José Ignacio Hernández is a law professor at the Andrés Bello Catholic University and the Central University of Venezuela currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Between 2019 and 2020, Professor Hernández served as the special attorney general of Venezuela under the interim government of Juan Guaido, during which time he was responsible for setting up legal frameworks to protect Venezuelan sovereign assets from seizure and mechanisms to manage the humanitarian emergency in cooperation with the U.S. government and other international allies. Widely considered one of Latin America’s foremost experts on public debt and restructurings, he has served as an expert witness in several legal cases, including the landmark Crystallex decision, and written over a dozen papers in comparative constitutional and administrative law and economic regulation. José Ignacio’s expertise includes public debt and debt restructurings, trade treaties, investment and climate change regulation particularly within the oil and gas sectors, and international arbitration and investment claims.

Maximilian (Max) Hess is the founder of the political risk consultancy Enmetena Advisory. He is also the author of Economic War: Ukraine & the Global Conflict between Russia and the West. Max serves as a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and has also held fellowships with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs. His writing has been featured in Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, and Al Jazeera, amongst others, and his broadcast experience includes the BBC, CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. Max has an enduring passion for all things related to the Republic of Georgia and serves as Secretary of the British-Georgian Society. He lives in London with his beloved Airedale Terrier, Koba.

Dany Bahar is an economist and Associate Professor of Practice at Brown University, a non-resident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab. He is also affiliated with The Center for Global Development, CESifo Group Munich, and IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Dany’s expertise focuses on economic growth, international economics, industrial transformation, and the effects of innovation and technology on firm productivity and market dynamics—from R&D to automation and artificial intelligence. His specialty is using advanced econometric and statistical methods to establish robust trends in big data, and apply them to specific companies, sectors, or countries. Current areas of focus include the diffusion of technology and knowledge within and across borders, as measured by productivity, structural transformation, exports, entrepreneurship and innovation, among other factors. Lately, his research has also focused on migrants and refugees as drivers of this process. He also produces and hosts a videocast/podcast: "Economists on Zoom Getting Coffee".

One of Chicago’s most storied investors and business leaders, Dennis Chookaszian is the former chairman and chief executive officer of CNA Insurance Companies and an independent director at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. During his career, he has served as a director on the boards of thirteen publicly traded corporations and well over eighty private corporations. He is currently a director of two public companies and twenty private corporations. Dennis is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School, where he teaches Corporate Governance. He also teaches International Corporate Governance in China at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and the Jiao Tong University Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. He previously taught Corporate Governance at the Indian Institute of Professional Management. He is a trustee of Northwestern University, and a member of the advisory board of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Kellogg School of Management.

Tobias Harris is a world-recognized expert on Japanese politics, policy, and macroeconomics. From 2013 to 2021 he was the Japan analyst at Teneo Intelligence, the political risk division of the advisory firm Teneo. He was also the Economy, Trade, and Business Fellow at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, a Washington, DC-based think tank focused on U.S.-Japan relations, from 2014 to 2020. Tobias was Senior Fellow for Asia at the Center for American Progress from in 2021 and 2022 and Deputy Managing Director of the Indo-Pacific Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States from 2022 through 2024. Tobias runs the popular blog “Observing Japan,” and has contributed to the Wall Street Journal Asia and Far Eastern Economic Review, and conducted graduate research at MIT and the University of Tokyo. 

Tobias was born in Chicago and lives in Bethesda, Maryland with his wife, their two sons, and their two cats. He has an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge and a BA in Politics and History from Brandeis University. He is an avid runner and baseball player.

Damien is the founder of MacroPolo, the Paulson Institute’s think tank, where he currently serves as its Managing Director. He is the author or editor of the books In Line Behind a Billion People: How Scarcity Will Define China’s Ascent in the Next Decade (Pearson/FT Press); The Economics of Air Pollution in China (Columbia University Press); and China’s Economic Arrival: Decoding a Disruptive Rise (Palgrave MacMillan). Previously, he helped build the China practice at Eurasia Group. Earlier in his career, Damien worked with multinationals at public relations firm H-Line Ogilvy in Beijing. His work has appeared widely in media, including The Atlantic, New York Times, Bloomberg, the Charlie Rose Show, NPR, and CNBC. Damien is adjunct faculty at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He speaks fluent Mandarin.

John Paul Rollert is The University of Chicago’s in-house ethicist for all things business. His research focuses on the intellectual history of capitalism, the ethics of leadership, and the application of empathy to law, business, and politics. He teaches classes in leadership, ethics, and politics at Harvard University as well as the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Rollert has been published in The Business and Society Review, The Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Raritan, Common Knowledge, and the Yale Law Journal. In addition to his academic work, he frequently writes on business, law, and politics for a variety of popular publications, and his work has been featured in The New Republic, Harper's, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Slate, Fortune, and The New York Times. He also pens a featured column for the Chicago Booth Review. A graduate of Harvard College, Rollert earned his JD from Yale Law School and a PhD from The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Hani Sabra is a political risk analyst with more than a decade and half covering the Middle East. He previously established Alef Advisory, a Middle East-focused political risk practice. Prior to founding Alef, Hani spent more than a decade at the New York-based political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, where he headed the Middle East practice. He is currently a director of strategy at Gemic. Hani is frequently called upon to provide media commentary about regional developments and is regularly quoted in publications like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. He has taught political risk and Middle East politics seminars at institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Montreal. His primary coverage areas include Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states, and regional geopolitics. He speaks fluent Arabic.

Dr. Stan Veuger is a senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is also the editor of AEI Economic Perspectives, and a fellow at the IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs. He was a visiting lecturer of economics at Harvard University in 2021 and a Campbell Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2022. Stan’s research has been published in leading academic and professional journals, including the Journal of Monetary Economics, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He is a celebrated thought leader on issues of fiscal and monetary policy in the U.S. and Europe, and comments frequently on economics, politics, and popular culture for general audiences. His writing has been featured in The Bulwark, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. His broadcast appearances include CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Telemundo, and Univision.