Mr. Michael Delaney has over twenty years of experience in the field of international relief and development. Mr. Delaney has worked for Oxfam America in Boston since 1990 and has been their Director of Humanitarian Response since 1999.

Mr. Michael Delaney has led all humanitarian responses for Oxfam America including in Iraq, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Mozambique, Kosovo, and most recently in Haiti. Mr. Delaney leads the response in Darfur which is the largest operational humanitarian response undertaken by Oxfam America.

Before joining Oxfam America, Mr. Delaney worked as a development worker on projects in Tijuana and as a relief worker in San Salvador. It was this work which allowed him to pursue a career in the international aid field, first acting as the Oxfam America Program Director for Central America and later for Latin America and the Caribbean.  As a result of his extensive experience in humanitarian relief, Michael Delaney also lends his time as the chief spokesperson for humanitarian issues on panels for PBS, BBC, CNN, NPR and the Boston Globe and the New York Times.

Dr. Carol Cohn is the Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights. She is a leader in the scholarly community addressing issues of gender in global politics generally, armed conflict and security. Dr. Cohn's research and writing has focused on gender and security issues ranging from work on the discourse of civilian defense intellectuals to gender integration issues in the US military, weapons of mass destruction, and the gender dimensions of contemporary armed conflicts. In her most recent research, supported by the Ford Foundation, Dr. Cohn examines gender mainstreaming in international peace and security institutions. Within this research program, a central focus is the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, and the on-going efforts to ensure its implementation at the international, national, and grassroots levels. Dr. Cohn has worked actively with the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security since 2001, and the Boston Consortium has been a member of the Working Group since 2005. Dr. Cohn is now working with the Social Science Research Council to design a Global Centre for Research on Gender, Crisis Prevention and Recovery for the United Nations Development Programme.

Professor Akram, teaches in the Boston University Law School’s Clinical Program and had worked for many years as an immigration lawyer before joining the faculty in 1993. She has served as executive director of Boston’s Political Asylum/Immigration Representation Project and as directing attorney of the immigration project at Public Counsel, a public interest law firm in Los Angeles. In 1992 she was interim director of the agency overseeing the resettlement of Gulf War Iraqi refugees in Saudi Arabia. “My areas of teaching and practice are an extension of my personal, political and philosophical beliefs about law as a change agent for social justice,” she says. “The rewards are many, from restoring safety and security to individual lives, to giving students the satisfaction of using law for positive change.”