David Fairman

Project Co-Director and Managing Director, Consensus Building Institute
Cambridge, MA
David Fairman heads the Leadership Team of USMEI, and was co-director of the U.S. Muslim Engagement Project, where he was the principal author of the USME Leadership Group Report, Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World.  For more than 20 years, he has facilitated consensus building and mediated resolution of public conflicts both internationally and in the United States. He works on national development plans with the United Nations Development Group, on complex projects with the World Bank Group and on building public conflict resolution capacity with aid agencies, developing country governments and civil society organizations. He is Associate Director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, a founding board member of the Alliance for Peacebuilding and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a B.A. from Harvard College.

Robert Fersh

Project Co-Director and President, Convergence
Washington, DC
Robert Fersh is a member of the Leadership Team of USMEI, was co-director of the U.S. Muslim Engagement Project, and is President of Convergence, where his central focus is organizing and conducting policy consensus processes on issues of national importance. Most recently, he served as Executive Director of Search for Common Ground-USA and its U.S. Consensus Council.  He currently co-directs the U.S.-Muslim Engagement Project and previously directed a national policy consensus project on Health Care Coverage for the Uninsured.  Mr. Fersh has over 30 years experience in national public policy issues, having held senior positions in the Executive Branch, with three Congressional Committees, and as president of a leading national non-profit organization working to end hunger in the U.S. He holds an undergraduate degree in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University and a law degree from Boston University.

Brian Katulis

Leadership Team, US-Muslim Engagement Initiative; Senior Consultant, Howard Gilman Foundation
Washington, DC

Brian Katulis is a Senior Consultant to the Howard Gilman Foundation and Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, where his work focuses on U.S. national security policy in the Middle East and South Asia. He has served as a consultant to numerous U.S. government agencies, private corporations, and nongovernmental organizations on projects in more than two dozen countries, including Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Egypt, and Colombia. From 1995 to 1998, he lived and worked in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and Egypt for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. He received a master's degree from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School for Public and International Affairs and a B.A. in history and Arab and Islamic Studies from Villanova University. In 1994 and 1995, he was a Fulbright scholar in Amman, Jordan, where he conducted research on the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan. Mr. Katulis has published articles in several newspapers and journals, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, and Middle East Policy, among other publications. He is co-author of The Prosperity Agenda, a book on U.S. national security published by John Wiley & Sons in 2008. He speaks Arabic.

Paula Gutlove

Project Manager and Deputy Director, Institute for Resource and Security Studies
Cambridge, MA
Paula Gutlove is a member of the Leadership Team of USMEI, was the Project Manager of the U.S. Muslim Engagement Project, and is the Deputy Director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies. Dr. Gutlove has over 25 years of experience working with people of diverse perspectives and interests to improve communication, build understanding, resolve conflicts and promote cooperation. In 1996, she founded the Health Bridges for Peace project, which links health care with the prevention and resolution of inter-communal conflict in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and elsewhere. Dr. Gutlove is a founding board member and board chair of the Alliance for Peacebuilding, an Associate of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, and a consultant to numerous international organizations. She holds a D.M.D. from Boston University and a B.S. from Cornell University, and has had post-doctoral fellowships in peace and conflict studies at Harvard University and the Australian National University.

Aakif Ahmad

Leadership Team, US-Muslim Engagement Initiative; Co-founder, Convergence
Washington, DC

Aakif Ahmad is a member of the Leadership Team of USMEI and co-founder of Convergence, a U.S-based firm providing consensus-based solutions to issues of national and international policy, and a member of the Leadership Team of the U.S.-Muslim Engagement Initiative. From 1996 to 2009, Mr. Ahmad worked at the Corporate Executive Board where, as Managing Director, he led sales organizations across Europe and North America. He also served as a member of the Management Committee for Global Sales and Marketing. Mr. Ahmad currently serves on the Boards of three non-profit organizations focused on legal advocacy, civic engagement and the provision of critical needs care, respectively. Mr. Ahmad earned a B.A. from Yale University in an interdisciplinary studies program combining Philosophy, Political Science and Economics. He is currently completing his Executive M.B.A from the Kellogg School of Management.