AC4's current and former Senior Associate Research Scholars/Scientists (ARS), and Visiting Scholars (VS) play an important role in developing our initiatives and continuing to support our core mission of promoting research and practice on peace, conflict, and sustainability.
Below please find a mere sampling of our current and former Research Scientists or Visiting Scholars.
Poonam Arora, Ph.D.
Visiting Scholar (current)
Dr. Poonam Arora is an Associate Professor and in-coming Department Chair in the Management Department at Manhattan College. Her research combines laboratory and field experiments to study the role of social context and relationships in high-conflict situations, such as environmental dilemmas. She conducts game-theoretic experiments in the laboratory, and works with businesses and NGOs in the field to model real world decisions within their social contexts. Dr. Arora’s research is funded by the National Science Foundation, and she has published in both psychology and economics journals. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Arora worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Co., and an investment banker at Citi for a total of nine years. She earned her BBA summa cum laude in Business Economics from John Cabot University in Rome, Italy, an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University, where she was an NSF Graduate Fellow.
Hakim M.A. Williams, Ed.D.
Visiting Scholar (2015-2016)
[email protected]
Dr. Williams is Assistant Professor of Africana Studies and Education at Gettysburg College, where he is also a member of the Globalization Studies and Public Policy programs. His research centers on school/structural violence and youth empowerment in Trinidad. During this year, he will begin work on his book and collect data via a critical youth participatory action research project (over a 7-month period in Trinidad). Dr. Williams has a bachelors degree (honors) in Psychology from St. Francis College, Brooklyn, and his master of arts, master of education and doctorate of education from Teachers College, Columbia University in the fields of international educational development and peace education.
Michael A. Gross
Visiting Scholar (2016)
Dr. Gross is a Professor in the Department of Management at Colorado State University and is the Editor-in-Chief for Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, the 2016 Past Division Chair, Conflict Management Division, Academy of Management, and the 2015 recipient of the Excellence in Teaching Award for the College of Business. He earned his PhD at Arizona State University. His current research interests focus on crying in the workplace, trust and trust repair, conflict and verbal aggression, and personality and abusive supervision. He has published in a variety of journals including Decision Sciences, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Journal of Management Inquiry, the International Journal of Conflict Management, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and the Journal of Management Education. He serves on five the editorial review boards. He teaches negotiation and conflict management at the undergraduate level and in the graduate and executive programs as well as courses in organizational behavior and human resource management. In addition, he has received numerous awards for excellence in research, teaching and service.
Aline Mugisho
Visiting Scholar (2016)
Aline Mugisho came to AC4 to further her research as a doctoral student at the Willy Brandt School of Public Policy, University of Erfurt. She has a Master’s Degree in Migration and Displacement from the African Centre for Migration and Society, Wits University, and a Bachelor in Journalism and Communication. Her research interest includes: Gender, Protection and Community Development, Social Resilience; Public Policy; Politics of Reconstruction in Post-Conflicts; Research Methods in Conflict; Transitional Justice; Migration and Diaspora Dynamics. She has substantive work experience in Southern Africa and Great-Lakes Region of Africa, especially in Democratic Republic of Congo, Post-genocide Rwanda, and Burundi.
Dahlia Simangan
Visiting Scholar (May – August, 2015)
Dahlia came to AC4 as PhD candidate from Australian National University (ANU) to further her dissertation examining how United Nations transitional administrations in Cambodia, Kosovo, and East Timor incorporated local perspectives into their post-conflict rebuilding strategies. Her focus was on four crucial areas according to the rebuilding component of the 2001 Responsibility to Protect (R2P) document: security, justice and reconciliation, development, and good governance. She has returned to ANU to finalize her research.
Shahar Sadeh, M.A.
Visiting Scholar (2012 – 2014)
Shahar traveled to AC4 as a PhD student at Tel Aviv University, in the Porter School of Environmental Studies, researching the interconnectivity between peace and environment, environmental peace building, and environmental peacemaking, peace parks, borders and cross border environmental projects. She is currently serving as Director of the Faculty Engagement Initiative, Israel & International Affairs at the Jewish Community Relations Council.
Arvid Bell, Ph.D
Visiting Scholar, (2023-2024)
Arvid Bell is a scholar and entrepreneur who specializes in negotiation strategy, crisis management, conflict system analysis, international security, and simulation design. He is a Lecturer on Government at Harvard University and Partner at Negotiation Design & Strategy (NDS), a training, advisory, and research development group.
Bell is also a member of the Executive Board of the Arms Control Negotiation Academy (ACONA), a Scotia Group member, and an affiliated expert with the Conflict Analytics Lab at Queen’s University, a research-based consortium concerned with the application of data science and machine learning to dispute resolution. An expert in negotiation and crisis management simulation design, Bell has launched a new generation of immersive case exercises used internationally to train decision-makers in academia, government, and the private sector.
Reflections from Visiting Scholar: " During my time at AC4, I explored how system effects in complex negotiations influence negotiators, and how negotiators can influence negotiation systems. My research greatly benefitted from in-depth exchange with negotiation experts affiliated with AC4 and Columbia’s master’s program in Negotiation and Conflict Resolution. I attend several CU events, accessed a variety of scholarly resources, and taught an NECR workshop on “Decoding Negotiation Systems.” It was fascinating to connect with the broader CU community and meet many scholars and practitioners in New York City. I remain grateful for the AC4 team’s hospitality and look forward to staying in touch."
Fangyi Wang, Ph.D Candidate
Visiting Scholar ( 2023-2024)
Fangyi Wang, a PhD student in Landscape Architecture at the School of Architecture, Tsinghua University. Her research interests include living in harmony with nature, national parks and protected areas, climate change response, and biodiversity conservation. Her doctoral thesis is about the evaluation and governance strategy of Living in Harmony with Nature in China. She visited AC4 to conduct her independent research and continued on by collaborating with Professor Joshua Fisher.
Julia Vassileva Ph.D Candidate
Visiting Scholar ( 2024-2025)
Julia Vassileva is a researcher and lecturer at Tallinn University, Estonia. At AC4, she continues her independent research on women's leadership and empowerment in peace negotiations in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, focusing on wars/conflicts in South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, and Ukraine. She builds on extensive data she collected while working as a lecturer and researcher at the Georgian Institute of Public Affairs in Tbilisi, the Azerbaijan Diplomatic Academy/ADA University in Baku, the Armenian State University of Economics in Yerevan, and the Moldovan Platform for Security and Defence Initiatives in Chisinau. Julia holds degrees from the University of Oxford, Vienna, and Collège d'Europe, and has worked for the EU and with NATO centers. Just before arriving in New York, she was a researcher at the UN in Geneva and a Visiting Associate Professor at Osaka Metropolitan University in Japan. You can talk to her about her research in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Italian, German, and Bulgarian - she will gladly chat!
Jon Mirena Landa, Ph.D
Visiting Scholar ( 2024)
On March 16, 2024, Professor Jon Landa completed his reseach with AC4. The Independent research was developed within the international research program that Agirre Lehendakaria Center and its Foundation (ALC-ALF) designed with AC4.
From the different lines of research that he has developed, he has been able to culminate a scientific research article in which he makes a quadruple state of the question of hate crimes with a comparative perspective. The first section of the study deals with the characterization of the legislative model adopted by the Spanish State in this matter. This characterization is developed in contrast with international standards and the main political-criminal models, with particular attention to that of the United States. Then, in second place, an account is given of the state of the doctrinal debate with the points that are currently at the center of the controversy. In this second part, a parallelism is detected between the tendency in the United States to bring the paradigms of hate crimes and terrorism closer together and the Spanish orientation on the matter. It also highlights the particular field of the growing relevance, common to both sides of the Atlantic, of online hate speech. Thirdly, the main lines of jurisprudential application of criminal types are also presented, heavily influenced by a 2015 Reform that has precipitated a growing number of convictions. Finally, the statistical picture is shown in the light of the official data and a final section of conclusions. In summary, a sort of updated state of the art of this criminal reality is presented at four levels: state of the legislation, of the doctrinal debate, of the jurisprudence and of the statistical data.
At Columbia University has was able to discuss these results with other research groups so that the aforementioned research could adequately reflect the different sensitivity and attitude(s) of the American and European models regarding freedom of expression: the former is much more “open” and permissive; the latter is much more prone to the criminal punishment of hate speech. Also significant is the tendency in the United States to expand criminal protection from ethnic minorities, historically marginalized, to sexual groups (sexual orientation and identity) or other groups (people with disabilities) although, as in Europe, the machinery of the administration of justice still focuses mainly on the first groups mentioned above, the original core of this legislative reality.