Prior to his appointment in Washington, he served as the General Director for external relations at the European Commission, helping to formulate the EU’s foreign policy and playing a key role in preparing for the new European External Action Service (EEAS) introduced by the Treaty of Lisbon. From 2004-09, he was the head of cabinet for European Commission President José Manuel Barroso. He also acted as the EU sherpa for G8 and G20 Summits from 2005-10. Before joining the European Commission in 1982, he spent seven years as a journalist.
He was a Brazilian delegate to the 2013 edition of the BRICS’ Academic Forum. Visiting professor at Brazilian and African universities, he acts as an international consultant for Brazilian and foreign organizations. He holds a Ph.D. in Education from the Federal University of Ceará and Postdoctoral studies from the University of Brasilia (UNB), with a research on the African integration.
He joined Wolfensohn & Company (2006-09), a private equity firm, as a managing director. He was a nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution and taught at Georgetown University. He serves on the boards of Partnership for Transparency Fund, Feedback Labs, Open Data Watch, FXB International, the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, the African University of Science and Technology, the Nelson Mandela Institution, and NOI Polls in Nigeria.
Author of numerous books and papers on the Arab world, Mediterranean, terrorism and security, such as Le terrorisme non conventionnel (dir. avec Olivier Lepick, PUF, Paris, 2003), Les Forces armées arabes et Moyen-orientales après les printemps arabes (dir. avec Stéphane Valter, ESKA, Paris, 2014) and La fin de l’Etat-nation ? De Barcelone à Bagdad (CNRS Editions, Paris, 2016).
She managed the US justice portfolios at Amnesty International USA and still consults with a number of public/private entities on how to authentically engage impacted communities. She hosts a show on SiriusXM, titled HSTRYRemastered where she and leading youth/young adult experts reexamine the US history and the reemerging of past conflicts, to generate a fresh perspective and create real change through solution-driven dialogue. Recognized by the White House as a Champion of Change and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Honoree.
During the Government of President Hurtado, Mahuad was a member of the government, first as manager of Emprovit, the state agency and then as Minister of Labor in 1983, and finally as spokesperson for the government. In 1992, he assumed the position of Mayor of Quito, for two consecutive periods (1992-1998), which gave him great prestige for the almost total provision of public services and the construction of a dynamic and ecological transport system.
He was previously the President & CEO of Sudatel Telecom Group operating in a number of African countries. Previous to that he was in Private Equity based in the GCC and before moving to the EMEA region Ihab spent a number of years with Verizon Communications in the US after starting his career at General Electric and IBM in New York.
Human Rights lawyer under the Pinochet dictatorship (1979-82), he is the author of Democracy in Latin America (between hope and despair), Notre Dame Press, 2013. Trained as a lawyer in Chile, he has a Ph. D. in Politics from Princeton University, 1989.
He came to the Pacific Council from the RAND Corporation, where he spent over a decade as a senior analyst and research manager specializing in strategic studies. From 1994-95, he was a member of the Secretary’s Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, responsible for Turkey, Southern Europe, North Africa, and the multilateral track of the Middle East peace process. Dr. Lesser was educated at the University of Pennsylvania, the London School of Economics, and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and received his doctorate from Oxford University.
Former Deputy Director for the Monetary and Capital Markets Department at the IMF (2001-07), Chairman of the Editorial Committee of the IMF Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR), he was Managing Director, Chief Economist and Global Head of Research for Rabobank International in London (1998-2001), and served the Deutsche Bank (1987-98) as Director of Global Fixed Income Research from New York, Co-Founding Managing Director of Research GmbH in Frankfurt and Head of Equity Business in Asia-Pacific, Singapore.
