Gender Expert Instructors

Dr. Christie Arendt

Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs and Global Affairs Section Lead at U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights & Labor

Christie Arendt is a Global Affairs Section Head in the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor at the U.S. State Department. She manages a team focused on advancing democracy, governance, LGBTI and disability rights, and the promotion of civic space around the world. Christie joined the State Department as a Presidential Management Fellow in 2006. She has expertise in elections, democracy and governance in Africa, and women’s political participation. While at the State Department, Christie spent ten years working in the Bureau of African Affairs and serving at USAID’s Center of Excellence for Democracy, Human Rights and Governance. Before joining the federal government, Christie was a Federal Policy Advisor for former Governor of Michigan Jennifer Granholm. Christie holds an M.A. in International Affairs from the Elliott School and a Ph.D. in Political Science from the George Washington University.  She continues to research, publish, and present her work on women’s political participation and democratic institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Laxman Belbase

Lecturer of International Affairs, Elliott School of International Affairs; Co-Director, Global Secretariat of MenEngage Alliance

Laxman Belbase is a Co-Director at the Global Secretariat of MenEngage Alliance. He has over 17 years of experience working with and providing technical support to various Human Right NGO and I/NGOs, UN Agencies and Government in the areas of Gender Equality and Justice, Child Rights, SRHR for all and, ‘transforming masculinities and working with boys and men in gender justice’. He is experienced in strategic planning, program development and implementation, monitoring and evaluation, and advocacy in the areas of gender equality, women’s rights & child rights.

Dr. Andrea Bertone

Professorial Lecturer & Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs, and Director of Gender at FHI3260

Dr. Andrea M. Bertone, Ph.D. has over 20 years of international development and research experience on gender integration, gender equality in education, human trafficking, female empowerment, and gender-based violence. She has managed projects, and conducted research about women and gender. She has co-authored two girls’ mentoring guides and authored several peer-reviewed articles on human trafficking. Dr. Bertone is the Director of FHI 360’s Gender Department, where she provides strategic programmatic and technical leadership, gender technical assistance across development sectors and geographic locations, and is overseeing the implementation FHI 360’s Gender Equality and Social Inclusion Framework 2.0. Concurrently, she serves as Adjunct Professor at George Washington University where she has been teaching graduate courses on human trafficking, and gender and development since 2006. Dr. Bertone holds a PhD in Government and Politics from the University of Maryland, College Park.

Kayla Brochu

Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs and Managing Director at Social Justice and Enterprise

BrochuKayla Brochu (MBA/JD 1999) deployed business and legal strategies to combat some of the world’s worst crimes as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime Expert on Technology-Facilitated Child Abuse, Exploitation, and Trafficking. Brochu came to the position in 2011 after working at the U.S. Department of Justice for more than eight years, prosecuting child exploitation and human-trafficking crimes. She is now the Managing Director at Social Justice and Enterprise, and teaches Human Trafficking at the Elliott School of International Affairs, GW. Prof Brochu is an experienced human rights/civil liberties attorney & executive level social justice leader with a demonstrated success in international human rights, women’s rights and child protection sectors. More on Brochu here.

Michael E. Brown

Professor of International Affairs and Political Science

Michael Brown has been a member of the GW faculty since 2005. He was Dean of the Elliott School from 2005 to 2015. 

From 1998 to 2005, Professor Brown was on the faculty of the School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University. From 2000 to 2005, he was Director of Georgetown’s Center for Peace and Security Studies and Director of the M.A. program in Security Studies. From 1994 to 1998, he was Associate Director of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. From 1988 to 1994, he was a member of the Directing Staff and Senior Fellow in U.S. Security Policy at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London. Professor Brown was Editor of the journal Survival from 1991 to 1994. He was Co-Editor of the International Security, the leading academic journal in the security studies field, from 1994 to 2006. He now serves on the Editorial Boards of Asian Security, International Security, and The Washington Quarterly.

Dr. Christina Fink

Professor of Practice of International Affairs

Professor Fink joined the Elliott School in 2011. She is a cultural anthropologist who has combined teaching, research, and development work throughout her career. Her areas of expertise include Burma/Myanmar in particular and Southeast Asia more broadly, equitable development, gender and development, and civil society in ethnically diverse states. She received her B.A. in International Relations from Stanford University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Social/Cultural Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. She served as a visiting lecturer at the Pacific and Asian Studies Department at the University of Victoria in 1995, and from 2001-2010, she was a lecturer and program associate at the International Sustainable Development Studies Institute in Thailand. During the same period, she also ran a bi-annual capacity building training and internship program which she developed for members of Burmese civil society organizations, including women’s groups. In addition, she has worked as a coordinator for the Open Society Institute’s Burma Project, a trainer and project consultant for an Internews oral history project, and a program evaluation consultant for the Canadian International Development Agency, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the Dag Hammarskjold Foundation.

Dr. Jane Henrici

Professorial Lecturer & Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs and Anthropology, Elliott School of International Affairs

Jane Henrici is an independent research and gender consultant with over 15 years of experience in U.S. and international research and development. Her work focuses on gender, diversity, and socioeconomic policy and programming; she has conducted projects on these topics in the Americas and Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, and Eurasia. She is a specialist in participatory and transformative research and training and has in-depth knowledge about and experience in skills education and training; livelihoods development; poverty response; displacement and migration; and disaster recovery; in addition, she has conducted research and analyses on health care and coverage; diversity and inclusion in planning and development; and women’s political participation.

Liz Pender

Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs and Senior Gender-Based Violence/Protection Advisor at OFDA/USAID

Elizabeth (Liz) Pender is the Senior Gender-based Violence/Humanitarian Protection Advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance. Since starting with OFDA, Pendere has provided technical support to OFDA-funded programs in Nigeria, Ukraine, Iraq and Syria, while also managing OFDA’s global engagement on the GBV Call to Action and Safe from the Start initiatives. Before coming to OFDA, Liz was the Senior GBV Coordinator with UNFPA in Myanmar (Burma), managing and coordinating UNFPA’s GBV Programs in Kachin and Rakhine States, and leading the GBV Sub-cluster for the overall humanitarian response at the regional and national levels. From 2010 to 2013, Pender was the Women’s Protection and Empowerment (WPE) Senior Coordinator for the International Rescue Committee’s Emergency Response Team. While with IRC, Pender was deployed to several conflict and natural disaster responses in Pakistan, Libya, Liberia, Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya (Dada’ab), Ethiopia, South Sudan, and Lebanon (Syrian refugee response), to design and support WPE emergency responses in each location.

Farhana Qazi

Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs and Executive Director of Global Insights, LLC

Farhana Qazi is an award-winning speaker and scholar on conflicts in the Muslim world. Her research covers political Islam, the origins of violent extremism and women in war. For nearly twenty years, Qazi has traveled throughout the Muslim world to better understand local drivers of extremism and the roots of conflict. She offers training courses to the U.S. Government on various aspects of Islam and radical Islam. She addresses the worldwide threat and offers sound solutions. For her service to the U.S. military, she received the 21st Century Leader Award, presented by the National Committee on American Foreign Policy in New York. Qazi is the author of Secrets of the Kashmir Valley, a human-interest story focused on the protracted conflict between India and Pakistan (2016). Her second book titled Invisible Martyrs: Inside the Secret World of Islamic Female Radicals explores the reasons why Muslim women and girls turn to violent extremism (September 2018).

Lyric Thompson

Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs and Director of Policy & Advocacy at International Center for Research on Women

Lyric Thompson is the Director of Policy and Advocacy at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW). In this capacity she leads the institution’s formulation of evidence-based policy  recommendations and manages ICRW’s advocacy efforts with the US Government and internationally. She brings ten years of experience in global gender and development issues including  women, peace and security; women’s economic empowerment; violence against women; child marriage and adolescent girls’ issues.

Leora Ward

Gender Expert Instructor, Elliott School of International Affairs and Former Program Officer, Gender Equality at the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration

After working for many years in the social justice, women’s empowerment, and humanitarian fields, Leora Ward created Healing in Service to support women like herself who struggle with self-love and balance. She offers tailored coaching and weekend retreats that bring participants into a deep sense of power and freedom. Her services are uniquely crafted based on one’s needs and use a variety of compassionate communication as well as coaching techniques to bring more calm, stability, and flow into daily life. Ward co-teaches Violence and Humanitarian Assistance along with Liz Pender at the Elliott School of International Affairs, GW.

Scott Weiner

Professorial Lecturer, Elliott School of International Affairs; Senior Policy Analyst, US Commission on International Religious Freedom

Scott Weiner is a professorial lecturer in political science at George Washington University and a senior policy analyst at the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. His research focuses on the politics of identity and state formation in the Middle East. From 2013-14, he served as a Visiting Research Fellow at the American University of Kuwait. Scott’s academic work has appeared in Political Science Review, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Journal of North African Studies, and Nationalities Papers. His policy writing has been published in the Washington Post, Lawfare, Small Wars Journal, and the Diplomatic Courier. He has also written for The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. Scott teaches classes on Comparative Politics of the Middle East, Patriarchy, Masculinities in International Affairs, and Human Rights. He completed his Ph.D at George Washington University in 2016.