We are proud to be advised by some of the most well known professionals in civil society and in the Model UN / Simulation Community. They help us to improve the impact of our work and connect us to people all over the world!
Farah Eck
Managing Director, UN Association of the USA (UNA-USA) at the UN Foundation.
Farah is Senior Director of Programs & Policies of the United Nations Association of the USA (UNA-USA), and within this role she oversees UNA-USA’s national programs, chapter support, communications strategy, and member engagement. Farah brings with her 7+ years of experience as a UNA-USA volunteer, serving as a Chapter President (UNA Chicago) and Board Member, and as UNA-USA National Council Member for the Great Lakes Region!
Farah’s background is in fundraising, organizational capacity building, communications, and stakeholder engagement. Prior to her current position at the UN Foundation, Farah oversaw the global Membership Division for Lions Clubs International (LCI), the world’s largest organization dedicated to improving communities through volunteer service. Before LCI, Farah served as the Alumni and Volunteer Relations Director of the Young African Leadership Initiative Regional Leadership Center East Africa in Nairobi, Kenya.
Farah is a global citizen who was born of a Pakistani father, American mother, and has lived and worked in 32 countries. Farah has coauthored a children’s cookbook and nutritional guide, Freddy, Fork it Over!, and is currently penning a children’s storybook based upon oral Kenyan folklore. She has a BA in advertising from Bradley University, a MA in communications and graduate certificate in nonprofit management from the University of Illinois at Springfield, and a MA in international relations and conflict resolution from American Public University.
Bill Yotive
Model UN Coordinator, World Federation of UN Associations (WFUNA)
Mr. William Yotive is currently the Model UN Coordinator for WFUNA. Prior to working at WFUNA, Mr. Yotive was Project Manager of the United Nations Global Teaching and Learning Project within the Outreach Division of the UN Department of Public Information for more than 14 years. He was responsible for creating educational materials for schools around the world on the United Nations and global issues on its agenda. In addition, he organized various global videoconferences for students and teachers each year at UN Headquarters on human rights, the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the observance of the International Day of Peace.
Prior to working at the UN, Mr. Yotive was a Director of Research at Sesame Workshop which produces educational television programmes for children, such as Sesame Street. He has designed and conducted many studies to evaluate the impact that these programmes have on the cognitive, social and emotional development of children. Mr. Yotive is an Advisory Council Member of the Committee on Teaching about the UN, serves on the International Institute on Peace Education Transnational Advisory Group, and is on the Advisory Board of Rainforest Flow. Additionally, he is a Senior Scholar at the University of Memphis School of Public Health and an Off-Campus Instructor at Zhejiang University.
Michael Eaton
Executive Director, National Model United Nations (NMUN)
Michael has served as full-time Executive Director of NMUN since 2004 and has helped expand its annual programming to include more than 5,000 annual college participants. Prior to his current position, he was the Director of Enrollment Services and Marketing for the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs, an educational nonprofit offering social justice-based off-campus study programs. He began his undergraduate studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and attended NMUN as a student delegate. He ultimately received his B.A. in Economics, summa cum laude, from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN and his M.A. in Nonprofit Management and the scholar award from Hamline University in St. Paul, MN. Additional honors include being named a Truman Scholar. He has completed coursework for a doctorate in International Education at the University of Minnesota (ABD).
Michael has served as an adjunct faculty member at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota; a Trustee of the Center for UN Reform Education, a board member and past-President of the United Nations Association of Minnesota, as well as multiple terms on the National Council of UNA-USA (including currently). He resides in Minnesota with his husband and enjoys the outdoors, in particular waterskiing and kayaking.
Laurabeth Goldsmith
Best Delegate
Laurabeth Goldsmith is the Executive Director of Partnerships at Best Delegate. Laurabeth believes in the power of Model UN to help create global citizens and to empower students to succeed in college and beyond. Laurabeth has created more than fifty partnerships for Best Delegate over the last seven years, and has led Model UN trainings for thousands of students and educators around the world.
This has included pioneering a multi year partnership with IDEA Public Schools (61 charter schools), creating a partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and delivering educator training at the United Nations in Vienna, creating a partnership and delivering training for the United Arab Emirates Ministry of Education to enable students and educators to learn about diplomacy, and managing dozens of Model UN Institute summer programs and workshops.
Laurabeth was the President of Emory’s Model UN team and helped to transform the team into one of the top 15 MUN teams in the country. Laurabeth was consistently an award winning delegate in MUN in high school and university. Prior to joining Best Delegate, Laurabeth worked for the Carter Center and Girl Scouts of Gulfcoast Florida.
His Honourable Amb Vitorino Mello Oliviera
Portuguese Delegation
His Honourable Ambassador Vitorino Mello Oliveira is the First Secretary to the Permanent Mission of Portugal to the United Nations and the Portuguese diplomat at the United Nations in New York. He is the Assistant Professor (Adjunct) of Sustainable International Business, Geoeconomics and International Relations, The Global Impact Mindset: UN Sustainable Development Goals, and the Field Lab in Partnerships for Sustainable Development at Nova School of Business & Economics, with research and teaching projects in other institutions, including Columbia, INSEAD and UNITAR. He is a PhD candidate in Economics and Finance, and a member of the Advisory Board at the Estoril Conferences. He also has experiences as a former diplomatic advisor to the Portuguese Minister of State and Finance and President of the Eurogroup.
Professor Darius Ornston
Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
Darius Ornston is a Professor and the Director of Academic Life at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto where he specializes in innovation policy, specifically the relationship between cooperation and economic change. His first book, When Small States Make Big Leaps, illustrates how those communities use cooperation to enter new, high-technology markets. In Good Governance Gone Bad, he demonstrates how the same, tight-knit networks which accelerate reform and restructuring can lead to policy overshooting, overinvestment, and economic crisis.
Since moving to Canada, Professor Ornston’s research has focused on how Canadian cities leverage cooperation, including the role of storytelling and their resilience to anchor firm collapse. With Dan Breznitz, Professor Ornston is also examining the design of innovation agencies, the political barriers to policy experimentation, and the revolutionary power of peripheral organizations. Their work on innovation policy has also been published by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the OECD.
Professor Ornston currently teaches two courses at the Munk School: One section of “Global Innovation Policy” in the Master of Global Affairs program and a first-year course on “Successful Societies” with Brian Rathbun.
Dr, Cristine De Clercy
L&D Lab
Dr. Cristine de Clercy, one of Canada’s foremost experts on the study of political leadership, is Trent University’s inaugural Jarislowsky Chair, part of a first-of-its-kind collaboration across five Canadian universities.
Dr. de Clercy’s academic career of over 20 years involves remarkable research publications that have involved millions in grant funding. Her research focuses on leader-follower relationships influenced by information and power dynamics. As well, she studies election law, parties, federalism, women’s political participation, and Canadian politics. She has published articles in many outlets including Leadership Quarterly, Politics and Governance, the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, Canadian Public Policy, the Journal of Canadian Studies and the Canadian Journal of Political Science.
Her new book is titled Trafficking in Uncertainty: How Leaders Move Citizens Toward Deep Change (McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming). Beyond the academy Dr. de Clercy has appeared before government committees as an expert witness, as well as provided political analysis and commentary for many international and national media outlets.
Professor Peter Hoffman
The New School for Social Research
Peter J. Hoffman is Associate Professor of International Affairs in the Julien J. Studley Graduate Programs in International Affairs (GPIA) at The New School, and director of United Nations Summer Study. His work spans the fields of Strategic and Security Studies, International Organization, International Relations Theory, and Comparative Historical Sociology. Peter’s main focus is on the dynamics of war and global responses, concentrating primarily on the international humanitarian system. Other major areas of his work encompass the United Nations; global governance; asymmetric warfare and Fourth Generation Warfare; armed non-state actors (guerrillas, warlords, militias, terrorists, and private military and security contractors); and, United States foreign policy.
He has also been a consultant for non-governmental organizations—such as the Fund for Peace, the National Committee on American Foreign Policy, the Stanley Foundation, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, and the Open Society Foundations—and was a member of the research team of the International Commission for Intervention and State Sovereignty that developed the concept of the “responsibility to protect.”
Peter is also a Research Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies, The Graduate Center of The City University of New York.
Teri Schultz
freelance reporter, NPR and Deutsche Welle
Teri Schultz has been covering the EU, NATO, and the BeNeLux region since 2007, appearing regularly on National Public Radio, and Germany’s public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. She has a particular interest in Afghanistan, having made six reporting trips there, and in Russia and the Nordic region, having lived and worked in Moscow and Helsinki.
Schultz helps teach media literacy and counter-disinformation to schoolchildren with the Lie Detectors organization and has held journalism fellowships in Russia and Pakistan. She holds a master’s degree in international relations from the University of Helsinki and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from New Mexico State University.
Kevin Chan
Co-Founder and CEO, BEst Delegate
Kevin – also known by his initials “KFC” – is the Co-Founder of Best Delegate, an education company that is considered the world’s leading provider of Model United Nations programs. He has grown the Model United Nations Institute summer camps to eight locations, developed summer and school year virtual Model UN programs, taught Model UN programs in 20 countries, and authored over 470 articles about Model UN and created resources that are used by over 800,000 users on BestDelegate.com every year.
He has also worked with clients including the United Nations, WFUNA, UN Foundation, and governments; helped organize a dozen conferences at the UN Headquarters in New York; and introduced United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at the UN General Assembly Hall. Outside of Model UN, Kevin is active in helping entrepreneurs grow. He is a professional Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) Implementer, runs a consulting firm called Momentium, and is an active leader in the Asian American Chamber of Commerce (ACE NextGen) and the Entrepreneurs Organization (EO).
Kevin received his B.A. in Political Science from UCLA, earned a Certificate in Financial Management from Cornell University, and completed Executive Education from the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management. Kevin has traveled to over 60 countries and lives in Los Angeles, California.
Sharon Low
Consultant Government and Public Services Solutions (GPSS), Deloitte
Sharon is a Master of Global Affairs graduate from the University of Toronto’s Munk School, and specialises in markets and innovation. She’s a Lupina fellow and Ontario graduate scholar, currently working at Deloitte in public sector consulting. Sharon’s MUN involvement spans over 25 conferences, and she enjoys coaching high school MUN and exploring farmer’s markets.