Global LAB's Advisory Council members are peers in the non-profit, education, legal, and medical fields who serve as advisors to our board and staff and act as spokespeople and ambassadors.

Carla Bossard, Ph.D. Carla Bossard is a Professor of Biology at Saint Mary's College of California (SMC) and an avid believer in and practitioner of international education. She has designed and led 18 travel/study courses for university level students, 3 for high school students and 2 for high school teachers, primarily in Asia and the South Pacific. At SMC she teaches environmental biology courses and does research on control of invasive plant species. She is a founding member and long-term leader of the California Invasive Plant Council and lead editor and author of the book, Invasive Plants of California's Wildlands.

Claire Burkert has lived and worked in Asia since 1989 when she created a major income-generation project for women artists and artisans in southern Nepal; the Janakpur Women's Development Center continues to prosper 13 years later. In Tibet, Claire has consulted for The Tibet Heritage Fund, designing strategies to organize and support traditional craft production and initiating pilot, village-based carpet weaving projects. Since 1994, Claire has primarily focused her work in Vietnam, where she has collaborated with Oxfam Quebec, Oxfam Hong Kong, and Oxfam Belgique to support numerous groups of ethnic minority women craft producers. With support from the Ford Foundation, she has worked extensively with Hanoi's Museum of Ethnology and CraftLink to develop innovative training and income-generation programs to help revitalize Vietnam's indigenous artisans. Claire is currently working with a JICA funded consulting firm advising Vietnam's national policymakers on the creation of the Handicraft Masterplan for Vietnam.

Hal Denton, serves as Global LAB's Outside General Counsel through his law firm, Denton Tavares Paes LLC. He provides a wide range of general legal and corporate advice with a particular focus on risk management and safety policies and protocols, corporate governance, and monitoring outside counsel. He served as General Counsel for AFS Intercultural Programs from 1989 until 2004. AFS is a large multi-national not-for-profit organization with approximately 11,000 study abroad students per year in 54 countries.

Paula Green, Ed.D., founded and directs the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding and serves on the faculty of the School for International Training, where she developed SIT's programs in conflict transformation across cultures. She has extensive international experience in peacebuilding and has taught at several graduate schools, universities, and other educational centers worldwide. As a facilitator in interethnic dialogue and conflict transformation, Green has worked in Bosnia, Israel and Palestine, Rwanda and Eastern Africa, Sri Lanka, Burma, Nepal, and many other regions. In addition to consulting and training, Green has been an active board member of several international peace organizations, including the International Fellowship of Reconciliation. The author of numerous internationally published articles and chapters, Green co-edited the textbook, Psychology and Social Responsibility: Facing Global Challenges.

Stephanie Guyer-Stevens started Outer Voices in 2003 as a response to her experiences working as an activist in the U.S. She is a writer and organizer with nearly two decades’ experience in non-profit work, specializing in women’s health, environmental, and sustainability issues. The founder of Women’s Health Education Project in New York City, she has also served as a consultant to various other non-profit organizations. Her writing and editorial work include publication in the Village Voice, Downtown, and Whole Earth. In book publishing, she was developmental editor for Opened the Gates Laughing by Mayumi Oda (Chronicle, 2001).

Jamie Zeigler Laurens is an independent school teacher based at Westridge School in Los Angeles, California. She holds a BA in English and French from Carnegie Mellon University. In her seven years as a teacher she has sought to instill the values of global citizenship, self-awareness and environmental stewardship in her students, and has led student service learning projects focusing on environmental sustainability and cultural immersion in Mexico, Costa Rica, the Artic, India, and the Galapagos. Jamie has traveled to twenty-five countries and studied the literature and movement of several cultures. She is a published author and fluent in French and Spanish. She currently teaches Yoga and Creative Writing to students in grades 7 through 12, is a student of Buddhism and Vedanta, and practices Thai massage.

Bob Lesser is Associate Director for Strategic Planning and External Relations in the New York City Department of Education’s Office of New Schools. Bob’s work focuses on strategic planning and partnership development for the DOE’s small schools initiative. Bob is also the founder and co-director of World Change Travel, an educational travel company focusing on leadership training and sustainable development. Bob holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University and a BA in sociology from Vassar College.

Gary J. Martin, Ph.D. is the Director of The Global Diversity Foundation and is responsible for establishing long-term ‘observatories’ of cultural and natural diversity at selected field sites in Asia, Africa and Latin America.He has been involved in conservation and ethnobotanical work for over twenty-five years, starting with a gap year in 1980 in which he carried out fieldwork in Mexico. He holds a BS in botany from Michigan State University and a MA and PhD in Anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley. Gary also serves as a Director of Diversity Excursions Ltd., a subsidiary of The Global Diversity Foundation, which is dedicated to providing ecologically appropriate and scientifically informative travel to southern Morocco.

Chi Nguyen is currently a sophomore at Stanford University studying environmental engineering. Chi is heavily involved with Stanford's Green Dorm Project, traveling with other student researchers to Washington, D.C. to win the EPA's P3 grant to support further research. In 1998, Chi and her sister started Viet Nam Youth Projects, a series of benefit concerts and fundraisers to raise money for needy children and communities in Viet Nam. Since then, she has organized and performed in seven annual concerts and has raised nearly $70,000 to fully fund the street children shelter in the city of Can Tho, a school-building project in Ca Mau, and scholarships for college students. Her experiences in Viet Nam have led to her activism for education on behalf of children who otherwise cannot afford it. Chi is currently featured in a Target television ad with Tiger Woods to promote community service.

Craig Selzman, MD is Assistant Professor of cardiothoracic surgery at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. He has extensive international experience, including medical relief work in sub-saharan Africa and wilderness expeditions in South America. He is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School, an avid kayaker and mountain climber, and an expert in wilderness medicine. He received his BA from Amherst College and his MD from the Baylor School of Medicine.

C. David Thomas is the founding director of the Indochina Arts Partnership, a non-profit organization he launched in 1988 to foster cultural development and exchange. To date, the IAP has facilitated more than 50 residencies in the U.S. for visiting Vietnamese artists and writers. David first arrived in Vietnam in 1969 as a combat artist/soldier. Stationed in Pleiku with the 20th Engineer Battalion, David's jobs ranged from drafting blueprints, to driving a jeep, to sketching engineering projects. He first returned to Vietnam in 1987 with the U.S. Indochina Reconciliation Project; since then he has made dozens of trips coordinating cultural exchange programs between the US and Vietnam. David was awarded a 2002-03 Fullbright Scholar grant to live in Vietnam. His book, Ho Chi Minh: A Portrait was published in 2003.

Gray Tuttle is the Leila Hadley Luce Professor of Modern Tibetan Studies at Columbia University. He received his Ph.D. in Inner Asian Studies at Harvard University in 2002. He studies the history of twentieth century Sino-Tibetan relations as well as Tibet’s relations with the China-based Manchu Qing empire. The role of Tibetan Buddhism in these historical relations is central to all his research. His current research project focuses on the support that Tibetan Buddhist institutions have received from the governments of China from the 17th to 20th century and how this support, along with economic growth in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands, has fueled expansion and renewal of these institutions into the contemporary period.

Kate Wang, MSc currently manages the Wildlife Conservation Society's Pacific Coast programs in the United States. Focal areas of her work include strategic partnership development, outreach, fundraising and the development of a capacity building and education project for Native American youth. Prior to joining WCS, Kate was the Outreach Program Director at the North American Association for Environmental Education. Kate has experience leading international and domestic wilderness trips and cultural study tours for youth and is passionate about leadership development, environmental sustainability and the value of cultural exchange both within the United States and abroad. Kate holds a B.A. in American Studies from Georgetown University and an M.S. in Environmental Education and Behavior, with a concentration on Ecotourism, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.