Board of Directors

Dr. William Ury is an author, walker and mediator. He is the founder of the Abraham Path Initiative and co-founder of the Harvard Negotiation Project. William is the co-author of the global bestseller Getting to Yes and author of The Power of a Positive No. Over the last 35 years, he has mediated between quarreling corporate divisions, battling unions and management, and warring ethnic groups around the world.

​​Dr. Deidre Combs brings over twenty-five years of experience as a highly skilled executive coach, leadership development consultant, instructor, and principal of Combs & Company, Inc. She is the author of three books, The Way of Conflict, Worst Enemy Best Teacher, and Thriving Through Tough Times. Through personally guiding hundreds of corporate, government and non-profit clients, Dr. Combs has developed unique multi-cultural coaching and training processes based on her doctoral research. Her instruction method combines cross-cultural doctoral research with decades of executive coaching and teaching adults, to provide courses that are applicable regardless of context and highly engaging. Deidre has three grown children and lives with her husband in Montana.

Christopher McLaurin, Executive Director of the Abraham Path Initiative, is an innovative and creative leader in the nonprofit community. Having spent his career building and supporting projects that bring people from diverse communities together, he strongly believes in API’s vision of a future in which the Middle East is known as a world class destination for walking trails, hospitality, and transformative experiences. 

Previously the Executive Director of the California Youth Symphony, under his leadership the organization had unparalleled success in both expanding its programs and representing Silicon Valley’s commitment to arts education internationally through its tours and live-streamed concerts. A former musician in the Kansas City and New World Symphonies, having served as a board member for three years in the former, he has performed on three continents as well as on Grammy nominated recordings. Mr. McLaurin is a graduate of the Juilliard School and San Jose State University.

Oliver Pospisil is drawing on over 20 years in managing international IT projects and 10 years of experience in negotiation training. He develops and implements enterprise systems, bringing experience in project management together with technical knowledge and business know-how. He specialized in the fields of data protection (GDPR), information security for critical infrastructure. Oliver lives in Düsseldorf, Germany, and has walked with API in Palestine, Sinai, and Iraq.

Author, lecturer, and consultant, Dr. David Baum integrates 35 years of experience as a nationally respected expert in change. Diverse clients include Fortune 50 companies, non-profits, and Nobel Prize winning organizations. His work includes conflict mediation in Northern Ireland, national health care reform policy negotiation, rural tribal development in East Africa, and post-conflict entrepreneurship for women in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda.

His clients have won the Nobel Peace Prize, The Conrad Hilton Humanitarian Prize, the Malcolm Baldrige Award, and the Clinton Global Citizen Award. He is a founding faculty member of the School of Collective Intelligence at the University of Morocco. Finally, David worked his way through graduate school with the circus. Thus, he is one of the few people to teach at three of the top ten business schools in the world with a background in fire eating, juggling, and magic.

CEO, Capwave Technologies Samia is a telecom infrastructure expert and innovator. She holds an EMBA from MIT’s Sloan School, has founded four companies, and is a strategic advisor to fortune 500 companies, governments, public and private institutions. She has been building global telecommunication networks since the mid-1980’s, doing business in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Europe, and Oceania. Earlier in her career, at Bell Laboratories, Samia co-pioneered the first fiber optics DWDM system, helping to lay the first fiber optic cables across the Atlantic. Her family is from Lebanon, she was born in Senegal, and lives in New Jersey.

Leo D’Acierno Managing Partner of White Rock Holdings and senior advisor at Simon-Kucher, and is the Founder and CEO of LiftRocket, a digital lender that provides disadvantaged borrowers with access to safety net and springboard credit through community self-help. Leo’s maternal grandparents emigrated to the United States from Syria. As a professional, Leo has spent his career helping to revitalize businesses through smart strategy, sales and marketing redesign, strategic pricing and digital reinvention. Since 2017 Leo has served as a senior advisor to the executive director of the Abraham Path Initiative. As a Board member he brings expertise and enthusiasm to Abraham Path Initiative as we transition from ‘start-up’ to an era of ‘grow, produce, and sustain.’

Dave D'Angelo is the Head of Sales at Dónde. He has run a conservation-based tourism destination in Laos and spearheaded humanitarian efforts in Nepal. Dave has consulted on sustainable tourism through GIZ, the World Wildlife Fund and the Adventure Travel Trade Association. He has managed social entrepreneurship funds and programs through the International Rescue Committee and VentureWell. Over the last ten years, he has helped launch over 300 social ventures designed to address the world's most difficult conservation, sustainability, and economic challenges. 

Dr. David W. Lesch is the Ewing Halsell Distinguished Professor of History in the Department of History at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. He is the author or editor of 17 books and overall has over 140 publications, including numerous articles in leading journals, chapters in books, and opinion essays in such noted publications as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Financial Times, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Time Magazine, and CNN.com. Dr. Lesch has advised the White House in the last four US presidential administrations, from President George W. Bush to President Joseph Biden. He has consistently met with and advised high level officials in Europe, the Middle East, and the United Nations on diplomatic issues. Dr. Lesch also initiated and developed (along with William Ury) the Harvard University-NUPI-Trinity University Syria Research Project, funded by the governments of Norway and Switzerland. 

Dr. Joshua Weiss is the President of Negotiation Works and a co-founder of the Global Negotiation Initiative and Senior Fellow at the Harvard Negotiation Project. Josh has been involved with the Abraham Path from the very beginning, walking stages from Harran to Hebron and the Negev. He most recently served as the Initiative’s Managing Director. Josh is the author of the popular The Negotiator in You series and the creator of the Negotiation Tip of the Week (NTOW) Podcast.

Dr. Arzu Yilmaz is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations Department at the University of Kurdistan Hewler since 2022. Prior to this, she was an Alexander von Humboldt scholar at the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 2019–2022, and a postdoctoral researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in the capacity of IPC-Mercator Fellow in 2016–2018. Her main research interests are foreign policy, Middle East politics, Kurdish conflict, migration, and gender studies, and Arzu has published extensively on the Kurdish conflict, Turkish foreign policy, the Syrian civil war, and Iraq in academic journals as well as in newspapers and online publications. She is the author of the book From Atroush to Makhmour: Kurdish Refugees and Reconstruction of Identity (in Turkish), published in 2016 by İletişim Yayınları.

Dr. James Sebenius holds the Gordon Donaldson Professorship of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where he took the lead in the School’s decision to make negotiation a required course in the MBA Program. He currently serves as Vice Chair and as a member of the Executive Committee of the Program on Negotiation.