Leonid is the Head of Humanitarian Projects at RUSNANO, a $5B Russian State Corporation of Nanotechnologies. Before the RUSNANO, Leonid was a Member of the Executive Board and Authorized Representative for the Government and NGO Relations at the RAO UES (Energy Sector) of Russia, headed, as well as RUSNANO, by Anatoly Chubais. In 1992 Leonid served as an Advisor to Egor Gaidar, then as an advisor to Anatoly Chubais, the Head of  Presidential Administration and later the Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation.

 Leonid was an active participant of the democratic movement in Russia from its emergence. Since 1993  he was the member of the Democratic Choice of Russia political party, then a leading representative of the Union of Right Forces, successor of the Democratic Choice of Russia political party. Since November 2008  Leonid is co-chairman of the Right Cause Party.

In 1993 Leonid worked as a Researcher at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. and a Professor of Psychology and Russian Research at the Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Leonid graduated from the Lomonosov Moscow State University with a degree in Psychology and received his Ph.D. in 1983. Upon graduating from the university, he lectured at the Social Psychology Department at the Moscow State University, specializing in interpersonal relations and political psychology. Leonid is currently Professor of the Social Psychology Department, Moscow State University and is the author of eight books.

Co-sponsored by CREEES

Ambassador Kinsman retired from the Canadian Foreign Service in 2006. Over his 40 years of service, he was Chairman of Policy Planning and later Political Director before being named Canada's Ambassador in Moscow in 1992. He was subsequently Ambassador in Rome (1996-2000), High Commissioner in London (2000-2002), and Ambassador to the EU in Brussels (2002-2006). Earlier postings abroad included being Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN in New York and Minister for Political Affairs in Washington. From 1985 to 1989 he was the senior federal official responsible for Cultural Affairs and Broadcasting where he was responsible for preparing the still-current Broadcasting Act, on which he continues to consult.

Today Ambassador Kinsman is a Contributing Writer for Policy Options magazine, a regular commentator for CBC News, and is published widely elsewhere, such as in the International Herald Tribune. He is a frequent speaker and lecturer in Europe and North America, and in 2007-2008 was Diplomat in Residence at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. In fall, 2009 he will be a Regents' Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.

He has been a member of numerous Boards, including the Imperial War Museum, London, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and the European Policy Centre, and several non-profit Boards, including the Council for a Community of Democracies, and the Victoria Conservatory of Music. His principal business contribution is to the Dundee Group of companies, and he sits as an independent Director on the Board of Dundee Precious Metals, Toronto.

He attended Princeton University and the Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris. He lives on Vancouver Island with his wife Hana.

Rajan Menon is the Monroe J. Rathbone Professor of International Relations at Lehigh University. He was an Academic Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Carnegie Corporation of New York for two years, where he played a key role in developing the Corporation's Russia Initiative. Dr. Menon was also a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and as Director for Eurasia Policy Studies at the Seattle-based National Bureau for Asian Research. He is the author of Soviet Power and the Third World (Yale University Press, 1986) and co-editor of Limits to Soviet Power (Lexington Books, 1989). He is a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and has also written for The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, Foreign Affairs, The National Interest, Newsday, and World Policy Journal, among other publications. Dr. Menon received his doctorate in political science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Dr. Menon's latest book, The End of Alliances, was published by Oxford University Press in 2007. He is working on his next book, Hubris: The Anatomy of Military Disasters. Dr. Menon's other areas of research and writing include Russian politics and foreign policy; the international relations of Central Asia, the South Caucasus, South Asia, and the Asia-Pacific; energy development in the Caspian Sea zone; security issues in Asia; globalization, and the comparative study of empires.