Diego A. Zambrano’s primary research and teaching interests lie in the areas of civil procedure, transnational litigation, and judicial federalism. His work explores the civil litigation landscape: the institutions, norms, and incentives that influence litigant and judicial behavior. Professor Zambrano also has an interest in comparative constitutional law and legal developments related to Venezuela. He currently leads an innovative Stanford Policy Lab tracking “Global Judicial Reforms” and has served as an advisor to pro-democracy political parties in Venezuela. In 2021, Professor Zambrano received the Barbara Allen Babcock Award for Excellence in Teaching.

Professor Zambrano’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming at the Columbia Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Stanford Law Review, and Virginia Law Review, among other journals, and has been honored by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS) and the National Civil Justice Institute. Professor Zambrano will be a co-author of the leading casebook Civil Procedure: A Modern Approach (8th ed. 2024) (with Marcus, Pfander, and Redish). In addition, Professor Zambrano serves as the current chair of the Federal Courts Section of the AALS. He also writes about legal issues for broader public audiences, with his contributions appearing in the Wall Street Journal, BBC News, and Lawfare.

After graduating with honors from Harvard Law School in 2013, Professor Zambrano spent three years as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb in New York, focusing on transnational litigation and arbitration. Before joining Stanford Law School in 2018, Professor Zambrano was a Bigelow Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School.

Michele Gelfand is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and Professor of Psychology by Courtesy at Stanford University. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture — as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times and has been featured in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, National Public Radio, Voice of America, Fox News, NBC News, ABC News, The Economist, De Standard, among other outlets.

Gelfand has published her work in many scientific outlets such as Science, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Psychological Science, Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS 1, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Research in Organizational Behavior, Journal of Applied Psychology, Annual Review of Psychology, American Psychologist, Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Current Opinion in Psychology, among others. She has received over 13 million dollars in research funding from the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, and the FBI.

She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World (Scribner, 2018) and co-editor of the following books: Values, Political Action, and Change in the Middle East and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Handbook of Conflict and Conflict Management (Taylor & Francis, 2013); and The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (2004, Stanford University Press). Additionally, she is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology Annual Series and the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press). She is the past President of the International Association for Conflict Management, past Division Chair of the Conflict Division of the Academy of Management, and past Treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. She has received several awards and honors, such as being elected to the National Academy of Sciences (2021) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2019), the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2016 Diener Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

Valentin Bolotnyy is a Kleinheinz Fellow at the Hoover Institution and an Affiliated Scholar at CDDRL's Deliberative Democracy Lab. He designs and analyzes randomized experiments aimed at understanding how Americans communicate about politics and public policy, and what factors may lead to changes in public opinion on key issues. He also works on forming research partnerships with government agencies to improve public services and gain insight into social behavior. His recent studies have covered the America in One Room experiment, climate adaptation, the gender earnings gap, public infrastructure procurement, immigration policies, and graduate student mental health.

Bolotnyy’s work has received national attention in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Vox, and American Theatre Magazine. He was awarded the Padma Desai Prize in Economics in 2019.

Bolotnyy received a PhD in Economics from Harvard University and a BA in Economics and International Relations, with honors and distinction, from Stanford University.

Major: Economics
Minor: Political Science; Modern Languages (Spanish & German)
Hometown: Scarsdale, NY
Thesis Advisor: Chonira Aturupane

Tentative Thesis Title: Comparing the Effect of Chinese and American Aid on Corruption in Latin America

Future aspirations post-Stanford: After graduation, my plan is to work in public sector consulting, preferably at the state and local level. After that, I'd like to go to graduate school to best leverage my skills in development economics, likely in or adjacent to the public sector. 

A fun fact about yourself: My first quarter as a CDDRL Honors student will be spent in Santiago, Chile, where I’ll be doing primary source research into Chilean politics and history.

Johnny J. Mack is the Associate Director of the World House Project at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He has extensive experience in social change, community development, and international relations. His professional background includes serving as the director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, president of Nelson Mandela Family Foundation, and the Drum Major Institute president.

Dr. Mack studies social change, social movements, and human development. His research focus is subsumed in his seminal work “After Confrontation, Then What?.” It rearticulates nonviolence beyond the traditional understanding of resistance to a meta-logic using Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to restructure the social edifice with a “revolution of values” through “peaceable power.” The framework explains Dr. King’s peaceable power as direct, structural, and cultural nonviolence with strategic, conscientious, and cultural action components. He, thus, argues nonviolence is a meta-logic, with direct, structural, and cultural forms that counter-pose Johan Galtung’s seminal conflict and violence triangles. Dr. Mack constructs the counter-pose of violence and nonviolence as a spectrum or alternative paths of change as articulated in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1967 book Where Do We Go from Here, Chaos or Community?

Dr. Mack has worked throughout the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and South Asia. His community and international relations work includes comprehensive community initiatives and community-based dialogue, education, and training programs on nonviolence, peace, and development. He organized Gen II, an international initiative that brought together the second generation of 20th-century peace icons, including Christine Chavez, Nadime Gemayel, Kerry Kennedy, Martin Luther King III, Dahlia Rabin, Naomi Tutu, and Justin Trudeau. He also designed and launched the initiative “Realizing the Dream: Poverty in America Tour” with Martin Luther King, III. Over 24 months, the tour visited 40 communities across the United States, including urban and rural communities, Native American reservations, Appalachia, and the Gulf Coast. The tour concluded with a national conference, a report to the nation, and a documentary aired on American Life TV Network.

He is the lead facilitator of the National Police Foundation National Council on Police Reform and Race, and Co-Director of ACT NOW! the national initiative to reimagine community. He has served as a senior advisor on domestic policy to Search for Common Ground and as the Henry Hart Rice Fellow at the Jimmy and Rosaland Carter School for Conflict Analysis & Resolution at George Mason University where he earned a doctorate.

Giulia P. Davis is the Program Manager of The World House Project (WHP), a program of the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) building on the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). Giulia oversees the fulfillment of World House Projects’ goals and activities, guiding program development and implementation in collaboration with its director Dr. Clayborne Carson.

A native of Italy educated in the U.K., Giulia started her career at a boutique management consulting firm where she was a senior management consultant, group manager, and equity partner. In 2015, she founded her own decentralized consulting firm, The Opportunivore, at the intersection of strategy, innovation, and social impact. Fluent in English, Italian, and Spanish, she has worked in 16+ countries as a purpose-driven professional.