María Ignacia Curiel is a Research Scholar at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Research Affiliate of the Poverty, Violence and Governance Lab at Stanford University. Curiel is an empirical political scientist using experimental, observational, and qualitative data to study questions of violence and democratic participation, peacebuilding, and representation.

Her research primarily explores political solutions to violent conflict and the electoral participation of parties with violent origins. This work includes an in-depth empirical study of Comunes, the Colombian political party formed by the former FARC guerrilla, as well as a broader analysis of rebel party behaviors across different contexts. More recently, her research has focused on democratic mobilization and the political representation of groups affected by violence in Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela.

Curiel's work has been supported by the Folke Bernadotte Academy, the Institute for Humane Studies, and the APSA Centennial Center and is published in the Journal of Politics. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and dual B.A. degrees in Economics and Political Science from New York University.

Héctor Fuentes is a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (2024-25). His research focuses on the critical juncture of the 2024 Venezuelan elections, exploring the dynamics that led to this semi-competitive election, analyzing the strategic successes of the opposition, and identifying windows of opportunity for fostering a transition to democracy in Venezuela. As the Director of EstadoLab, he has co-authored influential pieces on state fragility and democracy in Venezuela, as well as on state fragility across South America.

Héctor holds a Master of Global Affairs from Tsinghua University, where he was a Schwarzman Scholar, and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Oxford, supported by a Chevening Scholarship. His legal training was completed at the Central University of Venezuela, where he graduated as valedictorian. Throughout his career, Héctor has built extensive expertise in institutional capacity building, rule of law strengthening, and natural resource governance.

In addition to his research and academic work, Héctor has been actively involved in democracy promotion efforts in Venezuela. He co-founded EstadoLab, leading national campaigns that reached millions of young people and supported their participation in pro-democracy initiatives. He has also worked on various international projects aimed at rebuilding state capacity and promoting justice reform.

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.

Emil Kamalov's research interests lie at the intersection of autocratic control, political behavior, migration, and repression, utilizing advanced quantitative methods complemented by qualitative data.

In his PhD thesis and papers, Emil develops an integrated account of extraterritorial opposition politics, examining how geopolitical tensions and host-country conditions shape emigrant activism, diaspora resilience, and migrant well-being. His findings demonstrate that under certain conditions, transnational repression by autocratic regimes can strengthen rather than weaken diaspora activism.

In collaboration with Ivetta Sergeeva, Emil co-founded and co-leads the OutRush project, the only ongoing multi-wave panel survey focusing on Russian political emigrants following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The OutRush project includes over 18,000 survey observations across four waves, covering respondents from more than 100 countries. The project has garnered substantial international media coverage and has drawn attention from policymakers and experts.

Emil is expected to receive his PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in September 2025.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is a world-renowned leader, entrepreneur, scholar, and professor across the academic, private, public, and civic sectors. His specialities include global leadership and management across sectors, entrepreneurship and innovation, the data revolution and 4th Industrial Revolution — including AI, sustainable development and human security, good governance and accountability, globalization and transnationalism, public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder networks. Dr. Khagram holds all of his transdisciplinary bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees from Stanford University. He has lived and worked for extended periods in Australia, Brazil, China, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, the GCC, Germany, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

Dr. Sanjeev Khagram is currently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and Department of Management Science and Engineering.  He is also a Distinguished Visiting Fellow with the Hoover Institution's Emerging Markets Working Group, where he leads the Global Reslience Intelligence Platform Partnership (GRIPP), and at the Center for Sustainable Development and Global Competitiveness, where he leads the AI and Sustainability Initiative at Stanford.

Khagram was most recently CEO, Director-General, and Dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, 2018-2024, which he took to #1 in International Trade with QS World University Rankings. He is on leave from his position as Foundation Professor of Global Leadership and Global Futures at the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Arizona State University.  Previously, he was the inaugural Young Professor of Global Political Economy at Occidental College, Wyss Scholar at the Harvard Business School, Founding Director of the Lindenberg Center for International Development, Professor at the University of Washington, and Associate Professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Khagram is an award-winning scholar and teacher. Dr. Khagram has published widely including the award winning book Dams and Development with Cornell University Press; Restructuring World Politics with University of Minnesota Press; The Transnational Studies Reader with Routledge Press; Open Budgets: The Political Economy of Transparency, Participation and Accountability with Brookings Press; "Inequality and Corruption" in the American Journal of Sociology; "Future Architectures of Global Governance" in Global Governance, "Environment and Security" in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, “Towards a Platinum Standard for Evidence-Based Assessment,” in Public Administration Review, “Social Balance Sheets” in Harvard Business Review, “Evidence for Development Effectiveness” in the Journal of Development Effectiveness, and “From Human Security and the Environment to Sustainable Security and Development,” in the Journal of Human Development.

Dr. Khagram has worked extensively in global leadership roles across international organizations, government, business, and civil society from the local to the international levels around the world. Dr. Khagram has established and led a range of global multi-stakeholder initiatives over the last three decades, including the Global Carbon Removal Partnership, Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data, the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency, and the World Commission on Dams, authoring its widely acclaimed final report.  

Dr. Khagram was selected as a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, was a senior advisor to United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Dean of the Desmond Tutu Peace Centre, and Founder/CEO of Innovations for Scaling Impact – a global technology enterprise solutions network. He is currently Chair of the Board of United Platform Solutions (an African AI-IOT Pollution Monitoring Venture) and Vice Chair of Altos Bank (the first new bank in Silicon Valley since 2008).

Dr. Khagram was born in Uganda as a fourth-generation East African Indian.  He and his family were expelled by Idi Amin and spent several years in refugee camps before being provided asylum in the United States in the 1970s.  He has lived and worked across all regions of the world and travelled to over 140 countries.

Anna Grzymała-Busse is a professor in the Department of Political Science, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Professor of International Studies, senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the director of The Europe Center. Her research interests include political parties, state development and transformation, informal political institutions, religion and politics, and post-communist politics.

In her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, she examined the paradox of the communist successor parties in East Central Europe: incompetent as authoritarian rulers of the communist party-state, several then succeeded as democratic competitors after the collapse of these communist regimes in 1989.

Rebuilding Leviathan, her second book project, investigated the role of political parties and party competition in the reconstruction of the post-communist state. Unless checked by a robust competition, democratic governing parties simultaneously rebuilt the state and ensured their own survival by building in enormous discretion into new state institutions.

Anna's third book, Nations Under God, examines why some churches have been able to wield enormous policy influence. Others have failed to do so, even in very religious countries. Where religious and national identities have historically fused, churches gained great moral authority, and subsequently covert and direct access to state institutions. It was this institutional access, rather than either partisan coalitions or electoral mobilization, that allowed some churches to become so powerful.

Anna's most recent book, Sacred Foundations: The Religious and Medieval Roots of the European State argues that the medieval church was a fundamental force in European state formation.

Other areas of interest include informal institutions, the impact of European Union membership on politics in newer member countries, and the role of temporality and causal mechanisms in social science explanations.

Didi Kuo is a Center Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) at Stanford University. She is a scholar of comparative politics with a focus on democratization, corruption and clientelism, political parties and institutions, and political reform. She is the author of The Great Retreat: How Political Parties Should Behave and Why They Don’t (Oxford University Press) and Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy: the rise of programmatic politics in the United States and Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

She has been at Stanford since 2013 as the manager of the Program on American Democracy in Comparative Perspective and is co-director of the Fisher Family Honors Program at CDDRL. She was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America and is a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She received a PhD in political science from Harvard University, an MSc in Economic and Social History from Oxford University, where she studied as a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from Emory University.

Beatriz Magaloni Magaloni is the Graham Stuart Professor of International Relations at the Department of Political Science. Magaloni is also a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, where she holds affiliations with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC). She is also a Stanford’s King Center for Global Development faculty affiliate. Magaloni has taught at Stanford University for over two decades.

She leads the Poverty, Violence, and Governance Lab (Povgov). Founded by Magaloni in 2010, Povgov is one of Stanford University’s leading impact-driven knowledge production laboratories in the social sciences. Under her leadership, Povgov has innovated and advanced a host of cutting-edge research agendas to reduce violence and poverty and promote peace, security, and human rights.

Magaloni’s work has contributed to the study of authoritarian politics, poverty alleviation, indigenous governance, and, more recently, violence, crime, security institutions, and human rights. Her first book, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 2006) is widely recognized as a seminal study in the field of comparative politics. It received the 2007 Leon Epstein Award for the Best Book published in the previous two years in the area of political parties and organizations, as well as the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association’s Comparative Democratization Section. Her second book The Politics of Poverty Relief: Strategies of Vote Buying and Social Policies in Mexico (with Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez) (Cambridge University Press, 2016) explores how politics shapes poverty alleviation.

Magaloni’s work was published in leading journals, including the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Criminology & Public Policy, World Development, Comparative Political Studies, Annual Review of Political Science, Cambridge Journal of Evidence-Based Policing, Latin American Research Review, and others.

Magaloni received wide international acclaim for identifying innovative solutions for salient societal problems through impact-driven research. In 2023, she was named winner of the world-renowned Stockholm Prize in Criminology, considered an equivalent of the Nobel Prize in the field of criminology. The award recognized her extensive research on crime, policing, and human rights in Mexico and Brazil. Magaloni’s research production in this area was also recognized by the American Political Science Association, which named her recipient of the 2021 Heinz I. Eulau Award for the best article published in the American Political Science Review, the leading journal in the discipline.

She received her Ph.D. in political science from Duke University and holds a law degree from the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México.

Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) and the Satre Family Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI). From 2017 to 2021, she served as FSI's Deputy Director. She is Professor of Political Science (by courtesy) at Stanford and teaches in the Department of Political Science, the Program on International Relations, and the Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy Program. She is also a Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution.

Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). At Princeton, she received the Ralph O. Glendinning Preceptorship, awarded to outstanding junior faculty. She also served as a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and an Assistant Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She has held fellowships at Harvard University as well as the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. 

In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books: Transitions to Democracy: A Comparative Perspective, written and edited with Michael A. McFaul (Johns Hopkins 2013);  Autocracy and Democracy in the Post-Communist World, co-edited with Valerie Bunce and Michael A. McFaul (Cambridge, 2010);  Resisting the State: Reform and Retrenchment in Post-Soviet Russia (Cambridge, 2006); After the Collapse of Communism: Comparative Lessons of Transitions (Cambridge, 2004), coedited with Michael McFaul; and Local Heroes: The Political Economy of Russian Regional Governance (Princeton, 1997); and Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2021).

She received a BA (1988) and MA (1989) in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University (1995). In 2016, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ilia State University in Tbilisi, the Republic of Georgia.

Download full-resolution headshot; photo credit: Rod Searcey.