Sir Brian Urquhart
Sir Brian Urquhart served in various capacities with every Secretary General until his retirement in 1996 and subsequently served as Chief Assistant and successor under Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Ralph Bunche. Over this period, Sir Brian was centrally involved in the establishment and direction of Peacekeeping Forces, peaceful uses of atomic energy, the Congo crisis in the early 1960s, and peacekeeping in Cyprus, Kashmir, and the Middle East. In the period after 1956, Sir Brian was one of the principal political advisors to the Secretary-General working on Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, and Namibia, among others. He retired from the United Nations Secretariat in 1986. From 1986 to 1996 he was a scholar-in-residence in the International Affairs program of The Ford Foundation. He is the author of several books and biographies including Hammarskjold (1974); A Life in Peace and War (1987); Ralph Bunche, An American Odyssey (1994); Renewing the United Nations System (1994) and A World in need of Leadership (1996) co-authored with Erskine Childers, setting forth proposals to improve the Secretary General selection process. Currently, Sir Brian is serving as the Honorary President of the Center.

Barbara Crossette
Barbara Crossette was The New York Times United Nations bureau chief from 1994 to 2001. She had earlier been the Times chief correspondent in Southeast Asia and South Asia as well as a diplomatic reporter in Washington. She is the author of So Close to Heaven: The Vanishing Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas and The Great Hill Stations of Asia as well as a Foreign Policy Association study, India: Old Civilization in a New World. Ms Crossette won a George Polk award in for her coverage in India of the assassination in 1991 of Rajiv Gandhi, and an Interaction award in 1998 for coverage of international humanitarian issues. Now a consulting editor for the United Nations Association of the United States, she is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and is on the board of the Carnegie Council on Ethics in Foreign Affairs.

Ayca Ariyoruk
Ayca Ariyoruk is currently a Senior Associate for the Globaly Policy Program at UNA USA and is a former Research Fellow for the Larger Freedoms Program here at the Center where she wrote a series of articles on candidates for the position of Secretary General. Previously, Ms. Ariyoruk worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy as a Marcia Robbins-Wilf Young Scholar and Research Assistant. In 2003, Ms. Ariyoruk observed the presidential elections in Azerbaijan for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) and assisted with the implementation of democratic procedures. During her studies, she worked on research projects at the United Nations University Office in New York and United Nations Information Center in Ankara, Turkey. She received her M.A. from John C. Whitehead School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and B.A. in political science from University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Ms. Ariyoruk’s graduate thesis investigated U.S. policy towards Somalia and Rwanda and focused on the role of decision-makers in Washington D.C. She speaks, Turkish, French and Azerbaijani.