Ronald S. Robinson is a career Foreign Service Officer with the rank of Minister-Counselor. He currently is Chief of Staff to the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Mr. Robinson began his career with the U.S. Department of State in 1980, as a consular officer in Guatemala and served in various mid-level consular positions in Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Toronto and in senior consular positions in Kingston and Bangkok. Mr. Robinson also served as a Staff Assistant in the Bureau of African Affairs, with the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) in el Gorah, Sinai, Egypt, as a Political/Consular officer in Asmara, Eritrea and as a Senior Watch Officer in the Operations Center of the Executive Secretariat in the Department. Other assignments in the Department include Career Development Officer (CDO) for Senior Foreign Service officers in the Bureau of Human Resources (HR) where he was also the Executive Secretary to the Deputy Chief of Mission and Principal Officer Committee. Earlier in his career in HR he served as Deputy Division Chief for African Assignments and as an Assessor with the Board of Examiners. The Director General chose him to attend the Senior Seminar from 2002-2003. He was the Department’s Diplomat-in-Residence at Morehouse and Spelman Colleges in Atlanta, Georgia from 2006-2008. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Mr. Robinson worked in the American Law Division of the Library of Congress and for Georgia Legal Services in Douglasville, Georgia. He attended Richmond, Virginia public schools and earned a BA degree in Urban Affairs from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and a Doctor of Law degree from Emory University. He is a member of the State Bar of Georgia and the American Bar Association.

Aimee Carter is managing director of corporate affairs at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she oversees the Corporate Program; corporate member relationships, involvement, and business development; and programming on foreign policy and business discussions for corporate member companies. Prior to CFR, she led Booz Allen Hamilton’s $20 million emerging market environment analysis contracts and business, and served as contract manager for a $2.4 billion United States Agency for International Development (USAID) business environment analysis contract. Carter has led teams analyzing the business environments and recommending policy changes in Poland, Romania, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Croatia, Serbia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador. She also worked on a customs project in Albania, and an internet strategy project in Mali. At BearingPoint, she briefly managed a team supporting the U.S. Department of State’s role in the interagency Iraq policy process. At the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Carter assisted in managing development operations, and served as the researcher for the U.S.-EU-Poland Action Commission, chaired by Zbigniew Brzezinski. Earlier, she was a project assist at Shaw, Pittman, Potts, and Trowbridge, LLP, which is now Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. Carter holds an MA in international relations from Boston University, and a BA from the University of Virginia.

Zaid A. Zaid was most recently Special Assistant to the President and Associate White House Counsel in the Obama Administration, and he was previously the Senior Attorney Advisor to the General Counsel at USAID. Before joining the Obama Administration, he was a senior associate in the investigations and criminal litigation group at Wilmer, Cutler, Pickering, Hale and Dorr (WilmerHale) in Washington, D.C. While at WilmerHale, he served as a grant reader for the Middle East Partnership Initiative at the U.S. Department of State, and as the Coordinator for the Columbia Law School in Washington, DC program. Zaid joined WilmerHale after clerkships on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First and Second Circuits and the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He is member of the New York and Washington, D.C. bars. Zaid graduated from Columbia Law School in 2007 as a Richard Paul Richman Fellow, where he was on the Editorial Board of the Columbia Law Review. Prior to law school, he was a political officer in the Foreign Service. He served in Baghdad, Iraq as the liaison between the Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council and at U.S. Embassy Baghdad. He also served in New York at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, as Special Assistant to the Ambassador and as the U.S. Coordinator for the United Nations General Assembly; as Special Assistant to the Ambassador at U.S. Embassy Cairo; and he studied Arabic at the Foreign Service Institute in Tunis. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Zaid graduated from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 1999 and the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1997, where he was a Pickering Fellow. Zaid lives in Washington, D.C., with his husband Giles P. Herman and their sons Xavi and Rami.