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Over the course of his extensive career, Dr. Bertrand served as Vice President for University Planning, Research & Innovation, Tulane University, and Co-Directed and founded three Academic Public Health Institutions: the Department of International Health and Development at Tulane University, Center for International Health and Development at Tulane University, and the Zaire School of Public Health at the University of Kinshasa. A leading expert in International Development, he designs, manages, and leads multimillion dollar UN, WHO, and CDC development programs throughout Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. As Wisner Professor of Public Health, Dr. William E. Bertrand provides instruction in Information and Communication Technology and Applied Research in Development. Dr. Bertrand is an active international health and development practitioner serving communities around the world as consultant, capacity development, and program design, monitoring and evaluation.
Elke Johanna de Buhr, PhD, is an Assistant Professor at the Payson Center for International Development at Tulane University in New Orleans. Her research focuses on the rights and protection of children, and the health and wellbeing of people of all ages. She is currently the monitoring/data collection specialist on the Tulane University team that oversees the implementation of the Harkin-Engel Protocol and the efforts undertaken by the international cocoa/chocolate industry to eliminate the worst forms of child labor in the cocoa sector in West Africa for the US Congress. Earlier research activities include the study of orphans and vulnerable children in the Democratic Republic of Congo, research of street children in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, HIV/AIDS monitoring and data analysis in Rwanda, data management and capacity building in the health sector in Ethiopia, the evaluation of the international response to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in South-East Asia, and work on the Nepal Human Development Report 2001. Elke de Buhr has worked as a consultant on projects financed by CDC, UN-OCHA, UNAIDS and World Vision, among others. She has a PhD from Tulane University, a MS in International Development from Tulane University, and a Diploma in Political Science from Free University of Berlin, Germany.
Dauphine Sloan is Professor of Practice and Graduate Studies Advisor at the Payson Center for International Development, Tulane University. She teaches international political and economic relations, theories and practice of development since World War II, approaches to sustainable human development, organizational leadership and management in developing countries, as well as a course on development in the francophone world taught in French. Professor Sloan received her doctorate degree in Sociology from the University of Paris V in 1984, with a specialization in Soviet and East European studies. She was Assistant Director of the Russian and Eurasian Studies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, DC. Subsequently, she managed the ACE Program (Action for Cooperation in the field of Economics) in Brussels, a European Union assistance program for the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe, which funded research projects on all aspects of the transition from planned to market economies. Most recently, she was Director of the French Language Program at Tulane.
Dr. Douglas Meffert is an Associate Professor and Director of Project Development at Tulane University Law School's Payson Center for International Development where he serves as the environmental lead at the Payson Center's Disaster Resilience Leadership Academy. He is also Director of Tulane's RiverSphere - a new initiative fostering green jobs in water resource management and renewable energy through testing and development of hydrokinetic energy systems in the Mississippi River. Meffert received his undergraduate engineering and a master in business degrees at Tulane University and Doctorate of Environmental Science & Engineering from the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent awards include joint Loeb Fellowship at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, MA where he currently serves as a faculty associate. Dr. Meffert has more than 20 years of ecological habitat restoration and conservation and the ecological species and humans that depend on them. His research, policy development, project management and practice relate to coastal restoration and conservation, climate change adaptation, disaster recovery, and sustainable development domestically and internationally. He currently serves as the New Orleans coordinator for the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organization's Urban Biosphere program, which is dedicated to intellectual exchange and research to promote resilience and sustainability of urban ecosystems worldwide. He also serves or has served as technical advisor and community and stakeholder outreach coordinator for a variety of city, regional, and state planning efforts on, coastal habitat, urban, and water management plans including, but not limited to the Coastal Planning, Protection and Restoration Act, Louisiana's Coastal Sustainability Consortium, Tulane's Oil Response Committee, the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, the Sustainability Systems Working Group for the New Orleans Master Plan, the United Houma Nation, the U.S. Department of State's US-China Wetland Eco-Partnership program and a variety of other coastal, regional, and neighborhood resilience and disaster recovery plans. He has a consistent and diverse track record in writing, speaking, and liaising with a variety of scientific, agency, congressional, and public entities.
Dr. S. T. Hsieh is the Founding Director of the US/China Energy and Environmental Technology Center (EETC) at the Payson Center, and the Pacific Rim Center at Tulane University. Through the EETC, officially established in 1997, Dr. Hsieh facilitates a forum of information exchanges on energy and environmental technologies between governments, international organizations and the community enabling identification and propagation of opportunities for US-Chinese business ventures. Dr. Hsieh oversees the day to day operation in the New Orleans, Beijing, and Shanghai offices wherein project development, U.S./China joint studies on environment and energy issues, and pilot projects to produce near and midterm emissions reductions in China through joint U.S./Chinese efforts are the key focus. Furthermore, he has thirty years experience as an educator in the USA, currently a full professor of Electrical Engineering and a Research Professor at the Payson Center at Tulane University.
