February 25 at 19:00 (GMT+6)
Honorable Dr. William Courtney is an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation and Executive Director of the RAND Business Leaders Forum. He also chairs the board of trustees of Eurasia Foundation.
In 2014 he retired from Computer Sciences Corporation as senior principal for federal policy strategy. From 1972 through 1999, he was a Foreign Service officer in the U.S. Department of State. He co-chaired the U.S. delegation to the review conference that prepared for the 1999 Summit in Istanbul of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Earlier he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director of the NSC staff for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia; ambassador to Georgia, Kazakhstan, and the U.S.-Soviet Bilateral Consultative Commission to implement the Threshold Test Ban Treaty; Deputy U.S. negotiator in the U.S.-Soviet Defense and Space Talks in Geneva; and Deputy Executive Secretary of the NSC staff. He served abroad in Brasilia, Moscow, Geneva, Almaty, and Tbilisi. Courtney is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he was an international affairs fellow. He is a member, and former member of the board of directors, of the American Academy of Diplomacy and of the former the World Affairs Council of Washington, D.C. He graduated from West Virginia University with a B.A. and Brown University with a Ph.D. in Economics.