UNF: Distinguished Voices Lecture Series

Ariel Ekblaw

Monday, September 28, 2026 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Dr. Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute and General Partner of the Aurelia Foundry Fund, where she is advancing the future of human space exploration. Through space architecture research and development, education and outreach, and strategic investment in early-stage space startups, she is building an ecosystem to expand humanity’s presence in low Earth orbit and beyond while democratizing access to space.

Previously, Ariel was the founding Director of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative, leading a multidisciplinary team of more than 50 students, faculty, and staff in designing, building, and flying advanced space technologies. She holds a B.S. in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy from Yale University and earned her PhD at MIT, where she designed a novel architecture for autonomously self-assembling space habitats. Her pioneering “TESSERAE” research and the laboratories she leads focus on next-generation space stations and habitats for Earth orbit, the Moon, and Mars.

Ariel is the author and editor of Into the Anthropocosmos: A Whole Space Catalog (MIT Press, 2021), served on the NASA Lunar Surface Innovation Consortium Executive Committee and the XPRIZE Global Visioneering Committee, and is a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center and Tokyo’s Chiba Institute of Technology. Her work has been featured in a 2025 mainstage TED Talk and by WIRED, the Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN, NPR, and leading science and technology podcasts.

Jake Sullivan

Tuesday, October 13, 2026 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Jake Sullivan was the 28th Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs (National Security Advisor), serving in that position for all four years of the Biden Administration. In the Obama Administration, he served as Deputy Assistant to the President and National Security Advisor to then-Vice President Biden, Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, and Deputy Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

In the years between the Obama and Biden administrations, Sullivan was a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he wrote a number of articles on the future of American national security and economic policy.  He helped conceive and design a bipartisan project on a new approach to international economic policy, known as “foreign policy for the middle class.”  He also held teaching posts at Yale Law School, Dartmouth College, and the University of New Hampshire. And he served as a senior policy advisor on Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.

Sullivan holds a B.A. in political science and international studies from Yale College; a M.Phil in International Relations from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar; and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States and Judge Guido Calabresi of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He grew up as the second of five children in Minneapolis, Minnesota and is a proud product of the Minneapolis public schools. He and his wife Maggie Goodlander have a permanent home in New Hampshire.

Sebastian Mallaby

Tuesday, December 1, 2026 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Sebastian Mallaby is the Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, he is the author of six books, including More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite and The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, which have become investment classics. His latest book is The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence; the Financial Times wrote that “Mallaby has done full justice to his kaleidoscopically interesting subject.” He also co-hosts a weekly CFR podcast, The Spillover, which examines the ripple effects of global events across policy, geopolitics, economics, technology, and financial markets.

An experienced journalist and public speaker, Mallaby’s interests cover a wide variety of domestic and international issues, including the technology sector, central banks, financial markets, the implications of the rise of newly emerging powers, and the intersection of economics and international relations. His study of American economic statecraft, The Man Who Knew: The Life & Times of Alan Greenspan, won the 2016 Financial Times/McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award and the 2017 George S. Eccles Prize in Economic Writing. His earlier works are The World’s Banker, a portrait of the World Bank under James Wolfensohn that was named as an “Editor’s Choice” by the New York Times; and After Apartheid, which was named by the New York Times as a “Notable Book.” An essay in the Financial Times said of The World’s Banker, “Mallaby’s book may well be the most hilarious depiction of a big organization and its controversial boss since Michael Lewis’s Liar’s Poker.”

Before joining CFR, Mallaby served eight years as a columnist and editorial board member at the Washington Post and spent thirteen years with the Economist. While at the Economist, he worked in London, where he wrote about foreign policy and international finance; in Africa, where he covered Nelson Mandela’s release and the collapse of apartheid; and in Japan, where he covered the breakdown of the country’s political and economic consensus. Between 1997 and 1999, Mallaby was the Economist’s Washington bureau chief and wrote the magazine’s weekly Lexington column on American politics and foreign policy. In 2015, he helped to found a startup, InFacts.org, a web publication making the fact-based case for Britain to remain in the European Union.

Mallaby was educated at Oxford, graduating in 1986 with a first class degree in modern history. After eighteen years in Washington, DC, he moved to London in 2014, where he lives with his wife, Zanny Minton Beddoes, editor in chief of the Economist.

Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, U.S. Army (Ret.)

Tuesday, January 12, 2027 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

H.R. McMaster is the Fouad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also the Bernard and Susan Liautaud Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute and lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.

Upon graduation from the US Military Academy in 1984, McMaster served as a commissioned officer in the US Army for thirty-four years. He retired as a lieutenant general in June 2018 after serving as the twenty-fifth Assistant to the US President for National Security Affairs. From 2014 to 2017, McMaster designed the future army as the director of the Army Capabilities Integration Center. As commanding general of the Maneuver Center of Excellence at Fort Benning, he oversaw training, education, and modernization for the Army’s infantry, armor, and cavalry force. He has commanded organizations in wartime including the Combined Joint Inter-Agency Task Force—Shafafiyat in Kabul, Afghanistan, from 2010 to 2012; the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment in Iraq from 2005 to 2006; and Eagle Troop, Second Armored Cavalry Regiment in Operation Desert Storm from 1990 to 1991. McMaster was a Hoover National Security Affairs Fellow from 2002-2003.

McMaster holds a PhD in military history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was an assistant professor of history at the US Military Academy. He is author of the bestselling books Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam; Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World; and At War with Ourselves: My Tour of Duty in the Trump White House. His many essays, articles, and book reviews on leadership, history, and the future of warfare have appeared in The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, National Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Free Press, the New York Times, and The Economist.

McMaster is the host of Today's Battlegrounds and is a regular on GoodFellows, both produced by the Hoover Institution. He is a Distinguished University Fellow at Arizona State University.

Daron Acemoglu

Tuesday, March 30, 2027 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Daron Acemoglu is an Institute Professor at MIT, Faculty Co-Director of James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Inequality and Shaping the Future of Work, and a Research Affiliate at MIT's newly established Blueprint Labs. He is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Philosophical Society, the British Academy of Sciences, the Turkish Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the European Economic Association, and the Society of Labor Economists. He is also a member of the Group of Thirty.

He is the author of six books, including New York Times bestseller Why Nations Fail: Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (joint with James A. Robinson), Introduction to Modern Economic Growth, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty (with James A. Robinson), and Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity (with Simon Johnson).

His academic work covers a wide range of areas, including political economy, economic development, economic growth, technological change, inequality, labor economics and economics of networks.

Daron Acemoglu has received the inaugural T. W. Shultz Prize from the University of Chicago in 2004, and the inaugural Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contribution to labor economics in 2004, Distinguished Science Award from the Turkish Sciences Association in 2006, the John von Neumann Award, Rajk College, Budapest in 2007, the Carnegie Fellowship in 2017, the Jean-Jacques Laffont Prize in 2018, the Global Economy Prize in 2019, and the CME Mathematical and Statistical Research Institute prize in 2021.

He was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2024 (with Co-Laureates Simon Johnson and James A. Robinson), the John Bates Clark Medal in 2005, the Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in 2012, and the 2016 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

He holds Honorary Doctorates from the University of Utrecht, the Bosporus University, University of Athens, Bilkent University, the University of Bath, Ecole Normale Superieure, Saclay Paris, and the London Business School.

Robby George & Cornel West

Thursday, April 15. 2027 | 7 - 8 p.m. | Adam W. Herbert University Center

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also been the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology.

He was a Judicial Fellow at the U.S. Supreme Court, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds the degrees of JD and MTS from Harvard University and the degrees of DPhil, BCL, DCL, and DLitt from Oxford University.

He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. He is Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Cornel West, also warmly regarded as Brother West, is the current holder of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. In his capacity as professor, Dr. West offers instruction on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects encompassing philosophy, politics, literature, cultural theory, music, and the classics. He is dedicated to engaging diverse audiences and advancing the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., with a focus on truth-telling and the pursuit of love and justice.

Dr. West previously served as Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University, graduating Magna Cum Laude in three years, and subsequently received both his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from Princeton. Cornel West was the first Black man to receive a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University in 1980! Dr. West has written 20 books and edited 13 additional volumes. He has also contributed forwards and blurbs for hundreds of authors. His most celebrated publications include Race Matters, Democracy Matters, and his memoir Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His book - Black Prophetic Fire - explores the legacy of prominent African American figures from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most recently, he co-authored Truth Matters with Dr. Robert George, fostering thoughtful discourse on contemporary social issues in the United States.

Through a partnership with MasterClass.com, Dr. West teaches several courses, including a class on Empathy, MasterClass’s first multi-instructor course on Black History, Black Freedom & Black Love, and a course on Philosophy. For further information, visit www.cornelwest.com and select the MasterClass banner.

In 2024, Dr. West was an Independent Presidential Candidate, and in the same yearhe delivered the Gifford Lecture 2023/2024, titled "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for Our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane," at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Distinguished Voices Lecture Series