Our team

Ambassador Susan D. Page, a former diplomat, joined the Ford School faculty, and the Weiser Diplomacy Center in 2020 as a professor of practice in international diplomacy. She also serves as a professor from practice at the Law School. Page has served the U.S. Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations in senior roles for decades, across East, Central, and Southern Africa, and in Haiti and Nepal. Page was the first U.S. ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan.

Javed Ali began his appointment as an associate professor of practice in fall 2021. Ali brings more than 20 years of professional experience in national security and intelligence issues in Washington, DC. He held positions in the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Department of Homeland Security before joining the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ambassador Camara is a seasoned diplomat with over 15 years of experience in foreign policy and multilateral diplomacy. She served as Mali's Foreign Minister and Chief of Staff to the President until August 2020, and has held senior positions at organizations such as PartnersGlobal, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems. Camara also serves as the Africa instructor for the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute and is currently pursuing her PhD in Political Science at the University of Oxford.

John Ciorciari (johncior@umich.edu) is a professor of public policy. His research interests include international law and politics in the Global South, particularly in Asia. He has been a national fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, and as a Shorenstein Fellow at Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center. From 2004-07, he served as a policy official in the U.S. Treasury Department's Office of International Affairs. Since 1999, he has been a legal advisor to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which promotes memory and justice. He is the co-author of Hybrid Justice: The Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (Michigan, 2014) and author of The limits of Alignment: Southeast Asia and the Great Powers Since 1975 (Georgetown, 2010). He is part of the inaugural class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows.

Ambassador Melvyn Levitsky (levitsky@umich.edu), a retired career minister in the U.S. Foreign Service, is a professor of international policy and practice at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Prior to joining the University of Michigan in the fall of 2006, Ambassador Levitsky taught for eight years as professor of practice in public administration and international relations at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs and he has also taught at Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS).

Mariam Negaran is the Administrative Coordinator/Project Coordinator for the Program in Practical Policy Engagement (P3E) and the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program (STPP). Prior to joining the P3E and STPP teams at the Ford School, Mariam worked in student services at the International Programs in Engineering at the College of Engineering and the Department of Film, Television, and Media and LSA Honors Program at the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) at the University of Michigan. Mariam earned her BA in Journalism and Mass Communication & Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.