Our People

Board & Founding Members

Morris Bosin DPA, President
Morris Bosin is a senior consultant and strategic advisor with more than 50 years of experience in public-sector performance management, strategic planning, program evaluation, and organizational transformation. He has held senior roles across multiple federal agencies and has advised the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Department of the Interior, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, and other public institutions. Bosin also taught graduate-level strategic management for more than two decades. He holds a doctorate in public administration from The George Washington University and is the author of Governance in the 21st Century: An Expanded View. A co-founder of The Forum, he brings systems thinking and a phenomenological perspective to the work of democratic renewal.

Valarie C. Lamont Ph.D., Vice President
Valarie Lamont earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she was a member of the Biological Computer Laboratory and a research associate with the pioneering PLATO computer-assisted instruction laboratory. At PLATO, she created an early interactive program demonstrating how networked computers could inform citizens about a local issue, present possible responses, and invite participation in decision-making. She later contributed to the National Science Foundation-funded Legitech Experiment, which connected legislative science offices to study professional information and communication networks. At the University of Southern Maine, Lamont established a statewide Center for Entrepreneurship serving students across public and private institutions. Her work with The Forum reflects a longstanding interest in technology, systems, citizen participation, and the meaning of “We the People.”

Daniel Wolk, Secretary
Daniel P. Wolk is a Chicago-based educator, researcher, writer, and nonprofit professional with academic training in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago, as well as study in Arabic at the American University in Cairo. He has taught interdisciplinary social science, anthropology, sociology, and linguistic anthropology at the University of Chicago, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the University of Kurdistan Hawler, DePaul University, and the University of Illinois Chicago. His nonprofit experience includes program evaluation, immigrant and refugee employment initiatives, and educational programs. Wolk has also worked in community journalism, taught English as a Second Language, tutored students, and completed a Civic Saturday Fellowship with Citizen University.

Lawrence Hawkins, Treasurer
Lawrence Hawkins is Director of the Guy R. Hawkins Center for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, known as Hawkins STEM. The nonprofit brings STEM learning into neighborhoods and communities through collaborative, community-based “STEM Teams” for teens, adults, families, college students, professionals, and older adults. Hawkins approaches STEM not only as an academic field, but as a social and civic activity that strengthens curiosity, confidence, critical thinking, cooperation, and evidence-based problem-solving. Hawkins STEM has launched educational videos, a STEM hike connecting science with Washington, D.C., history, and community discussion experiments exploring systems, governance, and civic life. His work emphasizes that meaningful STEM inquiry can take place wherever people gather. 

Dorien DeTombe
Dorien DeTombe is the founder of the field of Methodology for Societal Complexity and the developer of the COMPRAM Methodology, an approach to political decision-making on complex societal issues. Her work addresses challenges such as sustainable development, climate change, public health, terrorism, financial crises, transportation, and water management. Trained in social science and computer science, she spent much of her academic career at Utrecht University and Delft University of Technology and has held research affiliations in China and Indonesia. DeTombe has facilitated workshops around the world, published numerous books and more than 150 articles, and helped establish an international research network devoted to societal complexity.

Carson Eoyang
Carson Eoyang is a former Chancellor of the National Intelligence University and has held senior roles overseeing education and training at NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration. He also worked on Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review, which focused on improving the performance of the federal government. Eoyang’s work examines how people and institutions must learn differently in periods of rapid and far-reaching change. He encourages public leaders to move beyond familiar assumptions and inherited solutions in order to understand the distinctive challenges of governing diverse interests and populations.

Michèle Friend
Michèle Friend is a British-Canadian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Logic Coordinator at The George Washington University. Her interdisciplinary scholarship spans the philosophy of mathematics, logic, chemistry, ecological economics, relativity theory, and computer science. She has contributed to pluralist approaches in mathematics, formal representations in chemistry, and applied methods for sustainable industry and environmental analysis. Friend also developed the Institutional Compass, a methodology that combines formal analysis with ethical and sustainability criteria to evaluate industrial and ecological projects. She served as president of the International Society for the Systems Sciences from 2023 to 2024 and has held visiting appointments at universities and research institutions in Europe, India, Mexico, and the United States.

Susan Jones
Susan Jones spent her career in commercial real estate finance and appraisal, becoming the first woman vice president at a Baltimore-area financial services firm representing major life insurance companies in commercial lending. She earned the Member of the Appraisal Institute (MAI) designation in 1994, served on the local MAI board, and owned her own appraisal company for nearly 30 years before retiring.

Susan has also been active in education and civic life, volunteering with Baltimore-area private schools and participating in Strong Schools Maryland, a grassroots organization that helped advance the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future. She served as President of The Woman’s Club of Roland Park, where she helped shape programming and hosted nearly 200 speakers from journalism, government, academia, medicine, and the arts.

Robert Knisely
Robert Knisely completed 30 years of federal service, including 20 years as a senior executive, after studying at Harvard and Georgetown Law. A former U.S. Marine, he served in the departments of Defense, Health, Education and Welfare, Housing and Urban Development, Commerce, Energy, Transportation, and Education, as well as several independent federal agencies. He helped manage the federal response to the 1973 energy crisis, helped direct President Ford’s Clemency Program, and created the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Knisely also headed the U.S. delegation to the first World Conference on Informatics in Government and was one of three civil servants selected to direct Vice President Al Gore’s National Performance Review. His work draws on systems science and cybernetics to examine the design and performance of government.

Richard Knowles
Richard Knowles is an organizational anthropologist and President of Richard N. Knowles and Associates, Inc. He helps organizations address complex problems and sustain safety excellence by using systems thinking, structured dialogue, and his 360 Degree Collaboration approach. His work brings people at all levels of an organization together to share information, build trust and interdependence, and release their collective energy and creativity. As manager of a 1,300-person chemical manufacturing plant, Knowles used this approach to reduce the total recordable injury rate by 98 percent, lower emissions by 95 percent, increase productivity by 45 percent, and raise earnings by 300 percent.

Egils Milbergs
Egils Milbergs is an innovation-policy strategist whose career has spanned federal government, national competitiveness initiatives, advanced manufacturing, economic development, and regional innovation systems. At the U.S. Department of Commerce, he helped implement the Bayh-Dole Act and develop the Federal Technology Transfer Act. He later served as executive director of the President’s Commission on Industrial Competitiveness and contributed to the framework for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Milbergs also helped formulate the “innovation ecosystem” concept through the National Innovation Initiative and led state and regional development efforts in Virginia and Washington. He is Founder and CEO of the Center for Accelerating Innovation and a Founding Director of the Healthy Communities and Wellness Alliance.

John Niles
John S. Niles is Founder and President of Global Telematics, a Seattle-based research consultancy established in 1986. His work has addressed organizational performance, community economic development, telecommuting, urban passenger transportation, and automated road mobility. Niles is co-author of three research-based books on technology and societal improvement: The End of Driving, Beyond Telecommuting, and The New Management. Earlier in his career, he served as a U.S. Navy aviation maintenance officer, worked on productivity improvement for the first elected mayor of Washington, D.C., and helped develop a computer-based professional communication network promoting local-government innovation before the World Wide Web. He holds degrees from Carnegie Mellon University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Larry Richards
Larry Richards has academic and professional backgrounds in electrical engineering, aeronautical systems, management, and operations research. After serving as a U.S. Marine Corps jet pilot, he worked as a research fellow at the Logistics Management Institute and then spent 32 years in higher-education administration. His interest in cybernetics and systems theory began in the 1970s and has shaped his work in decision-making, organizational design, and social transformation. In retirement, Richards has offered conversation-based courses through the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Southern Maine. He advocates “genuine conversation” as a source of creativity, deep learning, and meaningful citizen participation in democratic society.

Stuart A. Umpleby
Stuart A. Umpleby is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Management at The George Washington University. He earned degrees in engineering, political science, and communications from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research and writing have appeared in Science, Policy Sciences, Population and Environment, Science Communication, Futures, World Futures, and other U.S. and international journals. A leading scholar of cybernetics and systems thinking, Umpleby has emphasized the need for new forms of learning and communication suited to complex social systems and the information economy. He received the Norbert Wiener Award from the American Society for Cybernetics.

In Memoriam
Lowell Frederick Christy, Jr., Ph.D. (1948–2025)
We honor the memory of Lowell Frederick Christy, Jr., Ph.D., co-founder and driving force behind The Forum on Democracy. A cultural anthropologist and scholar of consciousness, Lowell devoted his career to understanding culture at the meta level of social change and to exploring how ideas, intelligence, and institutions shape societies over time. He believed progress begins by identifying the divides where communication breaks down and patiently building new structures to bridge them. His intellectual rigor, originality, and unwavering commitment to the Forum’s mission continue to guide its work.