President Obama nominated Carlos Pascual as the next United States Ambassador to Mexico in June 2009. The United States Senate confirmed the nomination on August 7 and Ambassador Pascual presented his credentials to the Mexican government on August 9, 2009.

Ambassador Pascual has had a 23 year career in the United States Department of State, National Security Council (NSC) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). He served as coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization at the U.S. Department of State, where he led and organized U.S. government planning to help stabilize and reconstruct societies in transition from conflict or civil strife.

Ambassador Pascual was Coordinator for U.S. Assistance to Europe and Eurasia (2003), where he oversaw regional and country assistance strategies to promote market-oriented and democratic states. From October 2000 until August 2003, Ambassador Pascual served as U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine. From July 1998 to January 2000, Ambassador Pascual served as Special Assistant to the President and NSC Senior Director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and from 1995 to 1998 as Director for the same region. From 1983 to 1995, Ambassador Pascual worked for USAID in Sudan, South Africa and Mozambique, and as Deputy Assistant Administrator for Europe and Eurasia.

Most recently, Ambassador Pascual was Vice President and Director of the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. Ambassador Pascual received his M.P.P. from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in 1982 and his B.A. from Stanford University in 1980. He has served on the board of directors for the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House, and the Internews Network. He has also served on the Advisory Group for the United Nations Peacebuilding Fund.

Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and Entrepreneurial Management Units. He graduated from Yale College with a Special Divisional Major that combined physics with the history of technology. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy, at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Economics Department.

Much of his focus is on the world of alternative investments, with a particular emphasis on venture capital and private equity. (This work is collected in two books: The Venture Capital Cycle and The Money of Invention.) Recent studies have examined the experiences of university endowments and sovereign wealth funds in these markets. He also examines how public policies can boost entrepreneurship and technological innovation. (These topics are explored in Innovation and Its Discontents and the recent Boulevard of Broken Dreams.) He founded, raised funding for, and organized two groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research: Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy and The Economy. His work has been published in a variety of top academic journals.

In the 1993-94 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs on private equity finance. In recent years, “Venture Capital and Private Equity” has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at Harvard Business School. (The course materials are collected in Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook, now in its fourth edition.) He also teaches a doctoral course on entrepreneurship and in the Owners-Presidents-Managers Program, and organizes an annual executive course on private equity in Boston and Beijing. He is leading an international team of scholars in a multi-year study of the future of alternative investments for the World Economic Forum and is the winner of the 2010 Global Award for Entrepreneurship Research.