Our Team
Dr. Tom Hill
President and Executive Director
Tom Hill (BA hons, MA, MRes, PhD) is President and Executive Director of the Center for Peace Diplomacy. He is also a Visiting Senior Research Fellow in the Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and a Deployable Civilian Expert for mediation at the Stabilisation Unit, the UK government’s conflict response organization.
Tom was mentored and trained as a peace negotiator by Kofi Annan, the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations. Tom assisted Annan with his memoirs, Interventions: A Life in War and Peace, and was appointed by Annan to be his special assistant when Annan served as Joint Special Envoy for Syria in 2012. Tom was also a political officer for Joint Special Representative Lakhdar Brahimi in the second United Nations Syria mission. Afterwards, Tom spent seven years as director of the Track II Mediation Unit at KCL.
Tom’s speciality is the strategic integration of the international and intrastate levels of peace negotiations. Tom has engaged in or led negotiations at all of the key levels of peace processes, including negotiations at the presidential level in the Kremlin, the White House, Tehran, Damascus, and Baghdad; at the UN Security Council in New York; at the League of Arab States; at major international peace summits in Geneva; and with front-line conflict actors, including running negotiations with more than thirty armed rebel groups.
As well as a practitioner, Tom is a scholar of war mediation. He has a PhD, awarded without corrections, from KCL on the history of international mediation in civil wars. From 2014-2016 he was a lecturer in international conflict resolution at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), Columbia University in New York. He runs the mediation module and capstone exercise for the Diplomacy Training Course at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, where he was an Associate Fellow.
Earlier in his career he was a New York-based associate at Macro Advisory Partners, the global strategic advisory firm, before which he was a strategic analyst for the UK Ministry of Defence. In 2006 he was awarded the Simon O’Dwyer-Russell Prize for best graduate in the Department of War Studies, KCL.
Dr. Matthew Taylor
Associate Fellow
Matt is a CPD Associate Fellow and also a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore. He specializes in modern revivalist movements in Islam and Christianity, Muslim-Christian dialogue, Christian extremism, and religious politics in the United States. He has served on the faculty of Georgetown University, George Washington University, and Loyola University Maryland. Matt holds a PhD in religious studies and theology from Georgetown University and a Master of Arts in Theology from Fuller Theological Seminary. Matt’s first book Scripture People: Salafi Muslims in Evangelical Christians’ America (2023) offers an introduction to so-called “Radical Islam” in America by way of comparison with American evangelicalism. His second book The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy (2024) tracks how the New Apostolic Reformation, a network of charismatic Christian leaders, helped instigate the January 6th Insurrection. Matt is also the creator of the award-winning podcast and audio-documentary series “Charismatic Revival Fury.”
Karrie Gaspard-Hogwood
Associate Fellow and Direct Engagement Officer (theocratic movements)
Karrie is a CPD Associate Fellow and divides her time between CPD and Tulane University, where she teaches sociology. Karrie is CPD’s in-house expert on American theocratic movements and is also CPD’s lead direct engagement officer for that sector. Karrie is a doctoral candidate at Tulane and is writing her PHD dissertation on American theocratic nationalism and the New Apostolic Reformation. She is regularly consulted by national and regional American news services for her expertise on American extremism, including CBS, NPR and ProPublica.
Tom Osann
Direct Engagement Officer (militia movements)
Tom is a direct engagement officer at CPD, leading CPD’s outreach to American militia groups as part of CPD’s American Conflict Prevention Program. A proficient Arabist, Tom’s exceptional experience in direct engagement operations comes from negotiating with a wide range of armed groups in Syria, Iraq, Turkey and Jordan over two decades in service of a range of conflict resolution, national security and international development organizations, including the Carter Center.
Anthony Burke
Senior Advisor, CPD Media
Anthony is senior advisor on CPD’s American Conflict Prevention Program and supports CPD’s technical innovations as part of its public engagement and media operations work. Based in Phoenix, Arizona, Anthony is also a visiting scholar at the School for Future of Innovations in Society at Arizona State University and founder of Camulos, a specialist firm focused on strategic analysis and artificial intelligence for national security. Anthony has had a varied career in the United Kingdom’s defense, intelligence and security community. He has broad experience of the “Five Eyes” partnership and first-hand experience of strategic intelligence operations and analytical tradecraft. In addition to his analytical background, he has an established record of technological innovation and delivery: as a Chief Engineer at Raytheon UK, Anthony led delivery of a wide-ranging suite of national security capabilities to the UK Government; and as the Strategic Lead for National Security at the UK’s Alan Turing Institute, Anthony led the Institute’s research on artificial intelligence within the cybersecurity domain. Earlier in his career he was a senior analyst for intelligence and information operations in the Strategic Analysis Group at the UK’s Ministry of Defence.
Skyley Mitchell
Stanford Fellow
Skyley joins CPD from Stanford University with the generous support of the Stanford in Government fellowship program. In this role Skyley shall be assisting the Executive Director with CPD’s core mediation programming and development efforts. Skyley is a rising senior at Stanford University majoring in International Relations specializing in Social Development and Human Wellbeing. Skyley is involved with the Cardinal Policy Group, Stanford ACLU, Consult Your Community, and Stanford Women in Pre-Law on campus. Previously she worked at the Harris County Judge’s office in Houston, Texas, and the Los Angeles-based non-profit Making the Right Connections where she helped to deliver preventative action programs to help children in gang-impacted communities.
Brian Fairbanks
Creative Director, CPD Media
Brian is the creative director for media campaigns at the Center for Peace Diplomacy and an advisor on white nationalist movements. In this role, Brian leads in product development for the organization’s CPD Media program (an innovation in the field of peacemaking that seeks to utilize modern media methods in support of peace negotiations and conflict prevention). Brian has had a distinguished career in journalism, new media and short documentary filmmaking, and is the author of several books, including Wizards: David Duke, America’s Wildest Election, and the Rise of the Far Right (2022). He was the first investigative reporter for Gawker and his work has appeared in the Guardian, Observer, Business Insider, and the Atavist Magazine.