Career diplomat and United Nations official Lakhdar Brahimi, British economist Partha Dasgupta, Caltech astronomer Shri Kulkarni, regional development expert Ann Markusen and Colombian novelist and political activist Laura Restrepo have begun six-year terms in 2007 as A.D. White Professors-at-Large at Cornell.

A.D. White Professors visit campus periodically to give formal lectures and to work with faculty and students in lectures, classes and outreach programs.

Brahimi was appointed special adviser to former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2001 after a 40-year diplomatic career during which he served the U.N. as envoy and adviser in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Caribbean. As special representative of the secretary-general for Afghanistan and Iraq and head of the U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2004, Brahimi was entrusted with overall authority for the political, human rights, relief, recovery and reconstruction activities of the U.N. in that country. He also chaired an independent panel established by Annan to review U.N. peace operations that in 2000 produced the Brahimi Report, an assessment of the shortcomings of the existing system of peacekeeping that made specific recommendations for change. Previously he served as special representative for Haiti (1994-96) and for South Africa (1993-94). In the latter position, he led the U.N. Observer Mission until the 1994 democratic elections that resulted in Nelson Mandela's presidency. He also took special missions to Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Yemen, Liberia, Nigeria and Sudan. Brahimi retired from the U.N. in 2005 and is a member of the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, a global initiative focusing on the link between exclusion, poverty and law.

Dasgupta is the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics and past chair of the faculty of economics and politics at the University of Cambridge, England. He is widely recognized as a leader in the development of market-based environmental and natural resource management strategies. His research interests include welfare and development economics, the economics of technological change, population, environmental and resource economics, the theory of games, the economics of under nutrition, biodiversity, sustainability, poverty and responsible environmental stewardship. Dasgupta is a fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, the Econometric Society, the British Academy, the Royal Society and the Third World Academy of Sciences. He is a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an honorary fellow of the London School of Economics, an honorary member of the American Economic Association, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and foreign member of the American Philosophical Society. He is a past president of the Royal Economic Society and the European Economic Association. Dasgupta is co-recipient (with Karl Goran Maler) of the 2002 Volvo Environment Prize.

Kulkarni is the McArthur Professor of Astronomy and Professor of Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology, where he directs the Caltech Optical Observatories and Michelson Science Center. His research spans some of the most important and dynamic research areas in modern astrophysics. Kulkarni has three principal interests: pulsar and neutron star astrophysics, optical and infrared interferometry and the study of interstellar medium in our galaxy and nearby galaxies. He is a leading authority on such exotic astrophysical phenomena as gamma-ray bursts and brown dwarfs and has been associated with many major advances in understanding the universe. He has been a leader in the quest to improve the resolution of optical instruments. Kulkarni is interested in the birth and evolution of neutron star systems. His fascination with pulsars began with his discovery (with D. Backer) of the first millisecond pulsar. Since then, he has been conducting new searches and building instrumentation to search for more of these objects. Kulkarni is also the interdisciplinary scientist for NASA's Space Interfeometry Mission, set to launch in the next decade, through which astronomers hope to catalog planets around nearby stars.

Markusen is a professor of planning and public policy and a member of the graduate faculty in geography and applied economics at the Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Her research offers insights about such issues as economic conversion of former military facilities, rural poverty, demographic change, social and cultural conditions necessary for economic development, the relationship between occupational and industrial structures and the effects of globalization on Latin American regions. Her work bridges the qualitative/qualitative divide, using a mixed-methods approach considered critical to the future of regional science. Her areas of expertise include arts, culture and economic development; regional economics and planning; industrial and occupational planning; and the economic impact of high technology and military spending. Markusen was a Fulbright lecturer in regional development economics in Brazil and has written on European, Korean and Japanese regional economies as well as on North American cities and regions. Markusen has authored more that a dozen books and more than 60 refereed articles.

Restrepo is one of the most prominent contemporary Latin American novelists and a journalist in her native Colombia. All of her novels have been translated into English and numerous other languages. Restrepo has been a witness, participant and chronicler of the tumultuous decades since the Cuban revolution and its impact on Latin American and Colombian politics, culture and society. She is known for her expertise on the Colombian diaspora to Europe and the Americas and her knowledge of her country's political scene, including conflicts with its guerrilla factions that have pushed the country to the brink of civil war. In 1983, she was named to a commission to negotiate peace with the militant rebel forces. Peace was negotiated and followed by several months of truce, but a subsequent breach led to further political instability, which forced Restrepo into self-imposed exile in Spain and Mexico for six years. She continued long-distance peace negotiations that led to guerrilla disarmament in 1989. Restrepo was a professor of literature at the National University of Colombia in Bogota. Her fiction is widely assigned in courses that cross academic boundaries in the humanities and social sciences.

Visit http://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/ for a schedule of events.