Dan Feferman recently completed his service with the IDF at the rank of major. For nearly a decade Dan served as a foreign policy and national security analyst and advisor to the General Staff, focusing on US-Israel strategic relations, as a special assistant to the Deputy Chief of the General Staff, and as a commander in an elite intelligence unit within the IDF’s Research and Analysis Division, where he continues to serve in reserve duty. Through his various positions, Dan has been closely involved in Israel’s most pressing strategic defense and political issues.

Dan also consults, lectures and writes on foreign policy, defense and intelligence matters .

Prior to his military service, Dan completed an MA in National Security Studies from Tel Aviv University and a BA in International Politics and Middle East Studies from the School of International Service, at the American University, Washington DC, both with honors. Dan also completed a prestigious internship at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Noah Slepkov is a fellow and chief technology officer at JPPI and he is lead developer and managing partner at theMadad.com.

At JPPI he is focused on public opinion surveys and big data research.

Previously he served as Foreign Policy and Strategic Advisor to Member of Knesset Dr. Einat Wilf and worked in the Israeli Knesset as a Parliamentary Assistant.

Noah holds an Honors BA in Jewish Studies from York University and an MA in Diplomacy and Conflict Resolution from the Lauder School of Government at the IDC Herzliya. He also studied Economics at the University of Toronto and Political Science at the University of Western Ontario.

Prior to immigrating to Israel from Canada in 2008, Noah worked on campuses across Canada organizing Jewish student events and leading Israel advocacy efforts.

STEVEN W. POPPER, (Ph.D., Economics, UC Berkeley, 1985; B.S. summa cum laude, Biochemistry, U of Minnesota, 1976) is a RAND Senior Economist and Professor of Science and Technology Policy in the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He is also director of RAND’s Israel Initiative. He has published research on the economics of innovation — particularly how organizations both public and private identify and incorporate technological change. He led RAND’s first Summer Institute, a week-long workshop on science, technology and U.S. economic competitiveness. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Associate Director of RAND’s Science and Technology Policy Institute (S&TPI.) He provided research and analytic support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other agencies of the executive branch. His work included projects on the economic and social returns to basic research, assessing critical technologies (including principal authorship of the Fourth U.S. National Critical Technologies Review,) policy analyses of national innovation systems, evaluations of federal R&D portfolios relevant to the Global War on Terror, determining the S&T capabilities required for a prospective Department of Homeland Security, technical barriers to international trade (for the National Institute of Standards and Technology,) federal R&D portfolio decisionmaking (for the National Science Board and the World Bank,) and Presidential transition documents on S&T issues of national importance.

Dr. Popper is currently leading projects on better integration of technology assessment into transportation planning for the Transportation Research Board and has recently competed studies on energy strategy in Israel and science and technology-based economic development in Mexico City. He has now begun a new project to work with Israel’s police on domestic policing issues. He was active in founding projects of the RAND Pardee Center for Longer-Range Global Policy and the Future Human Condition. This included co-authorship of the flagship study, Shaping the Next Hundred Years, which provides a new methodological framework for decision making under profound uncertainty that has been applied to an increasing set of policy issues. In particular, he has advised doctoral dissertations applying these concepts to issues in R&D planning and S&T policy. Dr. Popper has conducted research for, and has served as consultant to, several non-U.S. governments as well as multilateral international organizations such as OECD and the World Bank on issues of technology planning, industrial restructuring, and regional economic development. Prior to joining RAND he worked as a researcher in physical chemistry and enzymology, as Country Account Officer for Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia at Bank of America, and as consultant to the World Bank on issues of industrial restructuring in East Europe. He has also been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, is a member of the AAAS Policy Council representing the Industrial Science and Technology section, and is a Charter Member of the Pacific Council on International Policy.

Michael Herzog is a Brigadier General in reserve. He was discharged in August 2010 from long service in the IDF, which included, among other things, combat as an infantryman in the Yom Kippur War, a long career in the Intelligence Division, the head of the Strategic Planning Division in the Planning Division (AGT), the military secretary to the defense minister and chief of staff Minister of Defense (a total of six years in the last two positions, with four defense ministers).

Herzog has been involved in all of Israel’s peace talks with the Palestinians, Syrians and Jordanians since 1993. Between May 2009 and March 2010, he served as a special envoy of the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense in efforts to drive the political process.

He has also served and is serving as a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In 2021 Herzog was named Israel’s Ambassador to the US.

Senior Fellow at JPPI, Dov Maimon leads the “Grand Strategy toward Islam” project, the “Israel-Diaspora New Paradigm” project and the Institute’s activities in Europe.

Among his action-oriented work, he is a member of the Advisory Committee for Improving access to Ultra-Orthodox to Higher Education chaired by Professor Manuel Trajtenberg. He is also the author of the Action Plan for bringing the developing mass migration of French Jews to Israel. Commissioned by governmental agencies, the plan was adopted by the Israeli Cabinet on June 22nd 2014.

Born in Paris, he earned a B.Sc. from the Technion (Haifa, Israel), a MBA from Insead (Fontainebleau, France), a M.A in Religious Anthropology and a Ph.D. in Islamic and Medieval Studies from the Sorbonne University. He is a laureate of the prestigious prize “Grand Prix du chancelier des universites 2005” awarded to the best French PhD work in Literature and Human Sciences. He is also a graduat of the Mandel School of Educational Leadership. Formerly an High-Tech industry entrepreneur, Dov is teaching at the School of Business Administration of the Ben Gurion University.