Dr. Nancy Lubin is president of JNA Associates, Inc. — a research and consulting firm that works on assessments and projects concerning the former Soviet Union, especially Russia and Central Asia. She has lived, worked and traveled throughout the former USSR, including Central Asia and the Caucasus, for almost thirty years and consults for international donor organizations, private foundations, government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and private industry ranging from Fortune 500 corporations to smaller companies.

Dr. Lubin is also director and principal author of the Council on Foreign Relation’s Project on the Ferghana Valley, Center for Preventive Action, directing a working group under the chairmanship of Senator Sam Nunn to examine issues of conflict prevention in Central Asia; director of a three-year foundation-supported assessment and 2001 update of U.S. assistance to the New Independent States; and director/principal author of a number of other major projects examining a range of issues throughout Central Asia and the New Independent States, including energy, environmental, and other resource issues.

Prior to holding these positions, Dr. Lubin was an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a project director for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment. She also spent fourteen months as a fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, one year as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, two years as a research consultant to the U.S. Department of State, and many years as an adjunct professor at both Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown Universities.

Dr. Lubin received her Ph.D. from Oxford University; her B.A., magna cum laude, from Harvard College; studied at the Universities of Moscow and Leningrad; and was one of the first Westerners to conduct doctoral research in Soviet Central Asia where she worked for one year at Tashkent State University, Uzbekistan (1978-79).

She is the author of Labour and Nationality in Soviet Central Asia: An Uneasy Compromise, Aid to the Former Soviet Union: When Less is More, and of other books and monographs, Congressional reports and testimony, and scholarly and popular articles on Soviet and post-Soviet affairs. Her op-eds have appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, and elsewhere. She has appeared widely on U.S. and foreign TV and radio, and has participated in over 100 conferences in the U.S. and abroad.

Dr. Lubin is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations; the board of advisors of the Soros Foundation’s Open Society Institute, Project on Central Eurasia; the World Bank International Advisory Panel on the Aral Sea; the board of trustees of the National Council for Soviet and East European Research; an associate of the Fund for Peace; the board of advisors for Women in International Security (WIIS); the Atlantic Council Ethnicity and Central Asian working groups; the board of advisors for ISAR; the board of the Russian Littoral Project, University of Maryland; and the advisory board of Central Asian Monitor.