WWHI welcomes Linda Beck and Rudy Broers to our Board of Directors.

Linda Beck is an associate professor of political at the University of Maine at Farmington. Prior to arriving at UMF, she taught for 10 years in the Political Science Department of Barnard College, Columbia University, where she served as the acting chair of the Center for African Studies. Ms. Beck has won various teaching awards including the new faculty teaching award from the UMF student body. She has also published a book, "Brokering Democracy in Africa," and a number of articles and chapters in edited volumes on African politics, identity politics and social accountability. She is a member of the American Political Science Association, the African Studies Association, and the West Africa Research Association. She has a doctorate and master’s in political science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a bachelor’s in government from Skidmore College.

Rudy Broers is a senior consultant and partner at Universalia, a management consultancy based in Montreal that specializes in evaluation, organizational assessment and performance measurement for governments, NGOs and multilateral clients. Before he joined Universalia, Mr. Broers worked with UNICEF as head of monitoring and evaluation in its Madagascar office and as an evaluation specialist in its Ethiopia office. He has also worked previously with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), with a focus on West Africa, and at an economic consulting firm based in Cambridge Massachusetts where he specialized in energy, resources and regulatory economics. He has a master's in development studies from the University of Bradford and a bachelor's in economics from the University of Waterloo.