Executive committee
We bring together foreign policy professionals from in and outside Westminster.
Co-chairs
Sam Goodman
Sam is the Senior Director of Policy at the China Strategic Risks Institute. Previously he worked as a political adviser to the Labour Party and a parliamentary researcher, and has a background in British foreign policy as an associate of the British Foreign Policy Group. He is the author of the Imperial Premiership: the role of the modern prime minister in foreign policymaking 1964-2015 (Manchester UP, 2016) and has contributed to a number of media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the Diplomat, the Globe and Mail, and RUSI.
David Lawrence
David is a Research Fellow at Chatham House. Previously he worked as a political adviser to an NGO. He holds degrees from the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics. He has written for various publications and think tanks including the Independent, Politics Home, Foreign Policy Centre and New Economics Foundation.
Executive committee
Ben Horton
Ben is Head of the Director’s Office at Chatham House. He also leads the Common Futures Conversations project, a digital platform which facilitates dialogue between young people and policymakers across Africa and Europe. He holds degrees from the universities of London and Oxford.
Heather Staff
Heather Staff is a Policy Adviser for the RAMP project, supporting the APPG on Migration and Labour Party parliamentarians on migration and refuge policy. She is the Chair of the Labour Campaign for International Development and executive board member for a number of organisations in the UK and Europe.
Anisa Mahmood
Anisa is the founder and director of the Anti-Islamophobia Working Group. The group brings together different civil society organisations and experts to tackle Islamophobia in the UK. She previously served as a Senior Labour Policy Researcher and Advisor. Her expertise includes race and discrimination, human rights and foreign policy. She helped develop the Labour Party’s Islamophobia policy, has organised the annual Islamophobia Awareness Month campaign in Parliament and in 2021 successfully secured the first ever Parliamentary debate on the subject.
Anisa also sits on the executive committee of the New Diplomacy Project and is a board member of Labour Campaign for Human Rights.
Dr Jade McGlynn
Jade is a Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research focuses on Russo-Ukrainian relations, Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine since 2014, Russian propaganda and the politics of memory.
Jade is the author of two books: Russia’s War, which examines the roots and forms of popular support for war on Ukraine, and Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia. She received her DPhil, which focused on Russian propaganda and identity construction vis a vis Ukraine and the ‘West’ from the University of Oxford in 2020.
Jade is a non-resident senior associate in the Europe Program at CSIS and speaks Russian and Ukrainian and lived in Russia for five years.
Hugo Barker
Hugo Barker is a Visiting Researcher at Imperial Colleges Institute for Security Science and Technology (ISST) as well as being an Expert Fellow at the Security, Privacy, Identity, Trust Engagement EPSRC Network + (SPRITE+). He has just finished a project to develop the evaluation network for NATO’s Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA).
His research focuses on the security and privacy concerns surrounding emerging technologies such as XR, VR, and AR. He has provided expert evidence and advice to the UK government, parliament, and regulators on these matters. Hugo will be leading security and technology matters for the NDP. He holds an MSc in Security and Resilience: Science and Technology from Imperial College and an MA (Hons) in Economics from Herriot-Watt.
Reg Pula
Reg Pula is Head of Defence and Security at Rud Pedersen, Europe's largest independent political consultancy. He is also Executive Director of Labour Friends of Kosovo and the Western Balkans, a former defence and foreign policy advisor to the UK Labour Party, as well as Chair of the British Chamber of Commerce EU Defence & Security Committee.
Previously, Reg worked at ADS, the UK aerospace, defence and security trade body; worked as a Consultant at the European Defence Agency in Brussels and as a Fellow for the human rights NGO, United Nations Watch.
He holds a BSc in Politics and an MSc in EU Politics both from the London School of Economics, as well as an MSc in Global Governance and Emerging Powers at Birkbeck, University of London. Reg is fluent in both English and Albanian, speaks conversational Spanish and is learning French.
Kristin Thue
Kristin Thue is the Policy and Advocacy Coordinator for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Modern Conflict, and the Communications Coordinator at the Employers’ Initiative on Domestic Abuse (EIDA). She previously worked as a researcher in the Defence and Security team at RAND Europe. Kristin completed her MA in International Conflict Studies at King’s College London in 2020, where she specialised in gender and terrorism.
Kristin has a background in advocacy and communications from her native Norway, and has participated actively in national debates on gender equality, ISIS’ foreign fighters, and counterterrorism. She currently chairs the Women in International Security UK network.
Whitney Westbrook
Whitney Westbrook is the Programme Coordinator for the Queen Elizabeth II Academy for Leadership and the Next Generation at Chatham House. Whitney oversees the Common Futures Conversations initiative, Chatham House’s flagship youth engagement platform that connects young people from across Africa and Europe with policymakers.
Whitney’s background is in conflict and international law, interests developed through work with the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as a number of education and justice-focused nonprofit organisations. She has also worked in South Carolina Democratic politics. She holds a BA in International Studies and Law & Society from the University of South Carolina Honors College and an MA in Conflict Transformation and Social Justice from Queens University Belfast.
Get involved
Do you have expertise in foreign policy and international affairs? Join our network to support the development of an ambitious, progressive UK foreign policy for the 21st century.