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Human Trafficking Conference

Human Trafficking Conference Team

The University of Nebraska‐Lincoln Human Trafficking Team

The University of Nebraska‐Lincoln has seven faculty members that are involved in anti-trafficking studies, efforts, and the proposed conference. Also on the team is one former UNL PhD student who now teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and a consultant from Washington DC.

The Team members, in alphabetical order:

Dr. Dwayne Ball
Dwayne Ball

Dr. Dwayne Ball is an associate professor of marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has published numerous articles in academic journals, such as the Journal of Marketing Research and the Journal of Public Policy and Marketing. Working with colleagues, through a grant from the International Organization for Migration, Dr. Ball co-authored the first article and reports of research to empirically estimate the extent of cross-border human trafficking, using multiple survey techniques in Ukraine. Some of these results were recently published (Pennington, Ball, Hampton, and Soulakova 2009, “The Cross-National Market in Human Beings,” Journal of Macromarketing, 29, 2, 119-134). Dr. Ball’s current interests within human trafficking are in statistical, survey, and large-sample qualitative methodologies to estimate the incidence and nature of trafficking, as well as in identifying the vulnerable points in the marketing systems used by traffickers.

Professor Rochelle Dalla
Rochelle Dalla

Professor Rochelle Dalla is an associate professor in UNL’s Department of Child, Youth and Family Studies. Her Professional Interests center around marginalized populations-and marginalized women specifically. She is involved in a longitudinal, qualitative investigation of street-level prostituted women. Also interested in rural immigrant Latinas and have an active investigation following Navajo Teenage parenting women into adulthood. Honors and awards include numerous teaching awards including: 2007 Distinguished Publication Award from the Association for Women in Psychology, 2007 Swanson Award for Teaching Excellence, College of Education and Human Sciences, 2004 Award for Young Achievers, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, University of Arizona, 2003 Award for Young Achievers: School of Family and Consumer Sciences, University of Arizona, 2003 Distinguished Alumni Award: School of Family and Consumer Sciences, University of Arizona.

Dr. Ron Hampton
Ron Hampton

Dr. Ron Hampton is Chair and associate professor of marketing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has published numerous articles/book chapters in various journals/manuscripts such as the Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science and the Journal of Retailing. Working with colleagues, through a grant from the International Organization for Migration, Dr.Hampton co-authored the first article and reports of research to empirically estimate the extent of cross-border human trafficking, using multiple survey techniques in Ukraine. Some of these results were recently published (Pennington, Ball, Hampton, and Soulakova 2009, “The Cross-National Market in Human Beings,” Journal of Macromarketing, 29, 2, 119-134). Dr. Hampton has been working in the area of Human Trafficking over the past 4 years with IOM in Kiev on various funded projects.

Dr. Ari Kohen
Dr. Ari Kohen

Dr. Kohen is the Schlesinger Associate Professor of Social Justice and Political Science and the Director, Forsythe Family Program on Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. He teaches political philosophy at the undergraduate and graduate levels. His research focuses principally on classical and on contemporary political thought. His first book examined the philosophical grounding of the idea of human rights; his current book project looks at the ways in which we think about heroic behavior and the most choice-worthy lives

Dr. Laura J. Lederer
Laura J. Lederer

Dr. Laura J. Lederer received her B.A. magna cum laude in comparative religions from the University of Michigan. After 10 years in philanthropy as director of community and social concerns at a private foundation, she continued her education at the University of San Francisco Law School and DePaul College of Law and received her juris doctorate in June 1999. Lederer founded and directed The Protection Project at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government in 1997. In 2000, she moved The Protection Project to Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She is adjunct professor of law at Georgetown Law Center, where she has taught for six years, including the first full course on international trafficking in persons offered at a law school. She is the editor of Take Back the Night, published in 1980 by William and Morrow (hardcover) and Bantam Books (paperback), and The Price We Pay: The Case Against Racist Speech, Hate Propaganda, and Pornography, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1995, and the author of numerous articles on trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of women and children. She is currently Vice President for Policy and Planning for Global Centurion, a new NGO dedicated to fighting child sex trafficking.

Assistant Professor Anchalee (Joy) Panigabutra-Roberts
Anchalee (Joy) Panigabutra-Roberts

Assistant Professor Anchalee (Joy) Panigabutra-Roberts, Metadata & Multicultural Services Librarian & Women's and Gender Studies Faculty & Liaison at the UNL Libraries, has been active in developing a searchable catalog of websites on human trafficking (http://delicious.com/aproberts ) and is currently doing a citation research on the development of the interdisciplinary research on ‘trafficking in women’. She is also one of the organizing chairs for the Interdisciplinary Conference on Human Trafficking at UNL. Prior to coming to UNL, she co-organized a human trafficking conference at St. Cloud State University, Minnesota, in 2007, and helped organize a workshop on human trafficking as a faculty affiliate of the Center for Research on Violence Against Women in London, Ontario.

Dr. Julia Pennington
Dr. Julia Pennington

Dr. Julia Pennington is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Her practical experience bridges academia and industry. She earned her PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and has over 20 years of industry experience in international management, business development, and marketing with work in over 50 countries on 6 continents. Dr. Pennington’s current areas of interest in human trafficking are how the human trafficking system operates from initial recruitment to final outcome and how to best to disrupt the system. She is interested in the supply side of how victims move through the system including recruitment, enslavement, and final outcome and in the demand side including marketing tactics and prosecution. Along with colleagues at University of Nebraska, she recently researched human trafficking in five Eastern European countries.

Dr. Anna Shavers
Dr. Anna Shavers

Professor Anna Williams Shavers is the Cline Williams Professor of Citizenship Law in the University of Nebraska’s College of Law. She served as Interim Dean of the Law College 2009-2010 and has also served as Associate Dean of the Law College. Professor Shavers received her B.S. degree from Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, her M.S. in Business from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and d her J.D. degree from the University of Minnesota. She teaches Administrative Law, Immigration Law, International Gender Issues and Refugee and Asylum Law. She is also an affiliate faculty member of Women’s and Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies Programs at UNL. She currently serves on the Advisory Board to the ABA Commission on Immigration and has previously served as Chair of the AALS Section on Immigration Law, a Council Member and Immigration Committee Chair of the ABA Administrative Law Section, and member of the ABA Coordinating Committee on Immigration Law. Her research interests include the intersection of gender issues and immigration.

Sriyani Tidball
Sriyani Tidball

Sriyani Tidball, on the faculty of the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at UNL since 2008, has 27 years of experience working in an NGO. She and her husband founded Community Concern Society in Sri Lanka that empowers mostly with marginalized and vulnerable women and children. Her work includes running an orphanage, working with over 2000 children, and running a school for beach dropouts. During the past 14 years she has been working actively in the area of human trafficking, and six years ago opened a shelter for victims of abuse, homelessness and trafficking. She has been recognized as a leader in the field of human trafficking and represented Sri Lanka at two leading international conferences on trafficking (UN GIFT conference in India, 2007, and UN GIFT conference in Vienna, 2008).

Dr. Brian L. Wilcox
Dr. Brian L. Wilcox

Dr. Brian L. Wilcox is Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center on Children, Families, and the Law at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is also a faculty member of the Center for the Psychological Study of Street Children at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil where he conducts research on the commercial sexual exploitation of children. He is the author of over 70 research articles and has served on several national advisory boards dealing with high-risk children and adolescents. His research on legal protections for vulnerable children and adolescents has taken him to numerous countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and he is currently working on the evaluation of prevention programs in Ethiopia, Brazil, and the Republic of the Philippines.

Paul Yates
Dr. Brian L. Wilcox

Paul Yates is the Director of Involvement for Tiny Hands International, a non-profit organization serving the orphans and street children, the poor and those being threatened by or victims of the sex trafficking industry in Nepal, India and Bangladesh. Paul speaks throughout the United States regarding the work of Tiny Hands International. His passion is to increase the awareness of human trafficking, in particular sex trafficking, and inspire people to realize their potential to actively get involved and to use their gifts to fight this injustice.