Meet Our Team

Richard Downie is President & CEO of the World Affairs Council of Orange County, California, and is the Chair of the Mexico Initiative at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is on the Faculty of the Thayer Leader Development Group at West Point, NY, as well as the Washington D.C.-based Defense and Strategic Program of Missouri State University. Dr Downie is also a member of the Board of Directors of the World Hwa Rang Do Association--a non-profit martial art; and serves on the Advisory Board for Westport Construction Incorporated. Following a distinguished career in the US Army, Dr. Downie was Director of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies for nine years.

A graduate of the United States Military Academy (USMA) at West Point, he holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Southern California. He has appeared on CNN/E, Univision, Telemundo, NPR, and other media outlets as a commentator on international security issues. Dr. Downie is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Mary Ann Walker-Aguirre is an entrepreneur/CEO, Spanish-speaking Latina, on-air spokesperson and a long-time advocate of strengthening U.S. and Latin America relations. She has a 35-year track record successfully building, operating and scaling businesses. Ms. Walker-Aguirre founded Walker Advertising LLC, a leading direct response advertising agency serving the U.S. Latino market and legal industry with annual revenue of $100m. While CEO, her company invested more than $300 million in national Spanish-language media and helped more than a million Latinos find legal representation throughout the US.

Ms. Walker-Aguirre started her career as a Spanish language court interpreter in Los Angeles during the early 1980s, where she saw Latinos denied fair and equal justice simply because they couldn’t speak English. Ms. Walker-Aguirre currently serves as the non-attorney Managing Partner in her national law firm, WH Legal Group LLP. She is a contributing writer for the National Trial Lawyer publications and has lectured at Loyola Law School, the National Trial Lawyers Association and Marymount University. Ms. Walker-Aguirre has been interviewed by many major Spanish media outlets including Univision, Entravision, Estrella Media, Spanish Broadcasting Systems, Media Latin Communications (MLC), and Azteca TV, on their TV, radio, and digital platforms.

As a volunteer for the Biden/Harris campaign she served on Biden’s Latin America Foreign Policy Team and contributed her expertise to spearhead a national media campaign to ensure a historic Latino voter turnout and developed Spanish language public service announcements aimed at voter registration. She serves on the Advisory Board of the Woodrow Wilson Center, Latin American Program; the Atlantic Council Advisory Board focusing on Central America; as Vice Chair of the Pacific Council’s Mexico Initiative; and on the Board of Directors for the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce.

Nick Wolf is a social entrepreneur, regenerative farmer and community development practitioner, based on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico. At the Pacific Council, Nick works as the Mexico Initiative Fellow, where he supports efforts to promote stronger ties between Mexico and the U.S., build awareness, and share a more nuanced understanding of Mexico. Nick’s responsibilities include the U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation Project, which seeks to use the relationship between migration, armed violence, and cross-border arms trafficking to advance security cooperation.

Nick has lived and worked in Mexico for more than a decade, starting, growing, and managing businesses and organizations in organic and regenerative agriculture and the local food movement. In 2021, he started an agroecological farm in Zihuatanejo, Guerrero. He also serves as a board member for three community-based nonprofit organizations, working in the local economy, regenerative food, ocean conservation and citizen science sectors. Previously, Nick spent 10 years as a freelance researcher and contributor at the Economist Intelligence Unit.

He holds bachelor’s degrees in Broadcast Journalism and Spanish from the University of Missouri as well as MBA and Master of Science in Foreign Service degrees from Georgetown University. Nick served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Honduras from 2006 to 2008 and has also worked and studied in Peru and Spain. Originally from Oklahoma, Nick connected deeply with Mexico after a weeks-long motorcycle trip across the country, returning to work in the country after finishing graduate school.

Kathi Lynn Austin is an internationally recognized expert on arms trafficking, peace and security, and human rights. She is founder and Executive Director of the Conflict Awareness Project, a nonprofit dedicated to investigating, exposing, and bringing to justice major arms traffickers, war profiteering networks, and transnational criminal operations that fuel war, armed conflict and environmental devastation around the world.­ She is also a fellow at the Human Rights Center/University of California Berkeley.

For over 30 years, Ms. Austin has carried out precedent-setting field investigations into the illegal weapons trade, trafficking operations, terrorism, the illegal wildlife trade, and natural resource exploitation that has spanned Africa, Latin America, East and Central Europe, and South Asia. Her work has been featured and she has been a guest expert on major media worldwide, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, Al Jazeera, NPR, PRI and the BBC. She has produced award-winning documentaries, and in 2011, she was named the Arms Control Association’s “Person of the Year.”

Ms. Austin previously served as an arms expert for the United Nations Security Council and Chief of Joint Mission Analysis for UN Peacekeeping Missions as well as a consultant for a broad array of multilateral institutions and non-governmental organizations such as Human Rights Watch, the International Crisis Group, the Fund for Peace, and the Open Society Justice Initiative.

Brian Freskos is a senior researcher and data analyst at the Conflict Awareness Project, an international nonprofit that investigates, exposes, and brings to justice major arms traffickers, war profiteering networks, and transnational criminal organizations that fuel war and conflict around the globe. He assisted CAP Executive Director Kathi Lynn Austin in compiling “Follow The Guns: An Overlooked Key to Combat Rhino Poaching and Wildlife Crime,” which showed how weapons tracing could help dismantle TCOs engaged in wildlife crime.

Prior to joining CAP, Brian worked as a journalist, most recently for The Trace, where he covered the U.S. firearms trade. He has appeared on NPR, MSNBC, and other media outlets as a commentator on firearms policy, and he was twice named as a finalist for the Livingston Award, which recognizes outstanding reporting by a journalist under the age of 35. Brian holds a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University.

Aline Shaban is an associate researcher at the Small Arms Survey and is a contributing researcher on the Pacific Council’s U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation Project. She focuses on the prevention of illicit proliferation and civilian firearms registries, small arms exports and state transparency, as well as craft-produced weapons. Previously, she worked with the Centre on Conflict, Development, and Peacebuilding (CCDP) on a Weapons and Ammunition Management (WAM) project and was a fellow at the Safe Horizon Anti-Trafficking Program working on human trafficking issues in Brooklyn. Aline holds an MA in International Relations and Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva (IHEID) and a BA in International Criminal Justice from John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

Hannah Leone is a 2L at University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, where she is an associate editor for California Law Review and a litigation intern at Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. She is working on research for the US-Mexico Security Cooperation Project through a Human Rights and War Crimes Investigations class at UC Berkeley. Before law school she was a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, where she covered gun violence and more recently, public schools. Her investigative and feature reporting has been recognized by the Chicago Headline Club Lisagor Awards and Illinois Associated Press Media Editors Awards. She is originally from the Seattle area and attended Western Washington University, where she was editor-in-chief of the student newspaper.

Lexi Tian is a 2L at the University of California Berkeley School of Law, where she is involved in several organizations, including as Senior Articles Editor of the Berkeley Business Law Journal, Online Travaux Editor of the Berkeley Journal of International Law, as well the President of the China Law Association. This past summer, Lexi worked as a Summer Associate at Hillspire, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s Family Office, where she collaborated on its philanthropic endeavors and impact investments. In addition to her studies, Lexi has spent time as a Student Advocate at the Workers’ Rights Clinic, where she helped protect employment rights for low-income and disadvantaged workers and their families by providing free legal services to address discrimination and applying for employment-related benefits.

Lexi received a BA cum laude in Government and Economics from Smith College. While at Smith, she interned for two summers as a Legal Intern at the Beijing (Chengdu) Yingke Law Firm in Chengdu, China. Her passion for law and human rights also led to her work as a Human Rights Intern at the international non-governmental human rights organization FIACAT’s permanent representation to the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, where she took part in advocacy efforts against the death penalty and torture, and to improve prison conditions. Lexi also conducted comparative research projects on sex trafficking and death penalty policies. Before law school, Lexi was a legal research assistant at the Southwestern University of Finance and Economics Law School in Chengdu, China. Lexi joined the U.S.-Mexico Security Cooperation Project through the Human Rights and War Crimes course offered at Berkeley Law and will be a contributing member of the project this semester.

Jeffrey Adler is in his third year at UC Santa Barbara majoring in Political Science with an emphasis in International Relations. During his sophomore year, Jeff began work as a public policy aide for the Santa Barbara City Council, serving under the Mayor Pro Tempore, here, Jeff played a pivotal role in the exploratory research for Santa Barbara's implementation of the FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program. After a year’s work for the city, Jeff traveled to Washington D.C. where he worked for RJ Whyte Event Production through the UCDC Internship Program. Over the summer, Jeff took a shaping role in the production of a number of prestigious award shows & government summits: most notably the Congressional Black Caucus Phoenix Awards and the IV CEO Summit of the Americas. Working at RJ Whyte enabled Jeff to continue honing his passions of photography and video production– skills he has diligently been sharpening as he continues to explore the power of photography and visual media and their role in affecting political change. Today, Jeff serves his campus community as an Associated Student’s Off-Campus Senator, where he is a ranking member on the Senate’s Finance and Business Committee. Additionally, he is a staff photojournalist for the Daily Nexus, his college paper, a newly inducted member of DKA (UCSB’s coveted filmmaking society), and he is a staff member for UCSB’s Excursion Club, where he leads undergraduates on backpacking expeditions in his free time.