Erica Barks-Ruggles and Lloyd Gruber Join Brookings Institution as Guest Scholars

Erica Barks-Ruggles, an expert on HIV/AIDS and its impact on African economies, joined the Foreign Policy Studies program at Brookings for one year on September 1. Ms. Barks-Ruggles, an international affairs fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations, will spend a year at Brookings studying how HIV/AIDS affects the economies of South Africa, Nigeria, and Uganda. The study seeks to contribute to current research on the issue as well as assess the national security implications of the problem for Africa and the United States.

Prior to her appointment at Brookings, Barks-Ruggles was special assistant for Africa, South Asia, and human rights on the staff of Thomas R. Pickering, under secretary of state for political affairs, following three years as director for African affairs at the National Security Council.

Before joining the NSC, Barks-Ruggles worked in the State Department Secretariat on Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s traveling staff and as liaison with the bureaus responsible for the Newly Independent States, Political-Military Affairs, and Economic Affairs. She served as special assistant to the special envoy on Nigeria from 1994-1996, and in Madras, India, from 1992-1994.

Lloyd Gruber, assistant professor at the Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago, joined the Foreign Policy Studies program at Brookings as a guest scholar for one year on September 1. At Brookings, Gruber will conduct research on the domestic politics of globalization.

Gruber is the author of Ruling the World: Power Politics and the Rise of Supranational Institutions (Princeton University, 2000). Gruber earned a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University, a Master’s in philosophy from Oxford University, and completed his undergraduate work at Harvard.