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Team

Sunnylands is a full partner in every retreat, not with grants and funding, but with expertise and resources to drive the agenda. Our retreat team provides substantive expertise and commitment, working to ensure each retreat arrives at a solution or a strategy to implement action. For more information, please contact the Retreat Strategy Group at sunnylandstrust@sunnylands.org.

Ambassador Kathleen Doherty (Ret.)
Chief Strategy & Retreats Officer
Ambassador Kathleen Doherty (Ret.) joined The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands’ senior leadership team in February 2020 as Chief Strategy and Retreats Officer.
She comes to Sunnylands after a distinguished career with the U.S. Department of State, leaving the agency as a dean of the Foreign Service Institute, the State Department’s premier training facility for U.S. diplomats.  From September 2015 to February 2019, she was the U.S. Ambassador to Cyprus.
Kathleen has served in senior leadership positions in the U.S. Embassies in Rome, Moscow, and London, and in Washington, DC.  Earlier in her career, she served in Brazil and the Dominican Republic.  In her career, she has promoted democratic and economic reform, the empowerment of women, and engagement with youth; built strategic partnerships; negotiated international agreements, and led teams in times of major change.  When serving as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Europe, she received one of the State Department’s highest awards for her work on relations between the United States and the European Union, and has received more than a dozen other State Department awards.
She has a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a bachelor’s degree from Colgate University. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, she speaks nearly fluent Italian, and some Spanish, Portuguese, and Russian. Prior to joining the State Department, she worked as a journalist.
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Robert Fallon
Director, Global Initiatives and Retreat Communications
Robert Fallon is the director of global initiatives and retreat communications at The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. Prior to joining Sunnylands, Rob was chief of staff at the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM, formerly the Broadcasting Board of Governors) where he advised the chief executive officer and board on foreign policy and political strategy, managed agency senior staff, and directed the daily operations of the agency.
Rob joined USAGM in 2015 after eight years at the U.S. Department of State, where he served as a policy advisor and speechwriter to the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, and formerly as a senior advisor to the assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, where he oversaw Senate confirmation of the Department’s ambassadors and senior officials.
Rob holds a master’s degree in public administration and a certificate in advanced security studies from Syracuse University, as well as a bachelor’s degree in political science from Bates College. He is a proud native of New Hampshire and plays in a D.C.-area band in his spare time.
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Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson
Program Director
Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Sunnylands Program Director, is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania and director of its Annenberg Public Policy Center.
She has authored or co-authored 16 books, including Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, published by Oxford University Press, which won the Association of American Publishers’ 2019 R.R. Hawkins Award. Her other award-winning books include Spiral of Cynicism (with Joseph Cappella) and The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy).
She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association.
For her contributions to the study of political communication, she received the American Political Science Association’s Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award in 1995. In 2016, the American Philosophical Society awarded her its Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities. In 2020, the National Academy of Sciences announced that Jamieson will receive its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal, for her “non-partisan crusade to ensure the integrity of facts in public discourse and development of the science of scientific communication to promote public understanding of complex issues.”
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Marisa Luzzatto
Director of Strategic Partnerships, Civic and Democratic and Engagement, and Director of Retreat Operations
After working as a consultant to The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, Marisa Luzzatto joined the Retreat Strategy Group as director of retreat operations and special projects full time in September 2018. With a career that has spanned stints in national politics, the White House, and international development, Luzzatto has overseen extensive work in communications and large, multi-faceted project management, both domestically and abroad. At Sunnylands, she manages work in the U.S. civic and democratic engagement portfolio and is charged with oversight of retreats operations.
Prior to her current post, Luzzatto worked as a consultant to The Malala Fund, where she planned and managed travel with Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai to highlight barriers to girls’ education in places such as east Africa, Northern Iraq and Brazil. After serving in the Clinton Administration, Luzzatto worked for nine years as a senior director at the ONE Campaign, the international anti-poverty initiative founded by the activist and singer Bono.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Wisconsin and a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia University.
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Jeffrey Phillips
Director, Policy and International Partnerships
As the director of policy and international partnerships at The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, Jeffrey Phillips oversees Sunnylands’ activities that fall within the Trust’s primary areas of focus, including U.S.-China relations, global cooperation, and strengthening democratic institutions. He identifies and builds relationships with partner organizations and strategically designs results-oriented programs that convene thought leaders and influencers to find solutions to pressing domestic and global challenges. In addition, Phillips is charged with designing and implementing the Trust’s evaluations program.
Prior to joining Sunnylands, Phillips held various leadership positions with the International Republican Institute (IRI), a nonprofit dedicated to advancing democracy and good governance around the world. Phillips spent nearly three years based in Hong Kong directing IRI’s China programs and other activities in Asia. Upon his return to Washington, DC, Phillips served as deputy director of IRI’s Asia Division. He was also IRI’s congressional and government affairs director, leading IRI’s outreach strategy to Capitol Hill and other governmental stakeholders.
Prior to his tenure at IRI, Phillips worked for nearly four years as a legislative aide to former Senator Mark Kirk. Phillips earned a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Michigan. He completed an internship at the United Nations Development Programme in Bogotá, Colombia and currently serves on the board of directors of Village Focus International, a nonprofit organization headquartered in Vientiane, Laos with the mission to eradicate poverty, strengthen land rights, and end human trafficking.
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