Steve Reifenberg Appointed to Head Rockefeller Center

Steve Reifenberg will become executive director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies starting June 1.

Reifenberg's academic and professional experience has been centered around Harvard University and Latin America for the last decade.

"Steve's skill and experience will be a tremendous asset in building the Center," said John H. Coatsworth, Monroe Gutman Professor of Latin American Affairs and director of the Center.

Reifenberg is currently a program manager for the Conflict Management Group (CMG), an international nonprofit organization that was created out of the Harvard Negotiation Project at the Harvard Law School. At CMG, Reifenberg has managed and worked on many negotiation projects in Latin America, including a major negotiation training project with the InterAmerican Development Bank, a program on "teaching tolerance" in Colombia, and a program on Alternative Dispute Resolution in Peru.

From 1990 through 1993, he was director of the Edward S. Mason Program, a one-year master's program in public administration jointly administered by the Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID). The Mason Program annually brings to Harvard approximately 60 midcareer public sector professionals from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. As Mason Program director, he traveled extensively throughout Latin America, recruiting and interviewing candidates for the program.

Reifenberg completed a master's degree in public policy at the Kennedy School in 1988, and then worked for two years at the Harvard Institute for International Development. He also served as the Latin American coordinator for the International Pilot Projects under President Derek Bok. In addition, Reifenberg has worked closely with the Harvard alumni clubs throughout the region, and maintains close working relationships with many of the University's alumni.

Reifenberg has extensive experience living and working in Latin America. In the early 1980s he worked for two years as the co-director of a small orphanage in Santiago, Chile. More recently he lived in El Salvador, where he taught negotiations and served as a U.N. election monitor in El Salvador's 1994 elections.

Reifenberg has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame and an M.S. in print journalism from Boston University. From 1994 through 1996, he was a recipient of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's National Fellowship Program, a leadership development program that provides a three-year stipend for fellows to explore new interdisciplinary pathways. His fellowship project has explored the relationship between spirituality and conflict resolution, with a focus in Latin America and Asia.