FIVE ALL-STARS Evan Kohlmann L'04 Eric Rothschild L'93 Miguel Rodriguez C'94 L'99 Derek Pew L'93 Aretha Delight Davis L'97

It is a subject he has been interested in since he was a teenager and which he honed while he was an undergraduate at the Georgetown University school of foreign service.

“I applied to college not really knowing what I wanted to do, but I spent summers in France – my father grew up there – and I was always interested in foreign affairs,” he said.

When he got to Georgetown, he found a mentor in Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian political science professor who got Kohlmann fascinated with Middle Eastern studies.

“When he lived in Egypt, he passed by the number two guy in al-Qaeda there every day. He really knew his subject and that was a great impression on me,” he said.