Who We Are

  • Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez, Managing Director

    Daniel heads the firm’s Geopolitics, Risk, and Strategy practice. In a two-decade career spanning journalism, government, and finance, he has advised some of the world's most prominent businesses, investors, and governments. On faculty at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management since 2015, his research and teaching focus on political and geopolitical risk, country branding, populism, corruption, and private sector resilience in emerging markets. Daniel’s byline or visage can frequently be found haunting various op-ed pages, expert commentaries, conferences, and broadcast media. In his free time, he enjoys advising and investing in tech startups, most board games, and connecting interesting people. Daniel resides in Newton, Massachusetts, with his wife and twin daughters. He is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School and University of Chicago Law.

  • Christine Post, Director of Operations

    Christine serves as Aurora's Director of Operations, responsible for keeping all the ducks in a row. In addition to her work at Aurora, she leads the Student Experience team at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management’s Executive MBA program and additionally serves as a staff advisor for Kellogg's Global Initiatives in Management classes. Prior to joining Kellogg, Christine was a commercial litigation attorney within a large international law firm. Christine and her husband reside in Wilmette, Illinois with their two children. Her free time is spent in the stands cheering on her son's travel baseball team.

  • Dimitris Valatsas, CFA

    Dimitris Valatsas, CFA, Chief Economist

    Dimitris serves as the firm’s Chief Economist and leads our Economics & Markets practice. He has over a decade of experience advising asset managers, hedge funds, family offices, and other financial institutions on macroeconomic and market developments, focusing on the U.S. and Europe. In addition to his role at Aurora, Dimitris is an advisor for LGA, a family enterprise advisory firm. His articles and op-eds have appeared in numerous publications, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the South China Morning Post. Dimitris holds an AB in Economics from Harvard University and a Master’s in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford; he is a CFA Charterholder. In his free time, Dimitris enjoys cycling, scuba diving, and modernist art. A native of Athens, Greece, Dimitris lives in New York, NY with his wife and son.

Senior Specialists

  • José Ignacio Hernández

    José Ignacio Hernández - International Arbitration and Sovereign Debt

    José Ignacio Hernández is a law professor at the Andrés Bello Catholic University and the Central University of Venezuela currently a fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. Between 2019 and 2020, Professor Hernández served as the special attorney general of Venezuela under the interim government of Juan Guaido, during which time he was responsible for setting up legal frameworks to protect Venezuelan sovereign assets from seizure and mechanisms to manage the humanitarian emergency in cooperation with the U.S. government and other international allies. Widely considered one of Latin America’s foremost experts on public debt and restructurings, he has served as an expert witness in several legal cases, including the landmark Crystallex decision, and written over a dozen papers in comparative constitutional and administrative law and economic regulation. José Ignacio’s expertise includes public debt and debt restructurings, trade treaties, investment and climate change regulation particularly within the oil and gas sectors, and international arbitration and investment claims.

  • Maximilian Hess - Russia, Eurasia and Geo-economics

    Maximilian (Max) Hess is the founder of the political risk consultancy Enmetena Advisory. He is also the author of Economic War: Ukraine & the Global Conflict between Russia and the West. Max serves as a fellow in the Eurasia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and has also held fellowships with the International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Oxus Society for Central Asian Affairs. His writing has been featured in Foreign Policy, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, New Statesman, and Al Jazeera, amongst others, and his broadcast experience includes the BBC, CNN, CNBC, and Bloomberg. Max has an enduring passion for all things related to the Republic of Georgia and serves as Secretary of the British-Georgian Society. He lives in London with his beloved Airedale Terrier, Koba.

Senior Advisors

  • Dany Bahar - Labor, Immigration, and AI

    Dany Bahar is an economist and Associate Professor of Practice at Brown University, a non-resident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Growth Lab. He is also affiliated with The Center for Global Development, CESifo Group Munich, and IZA Institute of Labor Economics. Dany’s expertise focuses on economic growth, international economics, industrial transformation, and the effects of innovation and technology on firm productivity and market dynamics—from R&D to automation and artificial intelligence. His specialty is using advanced econometric and statistical methods to establish robust trends in big data, and apply them to specific companies, sectors, or countries. Current areas of focus include the diffusion of technology and knowledge within and across borders, as measured by productivity, structural transformation, exports, entrepreneurship and innovation, among other factors. Lately, his research has also focused on migrants and refugees as drivers of this process. He also produces and hosts a videocast/podcast: "Economists on Zoom Getting Coffee".

  • Dennis Chookaszian - Corporate Governance, Private Investment, and Tech

    One of Chicago’s most storied investors and business leaders, Dennis Chookaszian is the former chairman and chief executive officer of CNA Insurance Companies and an independent director at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. During his career, he has served as a director on the boards of thirteen publicly traded corporations and well over eighty private corporations. He is currently a director of two public companies and twenty private corporations. Dennis is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Chicago Booth School, where he teaches Corporate Governance. He also teaches International Corporate Governance in China at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business and the Jiao Tong University Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance. He previously taught Corporate Governance at the Indian Institute of Professional Management. He is a trustee of Northwestern University, and a member of the advisory board of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Kellogg School of Management.

  • John Paul Rollert

    John Paul Rollert - Ethical Capitalism, Generational Wealth, and Leadership

    John Paul Rollert is The University of Chicago’s in-house ethicist for all things business. His research focuses on the intellectual history of capitalism, the ethics of leadership, and the application of empathy to law, business, and politics. He teaches classes in leadership, ethics, and politics at Harvard University as well as the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Rollert has been published in The Business and Society Review, The Journal of Law, Culture and the Humanities, Raritan, Common Knowledge, and the Yale Law Journal. In addition to his academic work, he frequently writes on business, law, and politics for a variety of popular publications, and his work has been featured in The New Republic, Harper's, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, Slate, Fortune, and The New York Times. He also pens a featured column for the Chicago Booth Review. A graduate of Harvard College, Rollert earned his JD from Yale Law School and a PhD from The John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

  • Hani Sabra

    Hani Sabra - Political Risk, Middle East

    Hani Sabra is a political risk analyst with more than a decade and half covering the Middle East. He previously established Alef Advisory, a Middle East-focused political risk practice. Prior to founding Alef, Hani spent more than a decade at the New York-based political risk consultancy Eurasia Group, where he headed the Middle East practice. He is currently a director of strategy at Gemic. Hani is frequently called upon to provide media commentary about regional developments and is regularly quoted in publications like Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal. He has taught political risk and Middle East politics seminars at institutions like the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Montreal. His primary coverage areas include Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states, and regional geopolitics. He speaks fluent Arabic.

  • Dr. Stan Veuger

    Stan Veuger - Macroeconomics and Fiscal and Monetary Policy

    Dr. Stan Veuger is a senior fellow in economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is also the editor of AEI Economic Perspectives, and a fellow at the IE School of Politics, Economics & Global Affairs. He was a visiting lecturer of economics at Harvard University in 2021 and a Campbell Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2022. Stan’s research has been published in leading academic and professional journals, including the Journal of Monetary Economics, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. He is a celebrated thought leader on issues of fiscal and monetary policy in the U.S. and Europe, and comments frequently on economics, politics, and popular culture for general audiences. His writing has been featured in The Bulwark, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post, among other outlets. His broadcast appearances include CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, Telemundo, and Univision.

Our Work

At Aurora, we are building a different geopolitical and macroeconomic advisory service. We strive to provide independent research free from conflicts of interest and partisan influences. Our clients’ needs are our guiding stars: we tailor every product to ensure we maximize the value we add to their business.