2025 Keynote Speakers

Adar Cohen helps people have big conversations. He united gang leaders and police officers to prevent homicides in Chicago. He supported Protestants and Catholics in planning for a shared future in Belfast following generations of violent conflict. He helped a hospital system nearing collapse during the covid pandemic to find the way forward. Adar's work has been featured by the New York Times, MSNBC, and on the TED stage. He holds a PhD in conflict resolution from the University of Dublin and has taught at Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and -- at the invitation of the King of Bhutan -- at Sherubtse College, the Himalayan Kingdom’s first institution for higher education. He lives in an 1850 farmhouse in New Hampshire where he and his wife are raising two tough little negotiators.  

Heather Milner is an Ombudsman Analyst at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Ombudsman's Office, whichshe joined in 2011. Since 2018, she has served as Co-Coordinator on the Coalition of Federal Ombuds (COFO) Executive Committee. In 2020, she launched COFO’s Ombuds Supporting Ombuds meeting which she still facilitates. At the 2019 COFO conference, she presented a plenary session on “Self-ish, Self-less, and Self-Care…Where is the Balance?” Heather received ombudsman training from IOA and USOA, and mediation training from the Northern Virginia Mediation Service. Heather has a graphic design associate degree from Westwood College and designs materials for her office. 

I am the Dan K. Moore Distinguished Professor in Jurisprudence and Ethics in the School of Law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  I hold a bachelor’s degree (Linguistics) from Brown University and a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School.  After stints with a private law firm and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey, I entered academia in 1994 at the University of Wyoming College of Law. I moved to UNC in 1998.  Since then my scholarship has focused almost entirely on the wartime removal and imprisonment of Japanese Americans.  I’ve published three monographs in the field (Free to Die for their Country: The Story of the Japanese American Draft Resisters in World War II (Univ. of Chicago Press 2001), American Inquisition: The Hunt for Japanese American Disloyalty in World War II (Univ. of North Carolina Press 2007)), and Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe: Complicity and Conscience in America’s World War II Concentration Camps (Univ. of North Carolina Press 2023), as well as an edited volume (Colors of Confinement: Rare Kodachrome Photographs of Japanese American Incarceration in World War II (Univ. of North Carolina Press 2012)), and many articles in academic journals and the popular media. In addition, I curated the core historical exhibit at the Heart Mountain (Wyo.) Interpretive Center, a museum that opened in 2011 at the site where one of the USA’s ten concentration camps for Japanese Americans once stood. As a descendant of Holocaust refugees, I have also devoted energies to the memory of that historical episode, chiefly as a faculty member and academic director for the Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics.

Dawn Osborne-Adams serves as University Ombuds at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is also an Adjunct Professor of Law, teaching client-centered interviewing and counseling to our next generation of lawyers. Dawn’s prior ombuds experience includes roles as University Ombudsman at Binghamton University, Consulting Ombuds at Shell Oil Company, and Conference Ombuds for the Association for the Study of Higher Education. Dawn contributes to the ombuds field through teaching formative ombuds courses, mentoring new ombuds, serving as an editor of IOA’s InPractice column, consulting on the development of new ombuds programs, and conducting external reviews of existing ombuds programs. Dawn earned a B.S. from Georgetown University and a J.D. from New York University School of Law. She holds a certificate in dispute resolution from the Straus Institute at Pepperdine University School of Law and a certificate in executive coaching from New York University.