Brian Bellerose is an attorney and adjunct professor of law. He graduated from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the University of Chicago and studied education at Columbia University. Brian has taught US business law, international business law, legal language and writing at several universities such as Concordia University of Chicago, Suffolk University Law School and Bentley University. He also has several years of experience teaching English to foreign language speakers. Brian's legal career has specialized in international business, investments and financial services. He has over 25 years of experience advising multi-national companies and start-ups. He was the General Counsel and Managing Director of Renaissance Capital and MDM Group in Moscow Russia, the General Counsel of Oriflame Cosmetics, a publicly-traded company headquartered in Brussels Belgium. He was also the General Counsel of two groups of investment funds—Kazimir Funds, which specialized in investing in the former Soviet Union and BeiKai Capital, a group of private equity funds in China. Brian lives in New York City.

Laura M. Brank heads the Russia practice of Dechert LLP. She has been advising corporations, investment funds, banks, multinational institutions, and high net worth individuals on complex corporate and finance transactions in emerging markets for over two decades. Since 2014, Professor Brank has become one of the leading experts on U.S. economic sanctions against Russia, speaking and writing extensively on the topic, as well as counseling clients on compliance and sanctions matters.  She has been ranked in The Legal 500 EMEA and Chambers Global since 2007 and is top-ranked for her corporate/M&A work in the 2021 edition of Chambers Europe. She is listed in The Legal 500 EMEA 2021 for banking and finance, dispute resolution, energy & natural resources, real estate and more.  Laura obtained her B.A. from the University of Maryland, J.D. from Georgetown University Law Center, and M.S. from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. She is a member of the bar in New York and Washington D.C., and is a registered foreign lawyer in England and Wales. Laura has been leading courses on Economic Sanctions at Pericles since 2017. You can see her more extended bio on Dechert’s web page. https://www.dechert.com/people/b/laura-brank.html

Donald Cannon graduated from the University of Washington, Seattle. He began his professional life working first as translator for business concerns involved in commerce with the USSR, soon acting as negotiator and commercial representative as East-West trade increased. During this time, he also participated enthusiastically in citizen diplomacy and the Sister Cities Program. After the dissolution of the USSR, Donald embraced the economic changes taking place in Russia and, following the then-popular trend, he helped create several joint ventures. In the 1990s, he also established and managed a new business venture in Russia and was responsible for all of its operations, including complex technical issues. Donald ardently supports cultural diversity and has always advocated for pinpointing and interpreting societal differences and their underlying realities; he believes this to be as important as interpreting words and ideas. Operating on this conviction, he has supplied in-depth Russian company profiles to Western investors, mediated in contract negotiations and edited English-language website for Russian businesses. Wherever Donald has been throughout his career, he has always taught English, also using the principle that experiencing cultural differences is the root of language acquisition. To grasp English fully, we need to perceive its culture from the inside out. Traditional instruction in Russia, however, typically explains English and its culture from the outside in. Donald’s approach is to restore the inside-out flow and to give students a sudden “Aha!” experience uniting both language and culture.

Sergey Danilov obtained his Juris Doctor degree from Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University (Arlington, Virginia). A native of St.Petersburg, Russia, he spent over 30 years in various parts of the world, including the United States, Europe, and Central America, and speaks several languages. Currently he lives in France where he consults international clientele on various aspects of commercial and corporate law. At Pericles he teaches Language of Сontracts, Contract Drafting, Business Organizations, Transactional Lawyering and International Asset Recovery.

Marian Dent is the Dean of Pericles Center for International Legal Education, which runs an LLM program as well as legal skills programs for Russian practicing lawyers. Dean Dent teaches courses in legal writing, international business transactions, contract law and economic sanctions law. In addition to teaching law and directing the program, she also created Pericles’ texts on legal writing and legal English, helped develop materials for GMAT and TOEFL preparation, and occasionally teaches the logic section of the GMAT. Professor Dent obtained her Juris Doctor from the University of California, Berkeley (Boalt Hall) in 1988. After graduating Ms. Dent joined the Washington, D.C. law firm of Kirkpatrick and Lockhart, and worked there for four years in the fields of East-West and international trade, securities and general business law. She moved to Moscow in 1992 to direct the Moscow office of the American Bar Association, CEELI Project. After leaving CEELI, she taught legal writing, and intro to American Law, at the Russian Law Academy of the Russian Ministry of Justice from 1995-1998, and started the first Russian Jessup International Moot Court competition. She has also taught from time to time at Moscow University Touro, the American Institute of Business & Economics, and for ten years taught an introductory course in Russian Law for visiting students from the University of San Diego Law School. She was one of the founders of Pericles, and became Dean in 2002.

Paul Richard Engelke is an advocate practicing at the Pretoria Bar in South Africa. He graduated from the University of Port Elizabeth in 1991 with a B-Juris and immediately started working as a Public Prosecutor. In 1995 the Department of Justice relocated him to Pretoria. While in Pretoria he enrolled at the University of Pretoria where he graduated with a LLB. He completed the Law School for attorneys in 2001 and practiced as an attorney for a year. In 2002 he was admitted as an Advocate to the High Court of SA. In 2003 he worked for the Special Investigation Unit of the National Prosecution Authority where he spent 12 years specializing in the investigation and prosecution of Fraud, Corruption and Serious Commercial Crimes. He also headed up the Anti-Money Laundering unit of the SIU, it was during his time at the SIU that he was invited and attended a Forensic Investigation Course at the Russian Federal Detectives Collage, in Moscow. From 2015 he shared his time between his advocate duties and giving lectures to students in Criminal law and Forensic Investigations in Pretoria. Mr Engelke also completed the CELTA course and teaches English as a foreign language.

Marc Polonsky is a retired partner of the international law firm White & Case. His practice focused mainly on investment into and out of Russia, particularly in the natural resources and infrastructure sectors. Based principally in London, he also spent eleven years (1998 to 2008; 2017 to 2018) living and working in Moscow. He manages a philanthropic foundation that supports cultural heritage and humanities education and research, and is a non-executive director of an insurance company listed on the London Stock Exchange. He has a B.A. in Modern Languages (Russian and French) from the University of Oxford and is a solicitor qualified in England and Wales.