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Siri Nelson is the Executive Director of the National Whistleblower Center. Nelson served as an Associate Attorney and Policy Counsel at Kohn, Kohn and Colapinto, the nation’s leading whistleblower law firm, where she worked closely with anonymous whistleblowers, legislators, and regulators. Nelson was the recipient of the highly prestigious and competitive Estelle S. Kohn Memorial Fellowship awarded by Northeastern University School of Law and was elected to be the Commencement Speaker for her Class at Northeastern University School. She graduated summa cum laude from the College of New Rochelle, School of New Resources, with a B.A. in Liberal Arts focused on the Social Sciences. Nelson has been published in Columbia’s Blue Sky Blog and The National Law Review. She also serves as an Editor & Legislative Correspondent at Whistleblower Network News.
Other speakers include:
Andrew Lautz, Irvin McCullough, Jacqueline Garrick, Tom Devine, Melissa Wasser, Stephen Kohn
A social worker by background, Jacqueline Garrick entered the policy and program management realm upon her discharge from the US Army where she had specialized in post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) recovery and transition services.
Garrick has used her clinical experiences to improve quality of life programs and benefits for veterans, their families and employees. She has served in executive positions at the American Legion and the Departments of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Defense (DoD) and with Congress.
Garrick is a recognized public servant advocate with awards from several distinguished organizations. She is known for her work on organizational and professional development, strategic planning, programming and budgeting, legislation, oversight and investigations, personnel matters, and resilience and prevention approaches in the workplace. When Garrick left government, she founded Whistleblowers of America to provide peer support to those suffering the impacts of retaliation and advocate for mediation and continuous process improvement.
She developed the Whistleblower Retaliation Checklist to identify retaliation and its psychosocial impacts on employees in relation to the traumatic stressor of identity disruption. Garrick has coined the term Workplace Traumatic Stress and penned a Whistleblower Peer Mentor Code of Ethics and Workplace Promise campaign available on the WoA website.
Since 1979 Tom Devine has been the Government Accountability Project’s legal director, where he has assisted over 8,000 whistleblowers and not lost a case since 2006. He also has been on the front lines for passage and oversight of 36 whistleblower laws, including nearly all U.S. federal laws and internationally from Serbia to the UN and World Bank, most recently the EU Whistleblower Directive and Ukraine. He is an adjunct professor at the DC Law School, has been recognized annually since 2012 by the Metropolitan Washington Lawyer’s Association as one of Washington DC’s top employment lawyers, appears regularly as a media expert, has authored numerous books and law journals, and spoken in over a dozen nations as the State Department’s informal “Ambassador of Whistleblowing.”
Stephen M. Kohn is one of the nation’s leading whistleblower attorneys. A founding director of the National Whistleblower Center, he is the author of eight books on whistleblower law, including The New Whistleblower’s Handbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Doing What’s Right and Protecting Yourself. He is a practicing whistleblower attorney and serves pro bono as the Chairman of the Board of the National Whistleblower Center. Stephen is a partner in the whistleblower law firm Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto. His primary litigation focus includes representing international whistleblowers under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, tax fraud whistleblowers, qui tam reward laws, the False Claims Act, SEC whistleblowers and IRS whistleblowers. In 2012, the firm obtained the largest qui tam whistleblower reward given to a single individual in history ($104 million to UBS whistleblower Bradley Birkenfeld) and he represents Danske Bank Whistleblower Howard Wilkinson.
