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St. Olaf College students Ella Cereghino ’25 and Jack Fuerstenberg ’26 and alumnus Paul Sullivan ’17 will present at the 2025 Peace Scholars Conference.

The conference will be held on April 11 at the Norway House in Minneapolis. It is presented by the Peace Scholars Program and sponsored by the Smaby Family Foundation. The conference is free and open to the public, and those interested in attending can register online.

The Peace Scholars Conference is an annual gathering that brings together student scholars, academic leaders, and community members to explore pressing global issues through the lens of peacebuilding, dialogue, and conflict resolution.

This year’s conference will begin with poster presentations by last summer’s Peace Scholars, including Cereghino and Fuerstenberg. Each year students from St. Olaf, Augsburg University, Concordia College, Luther College, and Pacific Lutheran University are selected to participate in the Peace Scholars Program, which provides them with an opportunity to spend seven weeks in Oslo, Norway, studying peace, conflict, and dialogue. Two students at St. Olaf receive funding each year to participate in the program through the Philip C. Smaby Peace Scholars Endowed Scholarship, which was established in honor of the late Philip Carlyle Smaby, a Minneapolis-St. Paul philanthropist who attended St. Olaf. Three of his children — Mark Smaby ’66, Gary Smaby ’71, and John Smaby ’76 — are St. Olaf alumni as well.

“One of my strongest takeaways from the program is how ubiquitous the importance of dialogue is. We learned about dialogue in the context of economics, national security, and religion, among other topics, and my individual research focused on the role of dialogue in land use and city planning. Clear, open, and collaborative communication plays an essential role in all of these areas and others — even where we may not expect it.”

— Ella Cereghino ’25

At the conference, Cereghino and Fuerstenberg will share the research and projects they completed in Norway last summer.

“One experience that has stuck with me to this day was the dialogue that we participated in with local Norwegians as we were able to express our own perspectives on Norwegian and American society while also hearing about how Norwegian perspectives differ from ours,” Fuerstenberg says. “The primary thing that I gained from my time in the program was how to participate in and mediate a constructive dialogue between two or more parties in disagreement.”

Fuerstenberg says the program helped him see a path where his interests in international trade and economics can lead to graduate school and a professional career in academia. For Cereghino, a physics major at St. Olaf, the program helped her realize the important role that dialogue plays in the STEM fields.

“Through my experiences with research and my experience in the Peace Scholars Program, I’ve come to realize that science feels most valuable to me when it’s paired with dialogue and relevant to everyday questions about how people live,” Cereghino says. “One of my strongest takeaways from the program is how ubiquitous the importance of dialogue is. We learned about dialogue in the context of economics, national security, and religion, among other topics, and my individual research focused on the role of dialogue in land use and city planning. Clear, open, and collaborative communication plays an essential role in all of these areas and others — even where we may not expect it.”

Cereghino says her experience with the Peace Scholars Program has led her to consider pursuing environmental policy conflict resolution or research in a government or nonprofit setting.

“I would be able to have a role in either communicating science to the public or using it to make practical decisions about how we use and interact with land. Regardless, I want to work in a setting where I’m able to think about questions through both a scientific lens and a people-oriented lens, taking into account the wide variety of needs and interests that people bring, even to questions that we may think of as primarily scientific,” Cereghino says.

The two will share this insight, as well as a detailed look at the research they conducted in Norway, at the conference. The 2025 Peace Scholars will be announced at the conference.

The Peace Scholars Conference will also include a Peace Scholars Alumni Panel that brings together a distinguished group of program participants who will reflect on their experiences and discuss the ongoing impact of peace studies in their careers and communities.

Sullivan, who was a Peace Scholar in the summer of 2016, is now a community organizer with the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota. Sullivan’s work has focused on criminal legal reform, voting rights, and know-your-rights education for immigrant communities. The Peace Scholars Alumni Panel will be moderated by Thomas Hanson, a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer with extensive diplomatic experience in Europe and Eurasia.