Ambassador Farooq Sobhan, currently distinguished fellow & board member of the BangladeshEnterprise Institute (BEI) has joined the Cosmos Foundation as its Honorary Advisor Emeritus.  Ambassador Sobhan, former President and CEO of the BEI, was Executive Chairman, Board of Investment (BoI) and Special Envoy to the Prime Minister 1997-1999 and Foreign Secretary 1995-1997.  He has also served as Ambassador/High Commissioner to India, China, Malaysia and the United Nations. Referring to his joining the Cosmos Foundation Advisory Board, Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, the Foundation’s President said Farooq Sobhan does the Foundation great honour. "He is a person of prodigious experience, and I have no doubt will add enormous value to our contributions!” Ambassador Sobhan served as Chairman of the Group of 77 at the UN 1982-1983, and was Chairman, UN Commission on TNCs 1991-1992.  He is a member of the Board of Governors of the South Asia Centre for Policy Studies(SACEPS), based in New Delhi and was Co-Chairman of the Coalition for South Asian Co- operation (CASAC) from 1994-2001.  Ambassador Sobhan was a visiting professor at the Elliott School for International Affairs at George Washington University in 2003, where he taught a post graduate course on South Asia.  He is the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the independent Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), established in Dhaka in September 2007.  Read: Roundtable: Bangladesh must act fast to offset fallout of Ukraine conflict Ambassador Sobhan played a pivotal role in the establishment of the SME Foundation and served on its Board during the period 2008-9.  He was also a Member of the International Advisory Committee of the Asia Society in the U.S. and the Roundtable in the U.K.  Ambassador Sobhan also served from 2008-2011 as a Member of the International Commission on Migration and Development.  He chaired the Task Force established by the Asia Foundation in 2004 on “The US Role in South Asia”.  He was invited to speak at the White House Summit meeting on CVE held in February 2015. Dr Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, Honorary Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies (ISAS) at the National University of Singapore (NUS), a reputed diplomat turned scholar who had also served as Foreign Advisor in a Caretaker Government, is the President of the Cosmos Foundation. Besides, Dr Danilo Turk, former President of the Republic of Slovenia, Ambassador Krishnan Srinivasan, former Indian Foreign Secretary, Ambassador Tariq Karim, currently Director of the Centre for Bay of Bengal Studies at the IUB, Haider A. Khan, a Distinguished Professor of Economics at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, Professor George Edward Moose, a career member of the U.S. Foreign Service, where he attained the rank of Career Ambassador and has been adjunct Professor of Practice at The Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University, Ambassador Li Debiao, a Distinguished retired Chinese Diplomat and Md. Nojibur Rahman, former Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister of Bangladesh are members of the Advisory Board of the Cosmos Foundation. Cosmos Foundation is a philanthropic arm of the Cosmos Group, registered as a trust dedicated to providing strategic insights and policy solutions to help Bangladesh chart its course towards a better future, apart from discovering, cultivating and disseminating for a global audience, the art of Bangladesh.  Cosmos Foundation is organizing Bangladesh’s first-ever festival of disabled artists in collaboration with UNESCO. The Foundation provides direction to the Group’s flagship curatorial space, Gallery Cosmos, and its pioneering printmaking studio, Atelier71, which work in tandem.