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Cellist Rhonda Rider whom *The Boston Globe* calls a glorious cellist, remarkable for her extraordinarily expressive and inventive playing was the founding cellist of the Naumburg-award-winning Lydian String Quartet, with whom she performed for over twenty years. Rider is currently Coordinator of Chamber Music and on the faculty of The Boston Conservatory. During the summer months, she is heard at various festivals including Music from Salem, Green Mountain, Tanglewood, and Token Creek. She is also the cello coach for the Asian Youth Orchestra in Hong Kong. An advocate of contemporary music, she has premiered works by such composers as John Harbison, Lee Hyla, and Steve Mackey. She holds degrees from Oberlin Conservatory and the Yale School of Music.

Christopher Flavin is President of the Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based international research organization focused on energy, resource and environmental issues. Worldwatch is recognized around the world for its pathbreaking work on the global connections between economic, social, and environmental trends. Chris has spent his career at Worldwatch where he previously served as Senior Vice President and Vice President for Research. Chris is a leading voice on the need to build a low-carbon economy that will meet human needs without undermining the Earth's ecological support systems. He is co-author of three books on energy, including *Power Surge: Guide to the Coming Energy Revolution*, which anticipated many of the changes now under way in world energy markets. Chris is a regular co-author of the Institute's annual *State of the World* report, which has been published in 36 languages. He has participated in several historic international conferences, including the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and the Climate Change Conference in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997.Chris appears regularly in the national and international media, including outlets such as the BBC, National Public Radio, CNN, PBS Newshour, and Voice of America.

Williams Holmberg is the Chairman and President of Renew the Earth and the Chairman of the Board at the New Uses Council and the Biomass Coordinating Council of the American Council on Renewable Energy. Holmberg has worked for the EPA where he helped pioneer the use of ethanol as fuel, integrated the registration of biological pesticides, and fostered organic farming programs. He also helped establish the Office of Alcohol Fuels at the Department of Energy. Holmberg is a US Naval Academy graduate and has served in the Marine Corps. He has been awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, the Joint Service Commendation Medal and the EPA Silver Medal. Holmberg has advanced degrees in Personnel Administration, Russian Language, Soviet Affairs, and in Amphibious and Integrated Combat Operations.

Darryl Pinckney is an American novelist, playwright, and essayist. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was awarded The Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction in 1992 for his novel High Cotton.

Patricia Powell is the 2004 Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor of Writing at MIT. She is the author of three novels, Me Dying Trial, A Small Gathering of Bones and The Pagoda. Powell was born in Jamaica, grew up in England and immigrated to the United States with her family in 1982. She often weaves gender, race and sexuality into her work.

*7 NEWS* General Assignment Reporter Mike Macklin reports for *7 NEWS* and has covered a wide range of major stories of both local and national interest. Macklin's reporting for *7 NEWS* and his correspondence for the NBC NewsChannel have taken him all over the country. Before coming to *7 NEWS* in 1994, Macklin worked for more than 10 years as a reporter-anchor at WBZ-TV and WBZ-AM in Boston. At WBZ-TV, Macklin was responsible for political reporting, covering local, state and national elections, presidential primaries and party nominating events. He also was a general assignment reporter, as well as the anchor for Sunday mid-day newscast. Macklin has been nominated for a New England Emmy award for individual achievement in news reporting.

David Beard has been a reporter and editor for the past 27 years. He worked abroad as a foreign correspondent for The Associated Press and was deputy foreign editor, regional editor, and assistant managing editor for The Boston Globe. He has been the editor of Boston.com, one of the nation's biggest newspaper-based web sites, since September 2006. Beard also teaches news writing at the Harvard Extension School and is on the board of the school's journalism masters program. He was an Inter American Press Association scholar in Argentina and is a graduate of Northwestern University.

Billy Bean was born in Santa Ana, California in 1964 and graduated from Loyola Marymount University in 1986 with a degree in Business Administration. He played major league baseball from 1987 through 1995, breaking into the major leagues with the Detroit Tigers. Bean tied a major league record with 4 hits in his first major league game. He went on to play for the Los Angeles Dodgers, and the San Diego Padres. Billy came out publicly in 1999 on the front page of The New York Times, and subsequently on a nationally televised story with Diane Sawyer. He is the only living former major league baseball player to acknowledge his homosexuality. Bean is the author of, Going the Other Way: Lessons from a life in and out of Major League Baseball. (Avalon Publishing Group, NYC.)

Jean E. Jackson received her B.A. from Wellesley College in Sociology/Anthropology in 1965, and her M.A. (1966) and Ph.D. (1972) from Stanford University. She began teaching at MIT in the fall of 1972. Her earlier Latin American research interests included small-scale societies, kinship and marriage, gender, and anthropological linguistics. During the past 20 years she has examined indigenous mobilizing in Colombia. She is currently conducting archival research on how Colombia's indigenous communities have been represented in the two national newspapers, 1988-present. She is the author of several books and essays including: *The Fish People: Linguistic Exogamy and Tukanoan Identity in Northwest Amazonia* which was published in 1983. In 2002 she and co-editor Kay B. Warren published *Indigenous Movements, Self-Representation and the State in Latin America*. Recent essays include "Indigenous movements in Latin America, 1992-2004: Controversies, ironies, new directions" co-authored with Kay B. Warren (2005 Annual Review of Anthropology). She has also published various pieces on the Colombian conflict. "Colombia's Indigenous Peoples Confront the Armed Conflict" came out in 2005, as well as "Update on the Colombian Crisis" for the American Anthropological Association Committee for Human Rights.

Christopher Capozzola specializes in the political and cultural history of the United States from 1861 to 1945. He graduated from Harvard College and competed his Ph.D. at Columbia University in 2002. He has held fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Carnegie Scholars Program, and the Social Science Research Council. At MIT, he teaches courses in political and legal history, cultural history, and the history of race, gender, and class.