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Prior to joining state government, Ms. Edmonds was president of Jane C. Edmonds & Associates, Inc. (JCEA), a workforce development and diversity training and consulting firm. Ms. Edmonds also is a former Chair of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination (MCAD), the Commonwealth's civil rights law enforcement agency. From there, she went on to serve as Director for the Office of Intergovernmental Relations for the City of Boston. Ms. Edmonds is a former elected member of the Sharon School Committee where she served two terms, one as its Chair. Additionally, Ms. Edmonds is a former member of several private and public sector boards, including: the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, the Education Loan Services, Inc. and The Boston Club.

Andrew Porter serves as Of Counsel of Todd an Weld LLP, a Boston based firm of trial lawyers. He has over 20 years of experience practicing law in the areas of family and probate law, business representation, business litigation, and collection law. Porter has litigated cases in the Massachusetts State and Federal Courts and has also appeared on numerous occasions before the Massachusetts Appellate courts. Porter currently serves as counsel to the Boards of Directors for several companies and corporations and represents many business entities on matters of law.

David Charbonneau joined the faculty in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University in August 2004. His research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the detection and characterization of planets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars. Dr. Charbonneau is a founding member of the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, which uses a network of small, automated telescopes to survey tens of thousands of stars for periodic eclipses that indicate the passage of orbiting planets. In 2005, he led the team that made the first direct detection of light emitted by a planet outside the Solar system. In 2004, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific awarded him the Robert J. Trumpler Award for his graduate thesis entitled Shadows and Reflections of Extrasolar Planets. He was recently named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and awarded a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

David Liroff is the senior vice president of System Development and Media Strategy. David B. Liroff joined CPB in April, 2007, after having served as vice president and chief technology officer at the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts. Liroff joined WGBH in 1979, and during his tenure with the station had senior management responsibility for broadcasting, local program production, creative services, membership, major gifts and capital campaign fundraising, and for national "how-to" program production. Most recently at WGBH, Liroff had been responsible for production services, engineering, information technology, telecommunications, and audience research, and he had senior management responsibility for overseeing WGBH's transition to digital production and broadcasting. While at WGBH, Liroff had served on the boards of the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS), American Public Television (APT), Public Interactive (PI), and the Northeast Document Conservation Center. He also served on the Public Broadcasting Service Technology and Distribution Committee and was a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Prior to joining WGBH in 1979, Liroff was director of broadcasting at PBS member station KETC-TV9/St Louis, where he was responsible for programming, production, and audience research. From 1971-1977, he was PTV program director at WOUB-TV20 at the Ohio University Telecommunications Center in Athens, Ohio and was an assistant professor in the College of Communication, School of Radio/Television at Ohio University. Liroff holds a PhD in radio, TV and film from Northwestern University, a master's in speech and theater from Brooklyn College/City University of New York, and a bachelor's in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Marty Meehan is the second chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the fourteenth leader of the institution and its predecessor schools, founded in the 1890s. A UMass Lowell alumnus, Meehan graduated cum laude in 1978, having studied education and political science. He received a master's degree in public administration from Suffolk University in 1981 and a juris doctor from Suffolk University Law School in 1986. He holds honorary degrees from Suffolk and Green Mountain College in Vermont. Meehan served as an adjunct faculty member in political science at UMass Lowell in the late 1980s. A resident of Lowell, Meehan represented the fifth congressional district of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 2007. He served on the House Armed Services and Judiciary committees. Widely respected as a reformer, he established a national reputation for his legislative leadership in reforming campaign finance laws and protecting people against the health risks in tobacco use. Among his priorities were maintaining a balanced federal budget, preserving Medicare and Social Security, supporting and strengthening the military, and supporting economic growth that is worker- and environment-friendly. Meehan served as Massachusetts deputy secretary of state for securities and corporations from 1986 to 1990. The Boston Globe reported, "During Meehan's four years as deputy secretary, the Securities Division [went] from being a frequent embarrassment to gaining a national reputation as hard-hitting and activist." In the early 1990s, Meehan was the first assistant district attorney of Middlesex County, supervising more than 150 people, including 80 prosecutors, in an office admired for aggressive prosecution of child abuse, domestic violence and other violent crimes.

Henry Corra is a New York City based documentary filmmaker best known for his highly acclaimed films *Umbrellas* (1995), *George *(2000), *Frames* (2004), *Same Sex America* (2005) and the Emmy-nominated film *NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell* (2007). In 1994 Corra launched his own production company, Corra Films Inc. Corra Films, located in the heart of downtown Manhattan, draws on the talents of some of New York's most innovative and original filmmakers, editors, artists, musicians and designers who share a commitment to exploring and expanding the boundaries of documentary film language and the nonfiction narrative approach. Corra's films have been exhibited worldwide in theatrical venues in New York City, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin, and in broadcast venues including HBO, SHOWTIME, LOGO, CBS, PBS, VH1, ARTE and CHANNEL 4.

Born in Hong Kong and raised in Boston, Ellie Lee is one of those artists to whom pushing boundaries seems second nature. An animator with two award-winning shorts, Lee is also a seasoned documentarian. Her striking, charcoal-animated documentary, *Repetition Compulsion*, dealing with abused women, went on to become the first animated film to be broadcast on the acclaimed PBS documentary series, P.O.V. "It was conceived originally as a documentary, but the animation came about because I had these skills and abilities in that field and that seemed like the best way to tell the story, with the movement of the charcoal drawings capturing the violence without needing to actually show the women's faces." In 2000, Lee made the transition to live action, fiction narrative with her latest work, the haunting and elegiac short, *Dog Days*, a cautionary tale that takes place in a futuristic wasteland. "With Dog Days I really felt that my past as an animator and studying doc filmmaking at Harvard really came together to help make it a better film, says Lee. The film took top honors at the 2000 Hamptons and Florida Film Festivals, and is currently running on IFC.

David L. Kirp is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. A former newspaper editor as well as an academic, his interests range widely across social policy. Throughout his career, he has written about gender, race, education, affirmative action, housing and AIDS. Much of his work addresses the question of justice, not as theory but in practice.