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Allen Tate (1899-1979), American poet, critic, biographer, and editor, was a founder and editor of *the Fugitive*. Tate's earliest publications included the interpretative biographies *Stonewall Jackson* (1928) and *Jefferson Davi*s (1929). His first collection of verse, *Poems, 1928-31*, was published in 1932. While teaching English literature at several colleges, including Princeton, he held the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress from 1934 to 1944. He edited *the Sewanee Review* from 1944 to 1946. After 1951 he taught English literature at the University of Minnesota and lectured extensively at universities throughout the country. Tate's creative work always echoed his preoccupations as a southerner. His penetrating and original novel, *The Fathers* (1938), which is experimental in form and style and in many ways similar to some of William Faulkner's fiction, is a tortured exploration of the guilt and moral significance of Tate's heritage as a son of the Confederacy. In typical modernist fashion, Tate was determined in his poetry to be "unromantic." His poetic masterpiece, the "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928), is an elegy characterized by the density of its imagery, irony, and irresolvable ambiguity. Tate died in Nashville, TN, on Feb. 9, 1979. During his lifetime, he published 20 books and received many literary honors, including the Bollingen Prize for poetry.

Theater, film and opera director Julie Taymor's most recent film is *Frida*, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. The film garnered six Oscar nominations, winning two. Taymor made her feature film directorial debut in 1999 with *Titus*, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Based on Shakespeare's play, *Titus Andronicus*, her adapted screenplay is published in an illustrated book by Newmarket Press. On her work for the stage, Taymor has received numerous awards for her play, *The Lion King*, which opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in 1997, including two Tony Awards: for best direction of a musical and for her original costume designs. The Lion King most recently premiered in South Africa and opens in Paris in October 2007. Taymor's stage production of *Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus* was produced off- Broadway by Theatre For a New Audience in 1994. Other directing credits include *The Tempest*, *The Taming of the Shrew*, *The Transposed Heads*, and* Liberty's Taken*, an original musical co-created with David Suehsdorf and Elliot Goldenthal. In 1991 Taymor received a MacArthur genius Fellowship. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, the first Annual Dorothy B. Chandler Award in Theater, and the 1990 Brandeis Creative Arts Award. An illustrated book on her career, *Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire*, was recently expanded and revised by Harry N. Abrams. Her book, *The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway*, is published by Hyperion. An illustrated book, *Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film*, is available from Newmarket Press.

Dr. Angela Belcher is a materials chemist with expertise in the fields of biomaterials, biomolecular materials, organic-inorganic interfaces and solid state chemistry. The focus of Dr. Belchers research is understanding and using the process by which nature makes materials in order to design novel hybrid organic-inorganic electronic and magnetic materials on new length scales. Her research is very interdisciplinary in nature and brings together the fields of inorganic chemistry, materials chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology and electrical engineering. Among her awards are the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (2000), and the Du Pont Young Investigators Award (1999). Her research was mentioned in a July 2001 *Forbes* magazine cover story on nanotechnology.

Professor of biomedical engineering, University Professor, and co-director of the Center for BioDynamics, Professor Collins is part of the team of scientists who created the world's first genetic toggle switch. This mechanism is designed to control gene activity and has potential applications for treating a variety of diseases. For his extraordinary agility of mind and for his exceptional teaching ability, Professor Collins received the Metcalf Cup and Prize, Boston University's most prestigious teaching award. Professor Collins has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. Designation as HHMI investigators gives this elite group creative license to pursue novel, high risk avenues of research, with a total of more than $600 million awarded during their first 5-year term. Once established, investigators typically receive about $1 million per year.

Holmes Rolston is University Distinguished Professor of philosophy at Colorado State University. He has written six books, acclaimed in critical notice in both professional journals and the national press. The more recent are: *Genes, Genesis and God* (1999), *Science and Religion: A Critical Survey*, *Philosophy Gone Wild*, *Environmental Ethics*, and *Conserving Natural Value*. He has edited *Biology, Ethics, and the Origins of Life*. He has also written chapters in eighty other books and over one hundred articles. Scholars have cited and discussed in print Rolston's work over two thousand times. His articles have been reprinted and anthologized one hundred times. His books have been used as texts in a hundred and fifty colleges and universities. His work is published in Australian, Canadian, British, German, Scandinavian, Slovenian, South African, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian presses and journals, translated, reviewed, or cited in journals and books in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Finnish, Danish, Czechoslovakian, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovenian, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Environmental Ethics, Philosophy Gone Wild, and Genes, Genesis and God are in Chinese translation. Rolston was awarded the Templeton Prize in Religion in 2003, awarded by H.R.H. Prince Philip in Buckingham Palace. He was awarded the Mendel Medal by Villanova University in 2005. Rolston has spoken as distinguished lecturer on all seven continents. He gave the opening conference address to the Royal Institute of Philosophy annual conference, Cardiff, Wales, 1993. He was Distinguished Lecturer in Beijing, China, at the invitation of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Philosophy. He participated by invitation in pre-conferences and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, 1992, where he was an official observer. He spoke at the World Congress of Philosophy, Moscow, 1993, and again in Boston, 1998. He was distinguished Visiting Professor of Bioethics, Yale University, 2005-2006. Rolston's work has received critical notice in *The Christian Science Monitor*, *The Los Angeles Times*, and other national papers. He has published in *The Denver Post*, The *Philadelphia Inquirer*, and *New York Newsday. *

George F. R. Ellis, FRS, (born August 11, 1939) is the Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Complex Systems in the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He co-authored *The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time* with University of Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking, published in 1973, and is considered one of the world's leading theorists in cosmology. He is an active Quaker and in 2004 he won the Templeton Prize. From 1989 to 1992 he served as President of the International Society on General Relativity and Gravitation. Currently he is President of the International Society for Science and Religion. Ellis was a vocal opponent of apartheid during the National Party reign in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is during this period that Ellis' research has focused on the more philosophical aspects of cosmology, for which he won the Templeton Prize. He was also awarded the Order of the Star of South Africa by Nelson Mandela, in 1999. On May 18, 2007, he was elected a Fellow of the British Royal Society. In 2005 Ellis appeared as a guest speaker at the Nobel Conference in St. Peter, Minnesota.

Anita Diamant is an award-winning journalist and author of five books about contemporary Jewish life including *The New Jewish Wedding* and *Choosing a Jewish Life: Guidebook for People Converting to Judaism and for their Family and Friends.* She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her husband and daughter.

Phil Sharp became President of Resources for the Future on September 1, 2005. His career in public service includes ten terms as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Indiana, and a lengthy tenure on the faculty of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. He will be serving, effective immediately, on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on America's Climate Choices. Born in Baltimore in 1942, Sharp was raised in Elwood, Indiana. After a year at DePauw University, he transferred to Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, where he graduated cum laude in 1964. He spent the summer of 1966 at Oxford University and received his Ph.D. in government from Georgetown in 1974.