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  • Captain Kerr, born in Scotland, began his career with dolphins in 1983 as a volunteer research assistant at the Dolphin Research Center in Florida, and in 1984 he earned his Captains License. In 1987, Iain served as a research assistant to Dr. Roger Payne at the New York Zoological Society's whale camp in Peninsula Valdes, Argentina, assisting with the development of new benign methods for the study of the endangered southern Right whale. In 1988/89, under the auspices of the Ocean Alliance and the Interpolar Research Society, he captained the 85ft. research vessel Siben. In 1993, Iain lead the Odyssey Expedition to the Galapagos Islands. He was responsible for creating the research team, the visiting scientist program and for the development of new technologies for studying whales. Iain, now Vice President and CEO of Ocean Alliance, is directing much of his energies on a five year program designed to gather the first ever baseline data on synthetic contaminants throughout the world's oceans. This program, the Voyage of the Odyssey will use whales and Albatrosses as indicator species for measuring the health of the seas. Iain will work with Dr. Payne and leading scientists from around the world, using the R.V. Odyssey as the main platform for data collection. Iain received an honors degree in education from the University of London and his green card in 1997. He is an accomplished speaker and photographer. Iain has led expeditions to all parts of the globe, including Australia, the Amazon Basin, Argentina, Alaska, the Caribbean, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Hawaii and Mexico.
  • John Dean was legal counsel to US President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, and his testimony before Senate investigators convinced many Americans that Nixon was closely involved in the criminal activities that eventually led to his resignation from the presidency. Dean started his legal career in Washington in the late 1960s, as the chief minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee. He then served as an associate deputy in the Attorney General's office before being appointed as White House counsel. In his testimony before the Senate committee, Dean claimed Nixon knew about the 1972 break-in at the national headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and had helped to cover it up. Dean's supporters saw him as courageous and truthful; his detractors saw him as self-serving and disloyal. The law saw him as guilty of obstruction of justice, and Dean was sentenced to four months in prison for his role in the scandal (he spent the four months under a "witness protection" program). Dean went on to write books about his experiences in the Nixon White House, including *Blind Ambition (1976)*, which became a made-for-TV movie. Since then he has worked as an investment banker in California and written columns, essays and books on subjects as varied as President Warren G. Harding and Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist. In 2004 he emerged as an outspoken critic of the administration of George W. Bush and published the book *Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush. *
  • Dennis Lehane has written seven novels, *A Drink Before the War*, *Darkness*, *Take My Hand*, *Sacred*, *Gone Baby Gone*, *Prayers for Rain*, *Mystic River* and *Shutter Island*. *Mystic River* was a finalist for the PEN/Winship Award and won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel as well as the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction given by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.
  • Gail Mazur's book, *Zeppo's First Wife: New & Selected Poems*, is winner of the 2006 Massachusetts Book Award, a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and for the 2006 Paterson Poetry Prize. She is author of four earlier books of poetry, *Nightfire*, *The Pose of Happiness*, *The Common*, and *They Can't Take That Away from Me*, which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. She is Writer in Residence at Emerson College and Founding Director of the Blacksmith House Poetry Series, which she ran for 29 years. She is working on a new poetry collection, *Figures in a Landscape*. Photo credit to Michelle DeBakey.
  • Cokie Roberts (1943-2019) was a senior news analyst for *NPR News*, where she served as the congressional correspondent for more than 10 years. In addition to her work for NPR, Roberts was a political commentator for ABC News, providing analysis for all network news programming. From 1996-2002 she and Sam Donaldson co-anchored the weekly ABC interview program *This Week*. In her more than forty years in broadcasting, she has won countless awards, including three Emmys. She has been inducted into the Broadcasting and Cable Hall of Fame, and was cited by the American Women in Radio and Television as one of the fifty greatest women in the history of broadcasting. In addition to her appearances on the airwaves, Roberts, along with her husband, Steven V. Roberts, wrote a weekly column syndicated in newspapers around the country by United Media. The Roberts were also contributing editors to *USA Weekend Magazine*, and together they wrote* From this Day Forward*, an account of their more than 40 year marriage and other marriages in American history. The book immediately went onto *The New York Times* bestseller list, following Cokie Roberts's number one bestseller, *We Are Our Mothers' Daughters*, an account of women's roles and relationships throughout American history. Roberts histories of women in America's founding era Founding Mothers, published in 2004 and Ladies of Liberty in 2008, also became instant bestsellers. Cokie Roberts earned more than twenty honorary degrees, served on the boards of several non-profit institutions and on the President's Commission on Service and Civic Participation. The Library of Congress named her a "Living Legend"in 2008. She is one of the very few Americans to have attained that honor.
  • Bob L. Metcalf (1916- 1998),exemplified excellence and ac- complishment in multiple separate disci- plines over his career. Trained at a time prior to the balkanization of the basic sci- entific disciplines of physics, chemistry, and biology, Bob was interdisciplinary before the word became en vogue. Bob was a biologist at heart, but one who appreciated and fore- saw that a sound background and practice in chemistry would inform the discipline. Thus, Bob can be honored for two great contributions to biology. First, he made in- novative advances in basic insecticide toxi- cology and, perhaps more than anyone, deserves credit for helping to create the field of environmental toxicology. Second, Bob was the consummate chemical ecologist, again making fundamental research contributions before the field had evolved as a recogniz- able name. In addition to his many firsts in research contributions, Bob served science very well. He held the positions of departmental head (UC, Riverside; UI) and vice chancellor (UC, Riverside), served as President of the ESA (1958), served the National Academy of Sciences as an elected member (1967), was a member of the EPA FIFRA Scientific Advisory Panel, was a member of the first scien- tific delegation to visit China, and collaborated extensively with the World Health Organization. Bob was also a teacher, having mentored over 80 graduate students and editing one of the first academically oriented texts for pest management (Introduction to Insect Pest Management). Bob also served as editor during the 1970s for the groundbreaking Wiley series, Advances in Environ- mental Science and Technology, perhaps the first regularly pub- lished collection of books that covered all aspects of environmental science.
  • Peter Schrag, retired editorial page editor and columnist for the Sacramento Bee, has been writing for *The Nation* for nearly a half-century. His new book, *Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism, Eugenics and Immigration*, will be published next spring.
  • Elmar Weitekamp is a restorative justice pioneer in Germany. He is studying the relationship between the restorative justice movement and the human rights movement which led to truth and reconciliation commissions. He currently serves as Professor of Criminology, Victimology and Restorative Justice in the Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at Katholieke University in Leuven, Belgium. Weitekamp began his career as a Social Worker in the Department of Juvenile Welfare for the City of Mchengladbach, Germany. After earning an M.S.W. in Social Work in 1980 at Fachhochschule Niederrhein, Mnchengladbach, Germany, and an M.A. in Criminology (1982) at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, he entered the field of criminological research at the University of Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. Weitekamp then taught in various positions at the University of Pennsylvania, The Wharton School, and earned a Ph.D. in Criminology for the Graduate Group of Managerial Sciences and Applied Economics, The Wharton School (1989).