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A giant of the hard bop era, saxophonist and composer Benny Golson originally hails from Philadelphia, Penn. He began studying piano at the age of 9, but was soon seduced by the tenor saxophone sounds he heard on jazz records. Golson's career blossomed after graduating from Howard University, when he joined up with "Bull Moose" Jackson's blues band. There, he met pianist and composer Tadd Dameron, who encouraged Golson's budding talent at writing music. Golson spent a brief period with Dameron's band before joining Dizzy Gillespie's globetrotting big band, where his tenor playing and compositional abilities gained even more recognition. Artists like James Moody, Miles Davis and Dizzy himself recorded Golson's "Blue Walk," "Stablemates" and "Whisper Not" respectively. His tunes became an integral part of the group's repertoire some would become enduring jazz standards, such as "I Remember Clifford," "Along Came Betty," and "Killer Joe." At the end of the 1950s, Golson set out with trumpeter Art Farmer and formed the Jazztet, a hard bop quintet. After several years of touring, Golson took time away from the bandstand to concentrate on composing. He moved to Hollywood and began focusing on composing and arranging for commercials, television programs and films. Golson made a serious return to the stage and the studio in the late '70s, freelancing extensively with the likes of Woody Shaw and Pharoah Sanders. In 1982, he rejoined Art Farmer with a new version of the Jazztet. Golson has also devoted much of his time to jazz education though teaching, clinics and even writing textbooks for a new generation of musicians. He continues to record and tour regularly.

Professor Joseph J. Ellis is one of the nation's leading scholars of American history. The author of eleven books, Ellis was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for _Founding Brothers: the Revolutionary Generation_ and won the National Book Award for _American Sphinx, a biography of Thomas Jefferson_. His essays and book reviews appear regularly in national publications, such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. His commentaries have been featured on CBS, CSPAN, CNN, and the PBS’s The News Hour with Jim Lehrer and he has appeared in several PBS documentaries on early America. Professor Ellis has taught in the Leadership Studies program at Williams College, Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts, Mount Holyoke College, and United States Military Academy at West Point.

Host of NPR and WBUR’s On Point, award-winning journalist Tom Ashbrook first came to NPR and WBUR-Boston for special coverage of the 9/11 attack,. Tom’s career in journalism spans twenty years as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, and author. He spent ten years in Asia — based in India, Hong Kong, and Japan — starting at the South China Morning Post, then as a correspondent for The Boston Globe. He began his reporting career covering the refugee exodus from Vietnam and the post-Mao opening of China, and has covered turmoil and shifting cultural and economic trends in the United States and around the world, from Somalia and Rwanda to Russia and the Balkans. At the Globe, where he served as deputy managing editor until 1996, he directed coverage of the first Gulf War and the end of the Cold War. Tom received the Livingston Prize for National Reporting, and was a 1996 fellow at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation before taking a four-year plunge into Internet entrepreneurship, chronicled in his book The Leap: A Memoir of Love and Madness in the Internet Gold Rush.

Oliver Sacks was born in 1933 in London, England into a family of physicians and scientists. He earned his medical degree at Oxford University, and did residencies and fellowship work at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco and at UCLA. Since 1965, he has lived in New York, where he is a practicing neurologist. In July of 2007, he was appointed Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center, and he was also designated the university's first Columbia University Artist. In 1966 Dr. Sacks began working as a consulting neurologist for Beth Abraham Hospital in the Bronx, a chronic care hospital where he encountered an extraordinary group of patients, many of whom had spent decades in strange, frozen states, like human statues, unable to initiate movement. He recognized these patients as survivors of the great pandemic of sleepy sickness that had swept the world from 1916 to 1927, and treated them with a then-experimental drug, L-dopa, which enabled them to come back to life. Sacks is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, *The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat* and *An Anthropologist on Mars*, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette's syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer's disease.

Jose Antonio Abreu is a Venezuelan pianist, economist, educator, activist, and politician. Born in the western city of Valera,Venezuela in 1939, Abreu was trained as an economist. He holds a PhD in petroleum economics from the Universidad Catolica Andres Bello and did some graduate work at the University of Michigan. He served as a deputy at the Chamber of Deputies in the old Congress of Venezuela. After his political career, he also worked as a professor of economics and law at Universidad Simon Bolivar and his Alma Mater. He would return to politics briefly in 1983 to serve as Minister of Culture. In 1993, El Sistema was awarded the famous IMC-UNESCO International Music Prize in the institution class. UNESCO also appointed Abreu as a Special Ambassador for the Development of a Global Network of Youth and Children Orchestras and Choirs in 1995 and as a special representative for the development of network of orchestras within the framework of UNESCO's "World Movement of Youth and Children Orchestras and Choirs". This project was created in the context of an inter-disciplinary project "Towards a Culture of Peace". He co-ordinates the program through the UNESCO office in Caracas. He was also designated a Goodwill Ambassador by UNESCO in 1998. In 2001, Abreu was honored with a Right Livelihood Award and the World Culture Open Creative Arts Award in 2004. Among his numerous awards are the 1st Class Order of the Rising Sun Grand Cordon (Japan, 2008), the Glenn Gould Prize (Canada, 2008), the Puccini International Prize (Italy, 2008), the Q Prize with former student and protege Gustavo Dudamel (USA, 2008) and honorary memberships at the Royal Philharmonic Society (2008, United Kingdom) and the Beethoven-Haus Society (Germany, 2008). In 2009, he received the Crystal Award of the World Economic Forum and the TED Prize. On May 12, 2009, Jose Antonio Abreu was awarded the Polar Music Prize, given by the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.

Mario Armstrong translates technology for non-tech audiences, through his radio shows, TV appearances, public speaking, print and online. He is the on-air tech expert and contributor for NPR's "Morning Edition" program reaching 17 million households & NPR's "News & Notes" show. He hosts his own technology talk shows on XM radio, USTalknetwork.com, WYPR & WEAA. On TV he appears on NBC-Baltimore, AOL.com and he delivers a business tech segment for SBTV.com. He's also appeared on CNN, CNBC, TV-One, PBS and C-Span. Mario covers the stories, issues, devices and news makers of the day through the lens of technology! He explores how technology impacts our lives, education, institutions, entertainment, politics, society and business. In addition to his media presence, Mario created and oversees two educational youth tech programs that are designed to inspire middle and high-school students to pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering & math) academics and careers.

Dr. Ian Bogost is a videogame designer, critic, and researcher. He is Assistant Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Founding Partner at Persuasive Games LLC. His research and writing considers videogames as an expressive medium, and his creative practice focuses on games about social and political issues. Bogost is author of *Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism* (MIT Press 2006), recently listed among "50 books for everyone in the game industry," and of *Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames* (MIT Press 2007), along with several other books and many other writings. He is a popular speaker and widely considered an influential thinker and doer in the videogame industry and research community. He is currently completing a game about the politics of nutrition, commissioned by PBS and the iTVS, and designing editorial "newsgames" in a groundbreaking game publishing relationship with *the New York Times*. Bogost holds a Bachelors degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and a Masters and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA. He lives in Atlanta with his wife and two children.