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Ms. Lopez is a playwright and actress. Her *Sonia Flew* won the Elliot Norton Award for Best New Play and the *IRNE (Independent Reviewers of New England)* for Best Play and Best Production. It has been produced at the Huntington Theatre, Coconut Grove Playhouse, the Contemporary American Theatre Festival, Laguna Playhouse, the Summer Playwrights Festival in New York, the Milagro Theatre and the Steppenwolf Theatre. It was also broadcast on NPR's "The Play's The Thing!" Her other award-winning plays include *God Smells Like a Roast Pig* (Women on Top Festival, Elliot Norton Award--Outstanding Solo Performance,) *Midnight Sandwich/Medianoche *(Coconut Grove Playhouse),* The Order of Things *(CentaStage, Kennedy Center Fund for New Plays), and * How Do You Spell Hope?* (Underground Railway Theatre). Lopez was the first recipient of the Charlotte Woolard Award, given by the Kennedy Center to a promising new voice in American Theatre. Lopez is also an actress who has appeared in regional theatres across the country, and works in film and radio. She has served as a panel member for the National Endowment for the Arts and has enjoyed residencies with Sundance and The New York Theatre Workshop. She teaches theatre and performance at Wellesley College and playwriting at Boston University.

Amy Smith, who has a master's degree in mechanical engineering and teaches at MIT, isn't interested in building faster computers or bigger jetliners. She's thinking about how to cook dinner in a Haitian slum. Smith and her students have developed a way to turn this plentiful (and otherwise useless) material into clean-burning charcoal by carbonizing it in a covered oil drum. Smith, a practitioner of humanitarian engineering, wants to solve everyday problems for rural families in the developing world: where to find clean water, how to preserve vegetables for market, how to do laundry without electricity or plumbing. Smith's inventions include a hammer mill for grinding grain into floura task African women usually do by hand and a portable kit to test drinking water for contaminating bacteria. Smith, who was awarded a Macarthur Fellowship in 2004, runs MIT's IDEAS Competition, for which teams of student engineers design projects to make life easier in the developing world.

Dr. Paula A. Johnson is a cardiologist, the Executive Director of the Connors Center for Women's Health and Gender Biology and Chief of the Division of Women's Health at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. At Brigham and Women's Hospital, Dr. Johnson has built the leading program in women's health in the United States. Dr. Johnson is a clinical epidemiologist and is recognized as an international expert in the area of defining and understanding the quality of cardiology care for women and minorities. She founded the Center for Cardiovascular Disease in Women at Brigham and Women's Hospital that is dedicated to developing new sex- and gender-specific strategies for prevention, treatment and rehabilitation of coronary heart disease in women. Dr. Johnson is the recipient of many awards recognizing her contributions in women's and minority health and is featured as a national leader in medicine by the National Library of Medicine. The Mayor of the City of Boston appointed Dr. Johnson as a Commissioner and Chair of the Board of the Boston Public Health Commission in 2007.

Conor Walsh, winner of a competition to be the IDEAS from the Next Generation speaker at the conference, is a Ph.D candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT. His winning idea is a high-tech medical device called Robopsy, a robotic surgical aid for doctors performing biopsies that could make the procedure safer and more accurate. It has already received $80,000 in prize and development money and a provisional patent. Walsh's goal to develop practical engineering technologies that directly help humanity is realized in the lightweight, disposable plastic structure that holds and manipulates a biopsy needle.

Eric von Hippel is a professor and head of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He specializes in research related to the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. He also develops and teaches about practical methods that firms can use to improve their product and service development processes.

Barry Zuckerman is a medical professor and chair of pediatrics at Boston University School of Medicine and chief of pediatrics at Boston Medical Center. Also a co-founder of Reach Out and Read, a national program that has put more than 20 million free books in the hands of children through doctor's offices. He is currently serving as chairman of the Read Early, Read Aloud campaign sponsored by the Southern California First 5 Children and Families Commission. Dr. Zuckerman has been a national leader in expanding pediatric health care to more effectively address the needs of low income and minority children. In addition to Reach Out and Read, he started the Medical-legal Partnership for Children (MLPC) at Boston Medical Center, which uses legal advocacy to address the social causes of the health and developmental problems in low-income children. He also co-founded the Healthy Steps Program for Children, a strategic program designed to keep pediatricians informed of new findings in early childhood development. An author of more than 200 scientific publications, Dr. Zuckerman has also served as the editor for nine books. He has served on prestigious national committees, including the National Commission on Children and the Carnegie Commission on Meeting the Needs of Young Children. Dr. Zuckerman has been a consultant for UNICEF, providing technical assistance to Turkey and Bangladesh as they strengthen their child health services.

Wayne Franklin is a Davis Distinguished Professor of American Literature who was recently awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work on American writer James Fennimore Cooper. Franklin is Northeastern's second English faculty member in its history to garner such an award and was one of 185 grantees chosen from among 3,200 applicants to the Guggenheim Foundation in New York City. Franklin's Guggenheim fellowship will enable the continuation of his work and research on American writer James Fenimore Cooper, the American novelist credited with the invention of the frontier novel, the sea novel, and the American historical romance.

The first of her biographies, *Eliot's Early Years* (1977), began as a student thesis. The British Academy awarded it the Rose Mary Crawshay prize. A sequel, *Eliot's New Life*, was published at the time of the poet's centenary (1988). The two books were rewritten as one, *T.S.Eliot: An Imperfect Life* (1999), with new material collected over twenty years. A memoir of three women who died young, *Shared Lives* (1992), is about women's friendship going back to schooldays in the Cape Town of the fifties. The last book was *Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft* (2005). Lyndall is now approaching Emily Dickinson by way of the Dickinson feud. The feud exploded over adultery, but came to focus on the poet. Rival ca Lyndall is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and member of PEN. She is married to Professor of Cellular Pathology, Siamon Gordon; they live in Oxford and have two grown-up daughters.

Betty Burkes is a life-long educator and activist. Her work as an educator has included the Peace Corps in Africa, public schools in California and private schools in England. She founded and coordinated the Montessori Paradise pre-school on Cape Cod for 12 years offering young children an environment in which peace-making and social justice mingled with the affirmation of childhood. Betty co-founded and ran a Summer Arts and Music program from 1986-1999. Her activism and grassroots organizing has taken place internationally and nationally with the Womens International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) where she was president of the US Section of WILPF for 3 years and served on the National Board from 1989-2002, conducting workshops on educating and organizing for action around oppression issues. From 2002-2006, Betty worked with a joint project of the UN Department for Disarmament Affairs and The Hague Appeal for Peace. The HAP/DDA project involved supporting the local initiation of peace education projects in 4 communities internationally (in Cambodia, Albania, Peru and Niger) in which weapons reduction projects were launched. Those projects have been sustained beyond the end of the project due to the full integration and leadership within the local communities.