Forum Network

Attorney Howard Friedman has been representing plaintiffs in civil rights litigation for over thirty years. He began practicing law as a staff attorney at the Prisoners' Rights Project in Boston in 1977. He has been representing victims of police misconduct for many years. Howard is committed to enforcing the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution by bringing cases on behalf of people who were injured as a result of illegal conduct by police officers. He has managed complex class actions on behalf of thousands of class members. Howard is active in community groups concerned with civil rights. Howard is the president of the National Police Accountability Project. Howard is admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of the United States, the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts, and the Supreme Court of Illinois. He received his JD from Northeastern University Law School in 1977 and a BA from Goddard College in 1974.

Jefferey Hoffman is an American former NASA astronaut and currently a professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Hoffman made five flights as a space shuttle astronaut, including the first mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, when the orbiting telescope's flawed optical system was corrected. Trained as an astrophysicist, he also flew on 1990 Spacelab shuttle mission that featured the ASTRO-1 ultraviolet astronomical observatory in the shuttle's payload bay. Over the course of his five missions he logged more than 1,211 hours and 21.5 million miles in space.

Kerry Emanuel is the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he joined the faculty in 1981 after spending three years on the faculty of UCLA. Kerry’s research interests focus on tropical meteorology and climate, with a specialty in hurricane physics. His interests also include cumulus convection and advanced methods of sampling the atmosphere in aid of numerical weather prediction. He is the author or co-author of more than 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers and two books, Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes (Oxford University Press), aimed at a general audience, and What We Know about Climate Change (MIT Press). He is a co-director of MIT’s Lorenz Center, a climate think tank devoted to basic, curiosity-driven climate research.

Bruce Knecht is a senior reporter for the *Wall Street Journal* and the author of *The Proving Ground: The Inside Story of the 1998 Sydney to Hobart Race* (Allen & Unwin, 2001). His articles have appeared in the *Atlantic Monthly*, *The New York Times Magazine*, *Barron's*, and *Conde Nast Traveler*. A graduate of Colgate University and Harvard Business School, he has also been a Reuters Fellow at Oxford University.

Professor James Manwell has been working in field of wind energy for over 25 years, where his research interests have focused on wind resource assessment, hybrid power system design, and offshore wind energy. He is currently on the faculty of the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and is the Director of the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory (RERL) at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Beginning in the 1980s and continuing up to the present, Manwell has been active in the design and modeling of hybrid power systems, including the development of the Hybrid2 computer code. Hybrid systems include multiple types of generators, electrical loads, storage units, and control systems. Under his direction, the Renewable Energy Research Laboratory installed in 1994 the first utility scale (250 kW) wind turbine in Massachusetts. This turbine forms an integral part of the research and education program at the University. More recently, he has assisted the Town of Hull in acquiring a 660 kW wind turbine in 2001 (the largest in New England at that time), followed by a 1.8 MW wind turbine in 2006 (again, the largest in New England). Manwell is also an author of a textbook on wind energy; *Wind Energy Explained: Theory, Design and Application*. Professor Manwell provides assistance to the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (MTC) and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' Division of Energy Resources (DOER) to facilitate the introduction of renewable energy to the state. Currently he is the U.S. representative to the International Electrotechnical Commission's program (IEC TC88 WG3) to develop design standards for offshore wind turbines. He is also a member of the International Science Panel on Renewable Energy.