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Reginald H. Pitts is a professional historical researcher and genealogist. Pitts performs primary source historical and genealogical research services for a host of international, national and local individual clients and institutions. He is co-editor of the Penguin 2005 edition of Our Nig by Harriet Wilson.

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently the chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and has held this position since 2006. She also served as Acting-Director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute in the Spring 2008. Professor Higginbotham earned a Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in American History, an M.A. from Howard University, and her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Before coming to Harvard, she taught on the full-time faculties of Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and New York University. Higginbotham is the author of *Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church: 1880-1920* (1993), which won numerous book prizes, most notably from the American Historical Association, the American Academy of Religion, the Association of Black Women Historians, and the Association for Research on Non-Profit and Voluntary Organizations. *Righteous Discontent* was also included among the New York Times Book Review's Notable Books of the Year in 1993 and 1994. Her writings span diverse fields--African American religious history, women's history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history. One of her most cited and reprinted articles is "African American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race," winner of the best article prize of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians in 1993.

Secretary Ian Bowles oversees the Commonwealths six environmental, natural resource and energy regulatory agencies. Massachusetts is the first state in the nation to combine energy and environmental agencies under one Cabinet secretary. He also serves as Chairman of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority and Chairman of the Energy Facilities Siting Board. He brings nearly 20 years of experience in the energy and environmental sectors. He was a Director or Advisor to three early stage clean energy technology companies and has broad leadership experience in environmental policy. Bowles served in the Clinton Administration as Associate Director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality and as Senior Director of the Global Environmental Affairs directorate at the National Security Council. Following his service in the Clinton Administration, Bowles held appointments as a Senior Research Fellow at Harvards Kennedy School of Government and as Senior Advisor at the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, a multi billion dollar charitable foundation established by Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore. Bowles also served as President & CEO of MassINC, a Boston-based research institute, and as Publisher of *CommonWealth* magazine. He holds an A.B. in economics cum laude from Harvard College and a Masters degree from Oxford University, where he remains an adjunct member of the teaching faculty at the graduate school of the Environment and Geography. He has an honorary Doctorate from Emerson College. He lives in Charlestown with his wife Hannah and daughter Margaret.

Andrew Porter serves as Of Counsel of Todd an Weld LLP, a Boston based firm of trial lawyers. He has over 20 years of experience practicing law in the areas of family and probate law, business representation, business litigation, and collection law. Porter has litigated cases in the Massachusetts State and Federal Courts and has also appeared on numerous occasions before the Massachusetts Appellate courts. Porter currently serves as counsel to the Boards of Directors for several companies and corporations and represents many business entities on matters of law.

Dana Ansel is the research director at MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank in Boston. At MassINC, she oversees all of the research products, including reports on the Massachusetts economy, the changing demographics of the state, home ownership, workforce development, and higher education. Dana developed her interest in public policy as an undergraduate at Wellesley College. She continued her studies at Princeton University where she earned a doctorate in political science in 1997. Her research interests include labor market economics, inequality, and domestic public policy. Her dissertation, entitled "Poor Chances: The Working Poor Speak About Poverty and Opportunity," is based on in-depth interviews with working-poor adults in Boston. Prior to joining MassINC, she did consulting work for the Commonwealth Corporation. She is involved with the United Way of Massachusetts Bay, the Womens Union, and other nonprofit organizations in the area.

David Charbonneau joined the faculty in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University in August 2004. His research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the detection and characterization of planets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars. Dr. Charbonneau is a founding member of the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, which uses a network of small, automated telescopes to survey tens of thousands of stars for periodic eclipses that indicate the passage of orbiting planets. In 2005, he led the team that made the first direct detection of light emitted by a planet outside the Solar system. In 2004, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific awarded him the Robert J. Trumpler Award for his graduate thesis entitled Shadows and Reflections of Extrasolar Planets. He was recently named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and awarded a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

Marty Meehan is the second chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Lowell and the fourteenth leader of the institution and its predecessor schools, founded in the 1890s. A UMass Lowell alumnus, Meehan graduated cum laude in 1978, having studied education and political science. He received a master's degree in public administration from Suffolk University in 1981 and a juris doctor from Suffolk University Law School in 1986. He holds honorary degrees from Suffolk and Green Mountain College in Vermont. Meehan served as an adjunct faculty member in political science at UMass Lowell in the late 1980s. A resident of Lowell, Meehan represented the fifth congressional district of Massachusetts in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1993 to 2007. He served on the House Armed Services and Judiciary committees. Widely respected as a reformer, he established a national reputation for his legislative leadership in reforming campaign finance laws and protecting people against the health risks in tobacco use. Among his priorities were maintaining a balanced federal budget, preserving Medicare and Social Security, supporting and strengthening the military, and supporting economic growth that is worker- and environment-friendly. Meehan served as Massachusetts deputy secretary of state for securities and corporations from 1986 to 1990. The Boston Globe reported, "During Meehan's four years as deputy secretary, the Securities Division [went] from being a frequent embarrassment to gaining a national reputation as hard-hitting and activist." In the early 1990s, Meehan was the first assistant district attorney of Middlesex County, supervising more than 150 people, including 80 prosecutors, in an office admired for aggressive prosecution of child abuse, domestic violence and other violent crimes.

David Liroff is the senior vice president of System Development and Media Strategy. David B. Liroff joined CPB in April, 2007, after having served as vice president and chief technology officer at the WGBH Educational Foundation in Boston, Massachusetts. Liroff joined WGBH in 1979, and during his tenure with the station had senior management responsibility for broadcasting, local program production, creative services, membership, major gifts and capital campaign fundraising, and for national "how-to" program production. Most recently at WGBH, Liroff had been responsible for production services, engineering, information technology, telecommunications, and audience research, and he had senior management responsibility for overseeing WGBH's transition to digital production and broadcasting. While at WGBH, Liroff had served on the boards of the Association of Public Television Stations (APTS), American Public Television (APT), Public Interactive (PI), and the Northeast Document Conservation Center. He also served on the Public Broadcasting Service Technology and Distribution Committee and was a member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Prior to joining WGBH in 1979, Liroff was director of broadcasting at PBS member station KETC-TV9/St Louis, where he was responsible for programming, production, and audience research. From 1971-1977, he was PTV program director at WOUB-TV20 at the Ohio University Telecommunications Center in Athens, Ohio and was an assistant professor in the College of Communication, School of Radio/Television at Ohio University. Liroff holds a PhD in radio, TV and film from Northwestern University, a master's in speech and theater from Brooklyn College/City University of New York, and a bachelor's in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.