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  • Dolores Huerta is president of the Dolores Huerta Foundation, which is dedicated to community organizing. She co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez and is also an active member of the Fund for the Feminist Majority. As legislative advocate for the Community Service Organization and the United Farm Workers Union, she was instrumental in passing historic legislation which included securing disability insurance for farm workers, printing voting ballots in Spanish, issuing drivers licenses in the driver's ethnic language, insuring public assistance eligibility for resident immigrants, and legalization for 1 million farm workers under the Immigration Reform Act of l984-85. Huerta has received numerous awards, among them the Eleanor Roosevelt Humans Rights Award from President Clinton in 1998, the Puffin/Nation Award for Creative Citizenship, the Ohtli award from the Mexican government, the Smithsonian Institution James Smithson Award, and nine honorary doctorates from universities throughout the United States. She was also named one of Ms. Magazine's three most important women of 1997 and Ladies Home Journal's 100 most important women of the 20th Century.
  • Rafer Johnson (born 1935) won the Olympic decathlon in 1960 with a record-breaking score of 8,392 points. The decathlon winner, according to tradition, is regarded as the best all-around athlete in the world. As captain of the American Olympic Team, he bore the U.S. flag proudly in the opening ceremonies of the games that year and was the first African American to assume that special honor. He spent many years before and after his Olympic triumph spreading the message of peace as an international ambassador of goodwill, and in 1984 he received the distinctive honor of lighting the Olympic flame at the games in Los Angeles, California.
  • Gerard Doherty, MD, joined the General Surgery Section in April 2002, as the first Norman Thompson Professor of Surgery. Dr. Doherty is Chief of the Endocrine Surgery Division and Section Head for General Surgery. Dr. Doherty graduated from the College of Holy Cross and received his MD degree from Yale University School of Medicine. His General Surgery residency was at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. Dr. Doherty went on to the National Cancer Institute as a medical staff fellow and two years later joined the faculty in the Department of Surgery at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri. Dr. Doherty's clinical interests focus on endocrine surgery. His special interests include thyroid, parathyroid, and adrenal glands, tumors of the endocrine pancreas, and multiple endocrine neoplasia syndromes. He is actively involved in laboratory research and focuses on immune regulation of oncogenesis. Dr. Doherty is the author of over 150 articles and book chapters and 7 textbooks. He holds board certification in Surgery and is a member of numerous professional societies. He is an active investigator in the American College of Surgeons Oncology Group, and serves on its Executive and Executive Steering Committees. He is also Secretary-Treasurer of the International Association of Endocrine Surgeons, and is on the Council of the American Association of Endocrine Surgeons.
  • **Neil Swidey** is author of \_Trapped Under the Sea: One Engineering Marvel, Five Men, and a Disaster Ten Miles Into the Darkness.\_ He also wrote \_The Assist\_ and was a coauthor of \_Last Lion: The Fall and Rise of Ted Kennedy\_. A staff writer for The Boston Globe Magazine, Neil lives outside Boston with his wife and three daughters.
  • Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the excavation of issues that have contemporary policy implications. His 1986 book, *Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts*, was awarded three scholarly prizes. More recently, his book, *The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States* (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society. It was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and *the Los Angeles Times* Book Award. Keyssar is coauthor of *Inventing America*, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history, as well as coeditor of a series on *Comparative and International Working-Class History*. In 2004/5, Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections. Keyssar's current research interests include election reform, the history of democracies, and the history of poverty.
  • Nora Pierce is a lecturer in creative writing at Stanford University, where she was formerly a Wallace Stegner fellow. She was recently named a PEN Emerging Voices fellow.
  • **Cecile Richards** is a national leader for women’s rights and social and economic justice. As former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America and Planned Parenthood Action Fund for more than a decade, Richards has worked to increase affordable access to reproductive health care and strengthen the movement for sexual and reproductive rights. She and her husband Kirk Adams have three children and live in New York City and Maine. She spends most of her free time baking pies.
  • Internationally renowned author, speaker and story consultant Fernanda Rossi has doctored over 300 documentaries, fiction scripts and fundraising trailers, among them the 2009 Academy Award Nominated *The Garden* by Scott Hamilton Kennedy. Others include the 2007 Academy Award Nominated *Recycled Life* by Leslie Iwerks and the theatrically-released *Billy the Kid* by Jennifer Venditti. Along with her private consultations, she gives lectures and seminars worldwide on story structure and fundraising demos, such as her signature workshops Doctoring your Doc and Trailer Mechanics. Ms. Rossi shares her knowledge and research of storytelling and the creative process in articles in trade publications, such as the monthly columns Ask the Doc Doctor published by *SF360*; Story Strategies, at *The Independent* and the case studies Documentary Clinic published by *DER*, the Documentary Educational Resources. She is also the author of the book *Trailer Mechanics: A Guide to Making Your Documentary Fundraising Trailer*. In addition to having being an editor for 8 years, her own projects as a producer/director include the documentary *Inventing a Girl: An Experience in Homeschooling*, premiered at the Contemporary Issues Film Festival and winner of the Women's Vision Award. Her film script* Picture Me!* was invited to the 2005 Latin American Sundance Screenwriters Laboratory.
  • A documentary filmmaker specializing in science, medicine and technology. He has produce long-format documentaries for PBS, Discovery Channel and A&E, as well as corporate for a few select clients.