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  • Linda Mason, chairman and founder, co-founded Bright Horizons in 1986 and served as president until becoming chairman of Bright Horizons Family Solutions in July 1998. Linda Mason is also the author of *The Working Mother's Guide to Life: Strategies, Secrets, and Solutions*, published in November 2002. Mason co-founded Horizons for Homeless Children, a nonprofit organization that serves the needs of homeless mothers and their children throughout the Boston area. Prior to founding Bright Horizons, Linda Mason managed large-scale relief operations overseas. She served as co-director of Save the Children's emergency program in Sudan, serving 400,000 famine and war victims, and directed a large feeding program for children in Cambodian refugee camps along the Thai border. Mason is a 1998 honoree in Redbook's "Mothers and Shakers" awards for her work to improve the quality of child care, and she was the 1996 recipients of the Ernst & Young/USA Today "Entrepreneur of the Year" award. Linda also was honored by *Working Mother magazine* as one of the "25 Most Influential Mothers in America." Linda Mason serves on the boards of Yale University and Horizons for Homeless Children. She is a graduate of the Yale School of Management, Cornell University, and the Sorbonne University in Paris, France.
  • Rev. Dr. White-Hammond has been the co-pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Boston since 1997 and a pediatrician at the South End Community Health Center since 1981. She has a long history of involvement in community service. Rev. Dr. White-Hammond is the founder of and consultant to the church-based creative writing/mentoring ministry called "Do The Write Thing" for high-risk black adolescent females. In 2003, she became the co-convener of The Red Tent Group with Rabbi Elaine Zecher of Temple Israel, which brings together Christian women and Jewish women for small group Torah/Bible study. Rev. Dr. White-Hammond's work as a humanitarian has achieved global impact. She has worked as a medical missionary in several African countries including Botswana, Cote D'Ivoire and South Africa. Since 2001, she has made seven trips into war-torn southern Sudan where she has been involved in obtaining the freedom of 10,000 women and children who were enslaved during the two decades long civil war. In 2002 she co-founded My Sister's Keeper, a humanitarian women's group that partners with women of Sudan in their efforts toward reconciliation and reconstruction of their communities. My Sister's Keeper has developed two grinding mill projects and supports the Akon School for Girls in Gogrial County. In February 2005, Rev. Dr. White-Hammond traveled into Darfur, western Sudan to listen and learn from female victims of genocide in Internally Displaced Persons camps. She served as the National Chairperson of the Million Voices for Darfur campaign and is co-chair of the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur. She was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Boston University, a Doctorate of Medicine from Tufts Medical School and a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School.
  • Kenneth A. Sweder graduated from New York University School of Law as an Editor of *the Law Review* in 1968. After serving as the Assistant to the President of Brandeis University and Special Counsel of the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, he began practicing law in Boston in 1971. Since that time he has had wide experience and success in handling a variety of complex business litigation matters. Ken was the Chairman of the Litigation Department of the Boston office of a major New York firm before Sweder & Ross was established. When Sweder & Ross was founded, the Boston Business Journal did a Profile on Ken describing him as tackling the "City's high-profile cases" as a "business-savvy litigator." Ken was named a Massachusetts Super Lawyer in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Ken's many community activities include his service as the Founding Co-Chair of the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur. He was also the President of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Boston and in 2006 was the recipient of the prestigious Community of Excellence Award presented at a dinner of the Combined Jewish Philanthropies attended by over 650 lawyers and accountants.
  • Dr. Spellberg is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and is based in the Division of Infectious Diseases at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. His promotion to Associate Professor will become effective July of 2009. He received his BA in Molecular Cell Biology- Immunology in 1994 from UC Berkeley. He then attended medical school at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, where he received numerous academic honors, including serving as the UCLA AOA Chapter Co-President, and winning the prestigious Stafford Warren award for the topic academic performance in his graduating class. Dr. Spellberg completed his Residency in Internal Medicine and subspecialty fellowship in Infectious Diseases at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he received the Department of Medicine Subspecialty Fellow of the Year award. He co-founded NovaDigm Therapeutics, Inc., a biotechnology company, to translate the vaccine from the bench to the bedside. Dr. Spellberg is also developing genetically engineered white blood cells that recapitulate neutrophil functions and can be used to overcome the technical barriers to neutrophil transfusion therapy for neutropenic infections. Finally, Dr. Spellberg established the first auditable, peer-reviewed dataset that confirms the decline in new antibiotic development over the last two decades, underscoring the need for development of new immune-based therapies for infections.
  • Ernest Darkoh is the chairman and founding partner of BroadReach and former operations manager of Botswana's Treatment Program for HIV/AIDS. Ernest Darkoh has been at the forefront of what has been called the most important public health experiment on the African continent today, leading the charge to fight AIDS in the African nation of Botswana and building a nationwide health system from the ground up in the process. Born in the USA, Darkoh grew up in Kenya and Tanzania. There, pervasive poverty and the absence of effective government services made a deep impression on him. Encouraged by his parents, he returned to America as a young adult, first to triple-major in chemistry, biochemistry and molecular biology, then to attend Harvard Medical School. He added a master's degree in public health followed by an MBA, after which he took a job at McKinsey & Co., one of America's leading management consulting firms. Darkoh signed on to set up Masa, Africa's first national antiretroviral (ARV) Program. Through BroadReach, Darkoh is already deeply involved in expanding public access to antiretroviral drugs in South Africa, the nation with the world's highest number of HIV-positive citizens. Darkoh is working to tap excess capacity in this private system to treat public patients too. That means devising a medically sound yet affordable way to manage the treatment of individuals far beyond the direct reach of these specialists. Working with private treatment partners like South African-based Aid for AIDS, and Netcare, and with financing from the USA's PEPFAR fund and the UN's Global Fund for AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Darkoh's team has set up a network of private physicians who are willing to take on public patients. They have also trained groups of non-expert activists who can go into remote communities to identify uninsured people who appear to be HIV-positive and need treatment. Once these individuals are identified, BroadReach then sends in frontline health-care workers to supply the missing link.
  • Larry Klein was a teaching assistant in American history at the University of Maryland and the theater supervisor of The American Film Institute at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts before beginning his career as a documentary filmmaker. Over the past two decades, Klein has produced scores of programs for commercial and cable television broadcast as well as several award-winning PBS specials including: *Lewis Mumford: Toward Human Architecture* and the critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning series *Building Big with David Macaulay*. Klein has written and produced a variety of nationally-broadcast programs for WGBH TV in Boston including *Bridges in the Building Big* series and the NOVA presentations: *Mind of a Serial Killer*, *What's Killing the Children* and the Emmy Award-winning, *Why the Towers Fell*. He has produced individual programs for two WGBH mini-series: *A Natural History of the Senses* and *A Science Odyssey*, and he has also produced and directed a series of successful PBS family specials based on highly popular books by award-winning author-illustrator, David Macaulay. One of those specials, *Roman City*, also won a national, Prime-Time Emmy Award in 1994.