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Mahesh Sharma is the director of The Center for Teaching/Learning Mathematics of Framingham and Wellesley, MA, which is affiliated with Berkshire Mathematics in the UK. Professor Sharma is known nationally and internationally for his groundbreaking work in mathematics education. He is an author and editor of an international mathematics journal, *Focus on Learning Problems in Mathematics*, a consultant to public and private schools, a public lecturer, and a teacher-trainer. He also writes *Math Notebook*, a practical source of information for parents and teachers. His special field of interest is mathematics learning problems. He evaluates children and adults for their learning disabilities and also finds time to tutor students. This one-to-one work with students provides him with insight into their learning problems and he has developed a unique way of helping students to learn. This is called Vertical Acceleration. Through Vertical Acceleration one is able to help students make up the gaps in their learning in a very short period of time.

Robert Peterkin has been the director of the Urban Superintendents Program for 18 years. Prior to HGSE, Peterkin held school superintendencies in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and had a long career in educational leadership, from special education teacher to deputy superintendent, mainly in the Boston Public School system. Current work focuses on the restructuring of urban public schools for educational equity and higher student achievement, most recently as a court-appointed monitor in a federal case settlement agreement involving an urban school district and plaintiffs of color.

Photo courtesy of Craig Bailey/Perspective Photo.

Mark Feeney was born on July 28, 1957, in Winchester, Mass. Brought up in Reading, Mass., he graduated from Harvard College in June 1979 with a magna cum laude degree in History and Literature.

A highly-respected historian of the African-American experience, Dr. Spencer R. Crew's innovative museum exhibits have brought new life to American history. He is perhaps best known for his study of the Great Migration the massive movement of Southern African-Americans to Northern cities in the early twentieth century. Crew was both the first African-American director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History (NMAH) and the youngest. In 2001 he became executive director and CEO of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Frank Wilczek has received many prizes for his work in physics, including the Nobel Prize of 2004 for work he did as a graduate student at Princeton University, when he was only 21 years old. He is known, among other things, for the discovery of asymptotic freedom, the development of quantum chromodynamics, the invention of axions, and the exploration of new kinds of quantum statistics (anyons). Much in demand for public lectures to a wide range of audiences, Frank has been anthologized in *the Norton Anthology of Light Verse* and twice in *Best American Science Writing* (2003, 2005). His television appearances include "ghostbusting" for Penn and Teller (2005). Frank grew up in Queens, NY and attended the University of Chicago. After getting his Ph.D. from Princeton, he spent time on the faculty there and at the Institute for Advanced Study, as well as at UCSB's Institute for Theoretical Physics, now the KITP. Frank is currently the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at MIT.