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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.

Colin Norman is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University, and an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He works on both theoretical and observational astrophysics in areas including the formation, structure, and evolution of galaxies, the physics of active galaxies, quasars, and starburst galaxies, the structures of the intergalactic and interstellar media, and star formation.

Dimitar Sasselov has been a professor at Harvard since 1998. He arrived to CfA in 1990 as a Harvard-Smithsonian Center post-doctoral fellow. Between 1999 and 2003 he was the Head Tutor of the Astronomy Department. Dimitar was born in Bulgaria, and was educated at Sofia University, where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1988, almost concurrently working on his degree at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1990. His research explores the many modes of interaction between radiation and matter: from the evolution of hydrogen and helium in the early universe to the study of the structure of stars. He is very fond of unstable stars - ones that pulsate regularly and allow us to determine distances to other galaxies. Most recently his research has led him to explore the nature of planets orbiting other stars. He has discovered a few such planets - with novel techniques that he hopes to use to find planets like Earth. He is the director of the new Harvard Origins of Life Initiative - a multidisciplinary center bridging scientists in the physical and in the life sciences, intent to study the transition from chemistry to life and its place in the context of the Universe.

Jill Soloway is currently the Executive Producer of Showtime's *United States of Tara*. For four years Jill was a writer/Co-Executive Producer of HBO's *Six Feet Under*. She also worked on *Grey's Anatomy*, *Tell Me You Love Me*, and *Dirty Sexy Money*. Jill is in pre-production to direct her first feature film, *Tricycle*, and is writing the screenplay for *Marry Him*, a romantic comedy, for Warner Brothers and Tobey Maguire. She also adapted the screenplay for the sorority book *Pledged*. She is the author of the best-selling *Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants*, a hilarious, dirty, sad collection of essays and rants that was hailed as a post-feminist manifesto for the next generation. She is currently writing *And Then What*, a young adult novel for Harper Collins. It's about best friends, money and power that travels from Echo Park to Malibu and back again. Jill started off doing theater with her sister Faith in Chicago, where they created the stage phenomenon *The Real Live Brady Bunch*. Jill also created *Sit n' Spin*, a twice-monthly, standing-room-only night of comedic monologues and music. Recently, she co-founded OBJECT, a non-profit that seeks to engage young women in fun feminist activism.

Dr. Shara and his research group are conducting an exhaustive survey to inventory and "weigh" all 100,000 stars nearest to Earth. More than one billion stars are being examined in the search. The survey has already determined that many low luminosity stars remain undiscovered just a few light years away, and that a significant portion of the local "dark" matter is concentrated in stars 100 to 100,000 times fainter than the Sun. Dr. Shara uses the Hubble Space Telescope to survey the densest cores of globular clusters to retrieve and characterize the predicted collision products. These include some of the most exotic stars known to astrophysicists: "blue stragglers." By accurately weighing these stars, Shara and his collaborators have demonstrated that many are at least twice as massive as all other stars in a globular cluster. This strongly supports the hitherto theoretical collisional origin for blue stragglers.