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Associate Professor, Department of Public Health and Family Medicine Adjunct Associate Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Engineering Dr. Griffiths' research includes: - The human, animal, and environmental epidemiology of the emerging pathogen Cryptosporidium; - Development of an ultrastable measles vaccine for use where there are is no refrigeration or during emergencies; - the influence of malnutrition and environmental factors, such as air pollution and heavy metals, on common infectious diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia. - Dr. Griffiths has a long interest in waterborne diseases, ranging from research on the biology of the pathogens to their epidemiology and to public policy and regulation.

Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford and has written for *Conde Nast Traveler*, *Smithsonian*, and *National Geographic*. He is the author of *A Crack in the Edge of the World*, *Krakatoa*, *The Map That Changed the World*, *The Professor and the Madman*, *The Fracture Zone*, *Outposts*, *Korea*, among many other titles. He lives in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland.

Adam Pertman was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his writing about adoption in The Boston Globe, where he was a senior reporter and editor for 22 years before turning his career toward adoption. His book, Adoption Nation was named Book of the Year by the National Adoption Foundation. Pertman's other honors include the Angel in Adoption Award from the US Congress, the Special Friend of Children Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, and the Friend of Adoption Award from the ODS Adoption Community of New England among others. Pertman's commentaries have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald and on NPR, among others. He has been a guest on many radio and television programs, including Oprah and The Today Show.

Helen R. Deese is the Caroline Healey Dall editor for the Massachusetts Historical Society. In nineteenth-century Boston, amidst the popular lecturing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the discussion groups led by Margaret Fuller, sat a remarkable young woman, Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912): transcendentalist, early feminist, writer, reformer, and perhaps most importantly, active diarist. During the seventy-five years that Dall kept a diary, she captured all the fascinating details of her sometimes agonizing personal life, and she also wrote about all the major figures who surrounded her.

D. Brenton Simons has served as President and CEO (formerly Executive Director) of the New England Historic Genealogical Society since December 2005. Previously he served as Chief Operating Officer of the Society and, over more than a decade, held several other management positions at NEHGS. During his career he developed some of the Society's most popular services, including its website, www.NewEnglandAncestors.org, its member magazine, *New England Ancestors*, and its special publications imprint, the Newbury Street Press. He is most recently author of *Witches, Rakes, and Rogues: True Stories of Scam, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem in Boston, 1630-1775*, recipient of the 2006 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History. He is also the author of *The Langhornes of Langhorne Park* (1997) and co-editor and originator of *The Art of Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England* (2001). His articles have appeared in several historical and genealogical journals. His book, *Boston Beheld: Antique Town and Country Views*, will be published by the University Press of New England in 2008. A graduate of Boston University, Mr. Simons is a Council member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a member of The Society of the Cincinnati and The Society of Mayflower Descendants.

When 38-year-old Kica Matos became executive director of JUNTA for Progressive Action, she accepted the leadership of the oldest Latino community service organization in New Haven, Connecticut. But prior to her arrival, JUNTA had fallen into disrepair, even as New Haven's Latino population surged in number and need. In a few short years, Matos has transformed JUNTA into a model service provider and a powerful community force, expanding the organization's mission and programs and multiplying its client base with each passing year. Kica Matos spent her early career as a community and human rights advocate, working for such institutions as Amnesty International and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. She went on to earn a law degree from Cornell University and subsequently became an assistant federal defender in Philadelphia, where she represented death row inmates in state and federal courts. Matos observed that minorities and the disadvantaged represented a disproportionate number of the criminal justice system's bleakest cases. She decided to focus her work on community and social services in order to provide those at risk with alternatives to lives of crime and deprivation.

In 1993, when Elaine R. Jones took the helm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Legal Defense Fund (LDF), she brought with her two decades of experience as a litigator and civil rights activist. As President and Director-Counsel of the nations foremost civil rights organization working for equal rights under the law, she has been able to carry out a childhood commitment to justice. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, Ms. Jones came of age in the Jim Crow South and learned its painful lessons early on. Her mother was a college-educated schoolteacher and her father was a Pullman porter and a member of the nation's first black trade union. Her parents taught her about the realities of racism, but also about the importance of idealism. In 1989, Ms. Jones broke another barrier, becoming the first African American elected to the America Bar Association Board of Governors. Her term ended in 1992; she continues to sit on the ABA's Council on Individual Rights and Responsibilities. She is active in the Old Dominion Bar Association (Virginia) and the National Bar Association (first female recipient of its Founder's Award, C. Francis Stradford-1925), and is a former board member of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund. Ms. Jones is also a member of the executive committee of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the board of the National Women's Law Center.

Each year, roughly 40,000 people worldwide who suffer from leukemia or certain other disease of the blood receive a bone marrow transplant, necessitating that they first undergo the difficult process of total-body irradiation. Whitehead Fellow Fernando Camargo is engaged in research that may one day make these kinds of procedures far easier on patients and might also pave the way for treating other diseases as well. Camargo focuses on hematopoietic stem cells, those cells in the bone marrow that give rise to mature blood cells. These cells are rare, and they can remain in an early progenitor state while the cells that they spawn go on to develop into highly specialized cells. Of particular interest to Camargo are the molecular mechanisms that enable these cells to remain in such a stage. Using a wide range of laboratory technologies such as microarrays and RNA interference, Camargo is conducting large-scale screenings of these cells in order to find the exact genes that determine their properties. Recently, Camargo and his colleagues discovered the first microRNA shown to play a crucial role in the innate immune response. This finding not only has implications for the treatment of leukemia, it may also be relevant for a variety of inflammatory conditions. Additionally, in collaboration with the lab of Whitehead Fellow Thijn Brummelkamp, Camargo is studying the so-called Hippo signaling pathway, which regulates size and growth of organs and tissues, and influences cell regeneration and possibly cancer. Camargo received his PhD from Baylor College of Medicine in 2004, and became a Fellow at Whitehead Institute that year.