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Tracy Kidder graduated from Harvard and studied at the University of Iowa. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Award, and many other literary prizes. His books include _Mountains Beyond Mountains_, _Strength in What Remains_, _The Soul of a New Machine_, _House_, _Among Schoolchildren_,_ Old Friends_, _Hometown_ and _A Truck Full of Money_.

Julie Moir Messervy's vision for composing gardens of beauty and meaning is furthering the evolution of landscape design and changing the way people think about their outdoor surroundings. With thirty years of experience, four books and numerous high-profile lectures, Messervy has emerged as a leader of a movement in which landscape design is as much a personal journey as it is leaving a unique imprint upon the earth. She has inspired a new generation of landscape designers, homeowners and others to create soulful gardens that reflect an inward vision deeply rooted in outdoor archetypes, childhood imagination and aesthetic impulses. A celebrated author, Messervy's first book, Contemplative Gardens (Howell Press, 1990), was named one of the ten best garden books of the year by The New York Times. Her second book, The Inward Garden (Little, Brown and Company, 1995), won the Garden Writers Association of America Gold Medal in 1996. Her third book, The Magic Land, was proclaimed a delight by Yo-Yo Ma and a companion for inspired daydreaming by The Boston Globe. Messervy's latest book, written in partnership with architect Sarah Susanka, Outside the Not So Big House, (The Taunton Press, 2006) is a consistent best seller on Amazon.com and ranked at the top of bookseller lists in Canada. In 1999, Messervy completed the award-winning Toronto Music Garden; a collaboration with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the City of Toronto to create a three-acre public park based on the First Suite for Unaccompanied Cello by J.S. Bach. The six garden movements mirror the form, feeling and structure of the famous composition. Messervy and the Toronto Music Garden are the subject of the Emmy award-winning PBS film, Yo-Yo Ma: Inspired by Bach: The Music Garden. In 2005, the Toronto Music Garden received a Leonardo Da Vinci award for innovation and creativity. Messervy is the honored recipient of the Association for Professional Landscape Designer's 2006 Award of Distinction. In 2005, she was awarded the Great American Gardeners Award for Landscape Design by the American Horticultural Society. She is a regular contributor to Fine Gardening magazine with her column, Inspired Design. Her design work and books have been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Japan Times, The Washington Post, House & Garden, Country Living Gardener, Elle, Decor, Vogue, Garden Design, Landscape Architecture and numerous other leading newspapers and magazines around the world. She has appeared on WGBH's Victory Garden, NECN's New England Dream House and public radio stations across the nation. Julie is an affiliate member of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Messervy has lectured at distinguished venues such as the Smithsonian Institution, The National Geographic Society and the Getty Museum. Her imaginative landscape design work has delighted clients including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Marshall Field's, Fidelity Investments, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and scores of residential clients. As a Henry Luce Scholar and as a Japan Foundation Fellow, Messervy studied landscape design with eminent Japanese garden master Kinsaku Nakane in Kyoto, Japan. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Wellesley College, and Master of Architecture and Master in City Planning degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Ganson has been an artist-in-residence at MIT (where the Lemelson-MIT Award Program named him an Inventor of the Week, and where his show "Gestural Engineering" is ongoing) and has shown his work at art and science museums around the world -- including a current, held-over show at the Phaeno in Wolfsburg, Germany.

John Palfrey is Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. He is the co-author of *Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives* (2008) and *Access Denied: The Practice and Politics of Internet Filtering* (2008). His research and teaching is focused on Internet law, intellectual property, and international law. He practiced intellectual property and corporate law at the law firm of Ropes & Gray. He is a faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Outside of Harvard Law School, he is a Venture Executive at Highland Capital Partners and serves on the board of several technology companies and non-profits. John served as a special assistant at the US EPA during the Clinton Administration. He is a graduate of Harvard College, the University of Cambridge, and Harvard Law School.

Barry Bluestone is the Stearns Trustee Professor of Political Economy, the founding Director of the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, and the founding Dean of the School of Social Science, Urban Affairs, and Public Policy at Northeastern University in Boston. Before assuming these posts, Bluestone spent 12 years at the University of Massachusetts at Boston as the Frank L. Boyden Professor of Political Economy and as a Senior Fellow at the University's John W. McCormack Institute of Public Affairs. In 1982, he published The *Deindustrialization of America *(co-authored with the late Bennett Harrison) which analyzed the restructuring of American industry and its economic and social impact on workers and communities. A sequel published in 1988, *The Great U-Turn: Corporate Restructuring and the Polarizing of America*, also co-authored with Harrison, investigated how economic policies have contributed to growing inequality.

Dr. Rodney Brooks is a robotics entrepreneur and founder, chairman and CTO of Heartland Robotics, Inc. He is also a founder, board member and former CTO (1991 - 2008) of iRobot Corp and the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (on leave) at MIT. Dr. Brooks is the former director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelliigence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has pubished many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life. Dr. Brooks is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a founding fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the other AAAS), a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a corresponding member of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and a foreign fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence). He has been the Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College, and the Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University. He was co-founding editor of the *International Journal of Computer Vision* and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including *Adaptive Behavior*, *Artificial Life*, *Applied Artificial Intelligence*, *Autonomous Robots* and *New Generation Computing*. He starred as himself in the 1997 Errol Morris movie *Fast, Cheap and Out of Control* named for one of his scientific papers, a Sony Classics picture.

She has traveled extensively, has written non-fiction on South African subjects and made TV documentaries, collaborating with her son Hugo Cassirer on the television film *Choosing Justice: Allan Boesak*. She was responsible for the script of the 1989 BBC film, *Frontiers*, and for four of the seven screenplays for a television drama based on her own short stories, entitled *The Gordimer Stories 1981-82*. She has also published, in forty languages, thirteen novels and ten short story collections. Her first short story was published at the age of fifteen in the liberal Johannesburg magazine, *Forum*, and during her twenties, her stories appeared in many local magazines. In 1951 the *New Yorker* took one of her short stories. Her short story collections include "A Soldier's Embrace" (1980); "Something Out There" (1984); and "Jump and Other Stories" (1991). *Loot* (2003), is a collection of ten short stories widely varied in theme and place. Nadine Gordimer's subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa.

Ann Dumas, an independent scholar and curator based in London, is co-curator (with Timothy Standring) of Inspiring Impressionism. Her field of interest is 19th and early 20th century French painting. She is affiliated with the Royal Academy of Arts with whom she has curated a number of exhibitions, including Matisse: His Art and His Textiles, and 1900: Art at the Crossroads, and Paris: Capital of the Arts for which she was co-curator. For the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Dumas curated The Private Collection of Edgar Degas and From Czanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant Garde. Also a consulting curator for the Columbus Museum of Art, Dumas recently curated Renoirs Women and The Last Landscapes of Degas for that institution. She began her career as a research assistant at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and worked as an associate curator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Dumas studied the history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, England.

John McWilliams acquired his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is currently the Director of the Georgia State University School of Art and Design, and has been a part of the GSU faculty since 1969. McWilliams has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. While McWilliams is primarily a photographer, his current work incorporates drawing and bookmaking processes. His artwork is in a number of private and corporate collections including the Modern Museum of Art, New York, the Fogg Museum at Harvard University, and at the Smithsonian Museum of american Art. In addition, McWilliams has been published in numerous periodicals and books including Land of Deepest Shade: Photographs of the South as well as Sea Change: The Seascape in Contemporary Photography. Besides his personal and professional engagements as a photographer and educator, McWilliams is committed to a number of professional/civic activities. Most recently he was appointed to represent Georgia State University as a member of the Fulton County Arts Council. He has also served on the Board of Directors of the High Museum Photo Forum, Nexus Contemporary Arts Center as well as the Atlanta Photography Group.