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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.

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.