Forum Network

Sofia Snow will start teaching poetry for the Foundations Project at the YMCA in Hyde Park and has taught poetry workshops at Harvard University in conjunction with the hip-hop activist program Critical Breakdown. She has worked with YPACT, a peer leadership group based in Codman Square that works with at-risk youth. She performed in front of a citywide audience during the summer's Peace Fest at City Hall. She's also only 17 years old.

Steve Curwood is executive producer and host of *Living on Earth*. Steve created the first pilot of *Living on Earth* in the Spring of 1990, and the show has run continuously since April, 1991. Today, *Living on Earth with Steve Curwood* is aired on more than 300 National Public Radio affiliates in the USA. Steve's relationship with NPR goes back to 1979 when he began as a reporter and host of *Weekend All Things Considered*. He also hosted NPR's *World of Opera*. Steve has been a journalist for more than 30 years with experience at NPR, CBS News, the *Boston Globe*, WBUR-FM/Boston and WGBH-TV/Boston. He shared the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service as part of the *Boston Globe*'s education team. Steve Curwood is also the recipient of the 2003 Global Green Award for Media Design, the 2003 David A. Brower Award from the Sierra Club for excellence in environmental reporting and the 1992 New England Environmental Leadership Award from Tufts University for his work on promoting environmental awareness. He is president of the World Media Foundation, Inc. and a Lecturer in Environmental Science and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Ross grew up in New York, before coming to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University, where she obtained a BA in psychology and a master's degree in education. After this she became involved in the low-income community, and her primary activist work has been to address issues related to abolishing poverty. She has also worked on other causes from nonviolence, the environment, and international solidarity to anti-racist struggles, women's rights, union organizing and gay/lesbian civil rights. In 2006 Ross became the first open lesbian to run for the post of governor of Massachusetts. Ross lost to Deval Patrick, receiving 43,193 votes for 1.95% of the total vote. In December of that year, Ross was named "Person of the Year" by the New England gay-oriented magazine, *IN News Weekly*. Ross was an at-large candidate for the Worcester City Council in 2007. She received 6,629 votes, placing eighth out of twelve in the November election in which the top six vote-getters were elected. In 2008, Ross helped found the Massachusetts Alliance Against Predatory Lending, a coalition of over 30 community organizations, housing counseling agencies, legal services groups and others who have come together to work on the sub-prime foreclosure crisis in Massachusetts. She is also active in the Worcester Anti-Foreclosure Team.

Michelle Fine, distinguished professor of Social Psychology, Women's Studies and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, at City University of New York. Before that she taught at the University of Pennsylvania for more than a decade. Her research focuses on youth in schools, communities and prisons, developed through critical feminist theory and method.

Joao Magueijo studied physics at the University of Lisbon. He undertook graduate work and PhD at Cambridge University. He was awarded a research fellowship at St John's College, Cambridge, the same fellowship previously held by Paul Dirac and Abdus Salam. He has been a faculty member at Princeton and Cambridge, and is currently a professor at Imperial College London where he teaches undergraduates "General Relativity" and postgraduates "Advanced General Relativity". In 1998, Magueijo teamed with Andreas Albrecht to work on the varying speed of light (VSL) theory of cosmology, which proposes that the speed of light was much higher in the early universe, of 60 orders of magnitude faster than its present value. This would to explain the horizon problem (since distant regions of the expanding universe would have had time to interact and homogenize their properties), and is presented as an alternative to the more mainstream theory of cosmic inflation. Magueijo discusses his personal struggles pursuing VSL in his 2003 book, *Faster Than The Speed of Light, The Story of a Scientific Speculation*. He is also the host of the Science Channel series, *Joao Magueijo's Big Bang*, which premiered on May 13, 2008.