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  • Nigel Barker is a fashion photographer whose images have been printed in many major magazines. The host of Oxygen's [\_The Face\_](http://www.oxygen.com/shows/the-face "The Face"), Nigel was also a judge on America's Next Top Model for nine years. He directs and produces films and documentaries, many of which are devoted to his humanitarian work for organizations such as the Humane Society of the United States, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. He lives in New York City with his wife, Cristen, and their two children, Jack and Jasmine.
  • **Michael Murphy** is the executive director of MASS Design Group, which he co-founded with Alan Ricks in 2010. Since leading the design and construction of the critically acclaimed Butaro Hospital in Rwanda, Michael has become a thought leader in architecture and healthcare design. He regularly speaks to a variety of audiences on how architecture can improve people’s lives and sits on the boards of the Clinton Global Initiative Advisory Committee and the Center for Healthcare Design, among others. An architect by training, Michael was recently listed in the \_Atlantic Monthly\_ as one of the “Greatest Innovators of Today.” Under his and Alan’s leadership, MASS has received or been named a finalist for a variety of prizes, including the Curry Stone Design Prize and the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Michael also works to spread MASS’s design philosophy through a variety of mediums. He is a Rainer Arnhold Fellow with the Mulago Foundation, a member of the Social Venture Network, and along with Alan is published in the \_Huffington Post\_, \_Journal of Architecture\_, and the \_Stanford Social Innovation Review\_. Michael is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
  • Dr. Lu is an Associate Professor of Environmental Exposure Biology at the Harvard School of Public Health. His primary research is to use a variety of biomarkers for assessing human exposures to environmental chemicals in order to facilitate the identification of risk factors, as well as the formation of hypotheses for potential health effects. One of his current research projects is to integrate exposure biomarkers, physiologically based pharmacokinetic model and cumulative risk assessment tools for quantifying children’s longitudinal exposure to pesticides via dietary intakes, and its risks by comparing to benchmark doses used by the regulatory agencies.
  • Sam Stier is Founding Director of the Center for Learning with Nature, a non-profit effort providing curricula and professional development to teachers to enrich STEM engagement in the classroom. Trained as an ecologist, Mr. Stier’s scientific research has been published in scientific journals, his curricula has been published in science teachers’ journals, he has published a book with Chelsea House on the Philippines for young readers, and contributed to a book on biomimicry with Candlewick Press for children. Mr. Stier served for several years as an environmental consultant to the World Bank, The U.S. Peace Corps, The Nature Conservancy, Conservation International, and World Wildlife Fund International. He was a National Science Foundation Fellow in Curricula Development, and was appointed to the Next Generation Science Standards Task Force by the Office of Planning and Instruction, Department of Education, for the State of Montana in 2012.
  • Mark Dorfman is a biomimicry chemist with Biomimicry 3.8, an organization founded on the premise that living organisms, by necessity, have developed sophisticated, highly-effective, life-friendly chemistries that could inspire provocative, sustainable chemistries for modern society. In the course of his work, Mark seeks out and applies the design principles of nature's time tested chemical strategies to the development of innovative solutions to the toxic chemical and material challenges of the 21st century.
  • Dr. William Bobby McClain (STH ’62, STH ’77) earned his B.A. degree, summa cum laude, at Clark College, Atlanta. He conceived of and chaired the committee which produced the hymnbook, Songs of Zion, which sold more than 2.5 million copies and changed the composition of Christian hymnals of every denomination. He most recently co-chaired the committee for the sequel to Songs of Zion: Zion Still Sings! For Every Generation. Professor McClain met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. King was pastoring and McClain was a teen-aged preacher in his hometown of Gadsden, Alabama. After completing his seminary degree at Boston University, where King had previously received his doctorate, Reverend McClain returned to Alabama in 1962 to work with King and the civil rights movement and to serve as pastor of Haven Chapel Methodist Church in Anniston, Alabama, where he remained until returning to graduate school at Boston University in the fall of 1964. From 1968 to 1978, Dr. McClain, an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, served as senior pastor of the historic Union United Methodist Church in Boston. During that same period he taught at Boston College, Harvard University, Northeastern University and Emerson College. From 2001-2003 Dr. McClain served as the Senior Pastor of Philadelphia’s Tindley Temple United Methodist Church where the great Charles Albert Tindley served as pastor and wrote many of his famous and beloved Gospel songs.
  • Matthew Cushman was the Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Paintings Conservation from 2010 – 2014 the Worcester Art Museum, in Worcester, MA. He contributed to research on the cleaning, imaging, and monitoring of paintings as well the conservation treatment of works by Giovanni Lanfranco and Anthony van Dyck, among others. Cushman's current work focuses on the treatment of fifteen portraits of Haitian rulers in the collection of the Yale Peabody Museum, training visiting conservation assistants from Haiti, and conducting research related to the Haitian Conservation project.
  • Before becoming director of the Bellarmine Museum, Linda Wolk-Simon, Ph.D., served in many roles at The Metropolitan Museum of Art where, from 1986 to 2011 she served in many posts, including curator, Department of Drawings and Prints. Prior to that she was the assistant curator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan, a diverse collection of paintings, sculpture, textiles, glass, ceramics and old master drawings. While at The Met, she organized a highly attended Raphael exhibition and was co-curator of the well-received Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. Dr. Wolk-Simon specializes in European art of the 15th-19th century with a concentration on the Italian Renaissance. She was also an associate editor and reviews editor of the quarterly scholarly journal Master Drawings for several years. Most recently, she spent two years as the Charles W. Engelhard Curator and Department Head at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, where she organized a critically acclaimed exhibition on Degas, and was responsible for implementing and directing the Morgan Drawing Institute, a research center devoted to fostering scholarship in the field of old master and modern drawings.
  • Amala Mahadevan is a leading researcher in the fields of physical oceanography and climate, the oceanic carbon cycle, and biogeochemical distributions. Dr. Mahadevan and members of her WHOI lab have developed advanced models and analytics to investigate physical ocean processes and their implications for the productivity and distribution of phytoplankton, and the transport and mixing of properties. She has developed a non-hydrostatic ocean model suited to modeling limited domains in order to capture meso- and sub-mesoscale phenomena.
  • Walter Earl Fluker is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Ethical Leadership, the editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project and the Director of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Initiative for the Development of Ethical Leadership (MLK-IDEAL) at Boston University School of Theology. He was founding executive director of the Leadership Center and the Coca-Cola Professor of Leadership Studies at Morehouse College. The founder of VisionQuest International and Walter Earl Fluker and Associates, he is a featured consultant, speaker, lecturer and workshop leader at foundations, businesses, corporations, colleges, universities, governmental and religious institutions, nationally and globally.
  • Carolyn Finney, PhD is a storyteller, author and a cultural geographer who is grounded in both artistic and intellectual ways of knowing - she pursued an acting career for eleven years, but five years of backpacking trips through Africa and Asia, and living in Nepal changed the course of her life. Motivated by these experiences, Carolyn returned to school after a 15-year absence to complete a B.A., M.A. (gender and environmental issues in Kenya and Nepal), and a Ph.D. in Geography at Clark University (where she was a Fulbright and a Canon National Science Scholar Fellow). Along with public speaking (nationally & internationally), writing, media engagements, consulting & teaching (she has held positions at Wellesley College, the University of California, Berkeley & the University of Kentucky), she served on the U.S. National Parks Advisory Board for eight years. Her first book, _Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors_ was released in 2014. Recent publications include _Self-Evident: Reflections on the Invisibility of Black Bodies in Environmental Histories_ (BESIDE Magazine, Montreal Spring 2020), _The Perils of Being Black in Public: We are all Christian Cooper and George Floyd_ (The Guardian, June 3rd 2020), and _Who Gets Left Out of the Great Outdoors Story? _(The NY Times November 4 2021). Upcoming essays include “J_oy isa Revelation_” in _Nature Swagger: Stories and Visions of Black Joy in the Outdoors_ (edited by Rue Mapp, Chronicle Books, Oct. 2022) and “_Memory Divine_” in the upcoming anthology, _A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars_ (edited by Erin Sharkey, Milkweed Press, Feb. 2023). She is currently working on her new book (creative non-fiction) that takes a more personal journey into the very complicated relationship between race, land & belonging in the United States, and a performance piece entitled The N Word: Nature Revisited as part of an Andrew W. Mellon residency at the New York Botanical Gardens Humanities Institute. Along with being the new columnist at the Earth Island Journal, she was recently awarded the Alexander and Ilse Melamid Medal from the American Geographical Society and is a scholar-in-residence in the Franklin Environmental Center at Middlebury College. You can find out more about Carolyn at carolynfinney.com. Credit Photo : Nicholas Nichols
  • Gabriella Blum is the Rita E. Hauser Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law at Harvard Law School, specializing in public international law, international negotiations, the law of armed conflict, and counterterrorism. She is also the Co-Director of the HLS-Brookings Project on Law and Security and a member of the Program on Negotiation Executive Board. Prior to joining the Harvard faculty in the fall of 2005, Blum served for seven years as a Senior Legal Advisor in the International Law Department of the Military Advocate General’s Corps in the Israel Defense Forces, and for another year, as a Strategy Advisor to the Israeli National Security Council.