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Angela Tovar has worked as a community planner, advocate, and non-profit manager for over 10 years. She currently serves as the director of community development for The POINT CDC, a non-profit organization located in the South Bronx. In her current position, Angela oversees community partnerships, advocacy, and environmental justice efforts, including the development of a community-based climate resiliency plan. Prior to joining The POINT CDC, Angela spent 4 years at Sustainable South Bronx as the director of policy and research, where she managed the organization’s policy and community greening programs. Angela has also worked as a research fellow for The Center for Community Planning and Development at Hunter College and served as a senior manager of corporate volunteerism for Chicago Cares, where she coordinated large-scale community volunteer projects for companies, including Target, Home Depot, and Deloitte. Angela’s passion for social and environmental justice stems from her experience growing up on the industrial waterfront of Lake Michigan on Chicago’s south side. She holds a BA in urban studies from the College of Charleston, in Charleston, SC, and a master’s degree in urban planning from Hunter College in New York City.

Susan K. Sell is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University. Professor Sell received her B.A. in political science from Colorado College, her M.A. in political science from the University of California – Santa Barbara, and her Ph.D. from the University of California – Berkeley.She serves on the Board of IP Watch, which is a web-based reporting service covering intellectual property (www.ip-watch.org). She has served as a consultant for the Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Center for Science and Technology for Development. Professor Sell teaches graduate courses in international political economy, and international relations theory. She also teaches an undergraduate international political economy course.

Paul Herrnson is easily one of the nation’s leading experts on our topic. The 7th edition of his textbook, \_Congressional Elections: Campaigning at Home and in Washington\_, will be released this Fall. He is also an influential scholar of interest groups, having most recently co-edited \_Interest Groups Unleashed\_ (2013) with Christopher Deering and Clyde Wilcox. Join us to hear about the latest and best scholarship on the contest to control the “first branch” of the United States government. Paul Herrnson earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and his BA at Binghamton University. He is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Connecticut. His primary interests include political parties and elections, money and politics, public opinion, and voting technology and ballot design. He teaches courses on Congressional Elections and other aspects of American politics.

Donald Yacovone Ph.D., is the former Manager of Research and Program Development at the Hutchins Center's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University, and a recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, the highest honor awarded by Harvard in the field of African and African American studies. He earned his Ph.D. from the Claremont Graduate University and has taught at Pitzer College, the University of Arizona, and Millersville University of Pennsylvania. He was an editor at the Black Abolitionist Papers project before becoming the senior associate editor at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where he founded and edited the Massachusetts Historical Review. An expert in the antislavery movement, Yacovone is about to publish his eighth book: \_Wendell Phillips, Social Justice and the Powers of the Past\_, a co-edited essay collection for Louisiana State University Press. His contribution is entitled: "Race, Radicalism, and Remembering Wendell Phillips." His previous work includes \_Samuel Joseph May and the Dilemmas of the Liberal Persuasion\_ (Temple); \_A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens\_ (Illinois), \_Lincoln on Race and Slavery\_ (Princeton), with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and in 2013 co-authored with Gates, \_The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross\_ (SmileyBooks), the companion volume to the popular PBS series.

Dr. Gribbons is Director of the graduate user experience program, at Bentley University. The UX program at Bentley is among the largest and most respected program of this type in the country. Dr. Gribbons is the founder of the User Experience Center at the University as well as the UX Studio in Cambridge Massachusetts. As an expert on the user experience, Dr. Gribbons is frequently quoted in the media on topics related to product and service design. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Gribbons has consulted with leading companies around the world on user experience strategy and product design. Follow him on Twitter: @wgribbons

**Betül Kacar** is an astrobiologist from Istanbul. She is a Resarch Project Leader at Harvard's Dept. of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, where she resurrects inferred ancestral genes in the laboratory and engineers them inside modern genomes. Prior to that, she was a Postdoc with NASA's Astrobiology Institute, where she designed a bacterial system combining paleogenetics with laboratory evolution. Dr. Kacar is a recipient of research grants from NASA and The John Templeton Foundation, and is a co-founder of SAGANet: The Online Astrobiology Grassroots Network, designed to promote mentorship and outreach activities in science, engineering and related fields.

As a co-founder of Ministry of Supply, Gihan Amarasiriwardena shapes the company’s products and brand, bringing his background in science and technology to create high-performance products for the modern man. After earning his S.B. in chemical and biological engineering from MIT and completing studies with design firms in the US and UK, Gihan co-founded Ministry of Supply to bring his high-tech vision for menswear to life.

Ryan Britt, author of Luke Skywalker Can't Read has written for The New York Times, Electric Literature, The Awl, VICE Motherboard, Clarkesworld Magazine, and is a consulting editor for Story Magazine. He was the staff writer for the Hugo-Award winning web magazine Tor.com, where he remains a contributor. He lives in New York City.

Michael R. Davis, FAIA, LEED®, a Principal and Vice President at Bergmeyer Associates, Inc., Boston, Massachusetts, is a practicing architect, and educator, and an advocate for sustainable public policy. He is 2012 Vice President/President-Elect of the Boston Society of Architects and Co-Chairs the AIA Massachusetts Government Affairs Committee. Mr. Davis advises the Boston Redevelopment Authority as Chair of the Boston Civic Design Commission has served on the Boston Mayor Menino's Green Building Task Force, Massachusetts Governor Patrick's Net Zero Energy Building Task Force and is currently on the Advisory Board of the Boston Foundation for Architecture. For the American Institute of Architects, he has participated in three (2010 - 2012) and led two Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) charrettes in Ithaca, NY, DeKalb County, GA, and Augusta, GA.

**Justin Peters** is a correspondent for \_Slate\_ and a contributing editor at the \_Columbia Journalism Review\_. He has written for various national publications, including \_The New York Times, The Washington Monthly\_, and \_Travel + Leisure,\_ and was the founding editor of \_Polite\_, a general-interest print journal. An alumnus of Cornell University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, he divides his time between Boston and Brooklyn. (Photo Credit: Molly Peters)

Chris Cato is a board member on the United South End Settlements and a life-long resident of Boston's South End.

Kate Kruckemeyer grew up in Boston's South End and conducts interviews and oral history conversations for a variety of history projects.