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George Tsontakis is an American composer and conductor. He wrote \_Sonnets\_, a Shakespeare-inspired concerto for English horn and orchestra, which the Boston Symphony Orchestra premiered in 2016.

Austin Blackmon is the Chief of the City of Boston's Environment, Energy, and Open Space cabinet. He represented Boston at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, where the city received a C40 award for Smart Cities and Smart Community Engagement.

Isabel Zempel is the Principal of Sasaki Associates, an architecture and design firm with offices in Watertown, MA, and in Shanghai, China. Her design work encompasses urban-scale public landscapes, plazas, botanical gardens, waterfront developments, art installations, and sculpture parks.

Mariko Davidson is an urbanist and civic designer who creates policies and civic technology programs with cities to make our communities more livable and equitable. She has launched programs at the East-West Center, in Ahmedabad, India, and in the Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban Mechanics. She currently serves as an Innovation Fellow for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Mariko holds a Master's in City Planning from MIT.

A well-known and highly respected senior leader in the Obama Administration, Rosenthal most recently served as a White House counterterrorism and cybersecurity official, where he regularly advised the President, the National Security Advisor, and other senior Administration officials on a range of critical national security matters, including emerging cyber threats and the expanded use by the private sector of new encryption technologies. In his role as Director for Counterterrorism, Rosenthal was responsible for the U.S. government’s response to numerous threats and policy challenges posed by international terrorism, including various high-stakes and extremely sensitive operational matters. Rosenthal was also responsible for advancing one of the President’s most publicly debated policy priorities – the closure of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay.

Raúl Jiménez is a theoretical astrophysicist working in cosmology and an ICREA Research Professor in physical cosmology at the University of Barcelona. His main line of research has been to use astronomical observations to understand the laws of nature. Most of his research concerns the early universe and the evolution of galaxies.

Catherine J. Ross teaches as a Professor of Law at the George Washington University Law School and, in 2015-2016, a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard School of Education. She is the author of \_Lessons in Censorship: How Schools and Courts Subvert Students' First Amendment Rights\_ (2015). Ross specializes in constitutional law, particularly the First Amendment, family law, and legal issues concerning children. She has been a litigator in New York and has served on a variety of legal committees, including positions as chair of the American Bar Association's Steering Committee on the Unmet Legal Needs of Children and the Association of American Law Schools' Section on Law and Communitarianism.

Diane Rehm is the host of \_The Diane Rehm Show\_, originally the local morning talk show for Washington, DC's, NPR station, WAMU 88.5. Since Rehm began hosting in 1979 and the show was renamed in her honor in 1984, her program has attracted millions of listeners and grown to achieve international reach. She discusses an extremely broad range of topics and interviews representatives from an equally extensive range of fields, which earned her the National Humanities Medal in 2014. In addition to hosting her radio show, Rehm has individually written three books, \_Finding My Voice\_ (1999), \_Life With Maxie\_ (2010), and \_On My Own\_ (2015). Along with her husband, John, she has co-authored a fourth book, \_Toward Commitment: A Dialogue about Marriage\_ (2002).

Dr. Aleisa Fishman is a historian at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. She encourages audiences to explore the history of the Holocaust and how that history remains relevant today. Dr. Fishman curates the Holocaust Memorial Museum's podcast interview series Confronting Hatred, part of the Museum's initiative against Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism.

Jasmina Dervisevic-Cesic lost a home, a husband, two brothers and her right arm, all before she turned 20. She was the first Bosnian refugee granted permission to seek medical care in America. She is a businesswoman, human rights advocate, and frequent speaker in Facing History classrooms across New England, and she is the author of a memoir, \_The River Runs Salt, Runs Sweet: A Memoir of Visegrad, Bosnia\_ (2014). In 2016, her memoir earned her [recognition from Books In Common](http://www.booksincommon.org/authors-books/author-profile/?author\_id=318 "Books In Common Jasmina Dervisevic Cesic") as a featured author.

Ken Gude is a Senior Fellow with the National Security Team at the Center for American Progress. He is an expert on the intersection of law and security in the fight against terrorism. Prior to this, Gude was a policy analyst at the Center for National Security Studies, where he focused on post-September 11 civil liberties issues. He is a frequent contributor to print and broadcast media, including the LA Times and the Guardian.

Dr. Manolis (Emmanuel) Paraschos is a journalism historian and professor of journalism and mass communication at Emerson College. He has also taught comparative media law, mass media in modern society, multimedia journalism, international mass communication, global journalism, media ethics, propaganda and the press, news reporting and editing, opinion writing and student publication advising, and since 2010 he has researched and lectured on the earliest Greek communities in Boston.