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Rebecca Snyder received her B.S. in Zoology from Iowa State University. She earned her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Psychology from Georgia Institute of Technology. Throughout her graduate studies she held a Research Associate position at Zoo Atlanta. She spent two years in Chengdu, China studying captive giant panda reproductive, maternal, and developmental behavior, before becoming Curator of Giant Panda Research and Management at Zoo Atlanta in 2001. She became Curator of Carnivores at Zoo Atlanta in 2007, and then Curator of Mammals in 2010. As part of this position, she supervises Georgia Tech graduate students and Zoo Atlanta keepers, who are continuing behavioral research projects on giant pandas in China and other species at Zoo Atlanta. Dr. Snyder also has a strong interest in education and holds an adjunct position in the Psychology Department at Georgia State University where she teaches two courses in animal behavior.

Dr. Lawson is the Sr. Vice President of the Collections, Education and Conservation at Zoo Atlanta overseeing the animal and plant collections as well as the zoo’s education, research and conservation programs. Prior to this position, Dr. Lawson was General Curator and then Vice President of Animal Programs & Science. Dr. Lawson is an Adjunct Professor of Biology at Georgia State University where he regularly teaches. He also serves as co-chair of The Turtle Survival Alliance, and President of the TSA Foundation. Before joining Zoo Atlanta, Dr. Lawson worked as an Associate Research Scientist for The Wildlife Conservation Society where he directed a community-based wildlife conservation project in southwestern Cameroon, Africa. He has also served as Biological Curator and Live Collections Manager for the herpetological collection at The University of Texas at Arlington Collection of Vertebrates, and an Environmental Scientist for Stone and Webster Environmental Services in Boston.

Alison Weir is a British historian and *New York Times* bestselling author. Her works include the novels *Innocent Traitor*, *The Lady Elizabeth*, and and several historical biographies, including *Mistress of the Monarchy*, *Queen Isabella*, *Henry VIII*, *Eleanor of Aquitaine*, *The Life of Elizabeth I*, and *The Six Wives of Henry VIII*.

Daniel Kehlmann's *Measuring the World* was translated into more than 40 languages. His work has received several awards, including the Candide Prize, the Literature Prize of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, the Heimito von Doderer Literature Award, the Kleist Prize, the WELT Literature Prize, and the Thomas Mann Prize. Kehlmann divides his time between Vienna and Berlin.

Mary Catherine Bateson has been dividing her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and the Monadnock region of New Hampshire since she retired in 2002 as Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. During this interval she has been Scholar in Residence at the Radcliffe Institute, taught for three years as a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and is now a Visiting Scholar at Boston College's Center on Aging and Work. From 1979 to 2009 she was president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies in New York City, a non-profit founded by her mother Margaret Mead, winding down the affairs of the Institute in 2009 and transferring the literary rights of Mead and Gregory Bateson. She has written and co-authored numerous books and articles, and lectures frequently in the US and abroad.

Eliza Griswold, a fellow at the New America Foundation, received a 2010 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. Her journalism has appeared in *The Atlantic*, *The New Yorker*, *The New York Times Magazine*, and *Harper’s Magazine*, among others. A 2007 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she was awarded the first Robert I. Friedman Award for investigative reporting. A collection of her poems, *Wideawake Field*, was published in 2007.

Tao Lin was born in 1983, and raised in Orlando, Florida. In 2007 he published his first two works of fiction, the short story collection *Bed*, and the novel *Eeeee Eee Eeee*, simultaneously. And in 2008, published his poetry collection, *Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy*. It has been assigned as a text book in several college level psychology courses. In 2009, he published his novella *Shoplifting From American Apparel*. His books have been translated into German, Spanish, Japanese, Norwegian, and Serbian. He lives in Brooklyn.

Christina Paxson is the Hughes Rogers Professor of Economics and Public Affairs and the Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In 2000, she founded the Center for Health and Wellbeing (CHW), an interdisciplinary health research center in the Woodrow Wilson School. During her time as director of CHW, the center started undergraduate and graduate certificate programs in health and health policy, and took on the leadership of the University's Health Grand Challenges program. Paxson is a Senior Editor of *The Future of Children*; a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she is a member of the programs on Aging, Health, and Children; and a Research Associate of Princeton's Office of Population Research. Her research is on health, economic development and public policy, with a current focus on economic status and health outcomes over the life course in both developed and developing countries. She has been the Principal Investigator of several NIH-funded studies, including "Economic Status, Public Policy, and Child Neglect", "Parental Resources and Child Wellbeing" and "College Education and Health", and was the founding director of an NIA Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging at Princeton.

Before joining HHS, Mark H. Greenberg directed the Georgetown University Center on Poverty, Inequality and Public Policy, a joint initiative of the Georgetown University Law Center and the Georgetown Public Policy Institute. In addition, he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP). He previously served as the Executive Director of CAP's Task Force on Poverty and as CLASP’s Director of Policy. During his career, Mr. Greenberg has written extensively on issues relating to federal and state welfare reform efforts; workforce policy issues affecting low-income families; child care and early education policy; tax policy; poverty measurement; and a range of other low-income issues. In addition, he frequently provided technical assistance to state and local governments regarding poverty reduction strategies. Prior to coming to D.C., Mr. Greenberg worked at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid in Florida and the Western Center on Law and Poverty in Los Angeles, California. Mr. Greenberg is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.