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Christiane Amanpour is CNN's chief international correspondent based in New York. In her 18 years as an international correspondent, Amanpour has reported on all the major crises from the world's many hotspots. Amanpour joined CNN in 1983 as an entry-level assistant on the network's international assignment desk in Atlanta. She worked her way up to correspondent in CNN's New York bureau before becoming an international correspondent in 1990. Her first major assignment was the Gulf War, and she has since covered wars, famine, genocide and natural disasters around the globe. She has secured exclusive interviews with world leaders from the Middle East to Europe to Africa and beyond, including Iranian Presidents Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as the presidents of Afghanistan, Sudan and Syria, among others. After 9/11 she was the first international correspondent to interview British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Her body of work has earned an inaugural Television Academy Honor, nine News and Documentary Emmys, four George Foster Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards, the Courage in Journalism Award, an Edward R. Murrow award and other major journalism awards as well as honorary degrees from The American University of Paris, Georgetown University, New York University, Smith College, Emory University and the University of Michigan. In 2007, Amanpour was made a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE), by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II for her "highly distinguished, innovative contribution" to the field of journalism. In 1998, the City of Sarajevo named her an honorary citizen for her "personal contribution to spreading the truth" during the Bosnia war from 1992 to 1995. Amanpour graduated summa cum laude from the University of Rhode Island with a bachelor of arts in journalism.

George Mitchell became familiar with the workings of the U.S. Senate in the 1960s, when he served as executive assistant to Democratic senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. In 1980, when Muskie resigned to become secretary of state, Mitchell was appointed to fill the vacancy. As a senator, he became a leading figure for the Democratic Party, and was credited with helping his party win back the majority in the Senate in 1986. Senator Mitchell was elected majority leader in 1989, a position he held until his retirement from the Senate in 1995. He was known among his colleagues in the Senate as an honest leader and skillful legislative strategist. After leaving the Senate, Mitchell was instrumental in negotiating a peace agreement in Northern Ireland and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Senator Mitchell returned to the Senate in 1999 to participate in the Leader's Lecture Series.

Dr. Joshua Sparrow is assistant professor in psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School, supervisor of inpatient psychiatry at Children's Hospital, Boston, and associate director of the Brazelton Touchpoints Center. He has served as associate professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine of the University of Marseille in France. He is co-author with Dr. T. Berry Brazelton of six books: *Touchpoints Three to Six: Your Child's Emotional and Behavioral Development*, and the five books in the nationally best-selling "Brazelton Way" series: *Calming Your Fussy Baby*, *Discipline*, *Sleep*, *Feeding Your Child*, and *Toilet Training*. He writes a weekly *New York Times* Syndicate column, "Families Today." Dr. Sparrow is also the author of numerous scholarly papers published worldwide and has lectured extensively in the United States, Europe, and Brazil on child and adolescent development. His work with the Brazelton Touchpoints Center has included consultation on child development and parenting to the Harlem Children's Zone and the American Indian Early Head Start Programs. He consulted to parents and schools in New York City in response to the September 11 disaster. He has also served as a consultant to the Fox Family television show* Brazelton on Parenting*, as well as other children's educational programs and the I Am Your Child Foundation video on "Discipline". A graduate of Yale Medical School, Dr. Sparrow went through residency training and child psychiatry fellowship at Harvard Medical School teaching hospitals and is board certified in child/adolescent and general psychiatry.

A concert pianist, architect and inventor since age eight, Brian Hubert has a track record of accomplishments in diverse fields. Hubert was awarded the Lemelson MIT Student Prize in 2001. While working on his doctoral thesis, Hubert created a universal nano-assembly machine, capable of picking up and assembling thousands of atoms of almost any material at one time. His device could potentially be used for moving and patterning segments of DNA strands, ultimately enabling doctors to discover genetic related diseases in a matter of minutes, long before the patient showed any symptoms. Hubert received his BS, MS and PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT. After graduating from MIT, Hubert co-founded Kovio Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, a nano-technology company developing technologies for manufacturing microelectronics, where he serves as CTO.

Born in 1925, Engelbart grew up during the Great Depression near Portland, Oregon. During World War II, he served in the Navy, which sent him to the Philippines for two years as an electronic/radar technician. In 1948 he received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering and went to work for NACA Ames Laboratory (forerunner of NASA). He then applied to the graduate program in electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and obtained his Ph.D. in 1955. He stayed on at Berkeley as an acting assistant professor but a year later he left to work for Stanford Research Institute, or SRI Intl. Douglas. At SRI, Engelbart earned a dozen patents in two years, working on magnetic computer components, fundamental digital-device phenomena, and miniaturization scaling potential. In 1962 he published his seminal work, "Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework," under contract prepared for the Director of Information Sciences of the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. This outlined his visionary ideas for using computers to complement humans' intelligence. Many shrugged off his ideas at the time; for most it was too difficult to grasp what he was describing because the concepts were too futuristic.

James W. Stigler is Professor of Psychology at UCLA. He is co-author of *The Teaching Gap* (with James Hiebert, 1999) and *The Learning Gap* (with Harold Stevenson, 1992). He directed the TIMSS video studies (1993-2003), and in 1998 founded LessonLab Inc., a company whose mission was to study and improve classroom teaching, which became part of Pearson Education in 2003. He received his A.B. from Brown University in 1976, a Masters in Education from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977, and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1982. Before moving to Los Angeles in 1991, he served eight years on the faculty of the University of Chicago. He has received numerous awards for his research, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the QuEST award from the American Federation of Teachers. Dr. Stigler is best known for his observational work in classrooms, and has pioneered the use of multimedia technology for the study of classroom instruction.

Stephen Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Computers, is often given credit for starting the PC revolution. Born August 11, 1950, Wozniak built his own amateur radio station when he was 11 years old and got a ham-radio license. Two years later, he built his first computer. In the 1970's he built blue-boxes which he later sold with Steve Jobs. Having dropped out of college in 1975, Wozniak was working with a group called the Homebrew Computer Club, based in Palo Alto, CA. There, he developed a successful computer, but was working as a hobbyist. That is where he met Jobs, and the two decided that a completely assembled and inexpensive computer would be a hot item. They raised some money and built a prototype in Jobs' garage. Named Apple I, it was a fully assembled and functional unit that contained a $25 microprocessor on a single-circuit board with ROM. On April 1, 1976, Jobs and Wozniak formed the Apple Computer Company. Wozniak quit his job at Hewlett-Packard and became the vice president in charge of research and development at Apple. Apple I was priced at $666.66. Jobs and Wozniak sold their first 25 computers to a local dealer. In 1980, the Apple company went public and made Jobs and Wozniak millionaires. In 1981, Wozniak was in a plane crash that caused him short-term memory loss. He withdrew from his work at Apple, and went back to school, earning degrees in computer science and electrical engineering. He went back to work at Apple, in development, but decided to leave the company for good in 1985. That year President Ronald Reagan presented Wozniak with the National Medal of Technology. In 2000, Wozniak was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. In May 2004, Woz received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from North Carolina State University for his contributions to the field of personal computing, as well as several other honorary degrees from various institutions.

Betsy McAlister Groves, founder of the nationally recognized Child Witness to Violence Project at Boston Medical Center, dramatically disproves the myth that very young children are not affected by violence. Drawing on her experiences with the project, Groves contends that many children in the US witness violence at home, in school and on television, and that adults can, and should, help these children cope with their reactions.