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**Howard Gardner** is Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Best known as the originator of the Theory of Multiple Intelligences, he is the author of more than thirty books.

Jane Waldfogel, professor of Social Work and Public Policy at Columbia University, is co-editor of a recent volume, Stalled Gains and Steady Progress, which tracks trends in the black-white test score gap and offers explanations for uneven patterns of progress.

Ronald F. Ferguson is an MIT-trained economist who focuses social science research on economic, social, and educational challenges. He has been on the faculty at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government since 1983, after full time appointments at Brandeis and Brown Universities. In 2014, he co-founded Tripod Education Partners and shifted into an adjunct role at the Kennedy School, where he remains a fellow at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and faculty director of the university-wide Achievement Gap Initiative (AGI). During the 1980s and ’90s Ron focused much of his attention on economic and community development. That work culminated in the social science synthesis volume Urban Problems and Community Development (1999), which remains an important text in graduate policy courses. By the late 1980s, he had begun to study education and youth development because academic skill disparities were contributing to growing wage disparity. During the 1990s and early 2000s, his writings on the topic appeared in publications of the National Research Council, the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Department of Education, and various books and journals. In December 2007, Harvard Education Press published his book \_Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap\_. A February 2011 profile of Ron in the New York Times wrote, “there is no one in America who knows more about the gap than Ronald Ferguson.” Ron’s current focus as AGI director is an initiative entitled the Boston Basics that is spreading to other cities in a Basics National Network. It takes a socio-ecological saturation approach, collaborating with many partners to reach extended families with caregiving advice for infants and toddlers. In addition, Ron is co-authoring a book with journalist Tatsha Robertson on the ways that highly successful people were parented. Ron holds an undergraduate degree from Cornell University and a Ph.D. from MIT, both in economics. He has been happily married for 39 years and is the father of two adult sons.

Doris Kearns Goodwin, a former Harvard professor and Woodrow Wilson Fellow, is the author of several *New York Times* best-sellers, including *No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt*, which was awarded the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in History and her latest book, *Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln*. She is the recipient of the Charles Frankel Prize and the Sara Josepha Hale Medal. She was the first woman journalist to enter the Red Sox locker room and has been a consultant and on air-person for PBS documentaries on Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedy family, Franklin Roosevelt, Abraham and Mary Lincoln, and Ken Burns' *The History of Baseball*. Currently an NBC News analyst, Ms. Goodwin lives in Massachusetts.

Clayton M. Christensen is an authority on disruptive innovation, a framework which describes the process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors. Acknowledged in rankings and surveys as one of the worlds leading thinkers on innovation, Christensen is widely sought after as a speaker, advisor and board member. His research has been applied to national economies, start-up and Fortune 50 companies, as well as to early and late stage investing.

Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies, received his BA from Yale in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford in 1974. He is editor of the *Journal of Palestine Studies*, and was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993. He is author of *Sowing Crisis: American Dominance and the Cold War in the Middle East* (2009); *The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood* (2006); *Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East* (2004); *Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness* (1996); *Under Siege: PLO Decision-Making During the 1982 War* (1986); and *British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 1906-1914* (1980), and was the co-editor of *Palestine and the Gulf *(1982) and The Origins of Arab Nationalism (1991).