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Pedro Noguera, PhD, is a professor in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University. He is also the Executive Director of the Metropolitan Center for Urban Education and the co-Director of the Institute for the study of Globalization and Education in Metropolitan Settings (IGEMS). An urban sociologist, Noguera's scholarship and research focuses on the ways in which schools are influenced by social and economic conditions in the urban environment. Noguera has served as an advisor and engaged in collaborative research with several large urban school districts throughout the United States. He has also done research on issues related to education and economic and social development in the Caribbean, Latin America and several other countries throughout the world. Between 2000 and 2003, Noguera served as the Judith K. Dimon Professor of Communities and Schools at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 1990 to 2000, he was a Professor in Social and Cultural Studies at the Graduate School of Education and the Director of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley.

Gillian Martin Sorensen, Senior Advisor at the United Nations Foundation is a national advocate on matters related to the United Nations and the United States-United Nations relationship, addressing audiences as diverse as Rotary International and the Air Force Academy; university students; staff and Members of Congress; journalists and leaders of civil society. From l997 to 2003, she served as Assistant Secretary-General for External Relations on appointment by Secretary-General Kofi Annan. She was responsible for outreach to non-governmental organizations and was the contact point for the Secretary-General with parliamentarians, the academic world, religious leaders and other groups committed to peace, justice, development and human rights. Prior to that, Mrs. Sorensen served from 1993 to 1996 as Special Adviser for Public Policy on appointment by Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali where her duties included directing the UN's global Fiftieth Anniversary observances in l995. She led the planning of conferences, debates, documentaries, concerts and exhibits; the preparation of books and curricular materials, and the coordination of the UN50 Summit at in which l80 Presidents and Prime Ministers participated. She is an experienced public speaker and often represented the World Organization in this country and abroad. Gillian Sorensen is a graduate of Smith College and studied at the Sorbonne. In the fall of 2002, on leave from the UN, she was a Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government (Institute of Politics) at Harvard University. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy. Previously, she served as a Board Member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting on appointment by the President of the United States. In addition to her public service, she has been active in politics and was a delegate to three national Presidential conventions.

He has published more than ten books of poetry, most recently *Selected Poems* (ARC Publications, 2002); *Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems* (2000); *Honorable Amendments* (1995); and* Healing Song for the Inner Ear* (1985). His other collections include: *Images of Kin* (1977), which won the Melville-Cane Award from the Poetry Society of America and was nominated for the National Book Award; *History is Your Heartbea*t (1971), which won the Black Academy of Arts & Letters Award for poetry; and *Dear John, Dear Coltrane* (1970), which was nominated for the National Book Award. He was the first poet laureate of the State of Rhode Island from 1988 to 1993. Michael S. Harper is university professor and professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970. He lives in Barrington, Rhode Island.

Dr. Charles "Stormy" Mayo is a Senior Scientist at the Center for Coastal Studies in Provincetown, MA. Dr. Mayo directs the habitat studies program at the Center, heading up an effort to understand the interaction between endangered large whales and the ecosystems that support them. In recent years he has directed an investigation of the interaction between food resources and northern right whales with a particular emphasis on the impact of anthropogenic change on plankton patches. His technical work has ranged from complex computer modeling of foraging movements to the development of new techniques for documenting whale behavior and zooplankton distribution. Additionally, Dr. Mayo is also known for his efforts to reduce whale mortality caused by entanglement in fishing gear through the development of new management techniques and the development of methods to rescue entangled whales at sea.

Stephen Van Evera teaches international relations at MIT, where he is professor of political science. He received his B.A. in government from Harvard and his Ph.D. in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. His research interests include the causes and prevention of war, U.S. foreign policy, U.S. national security policy, and social science methods. He is author of *Guide to Methods for Students of Political Science* (Cornell, 1997), *Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict* (Cornell, 1999), and articles on the causes of World War I, nationalism and the war problem, American intervention in the Third World, American defense policy, and Europe's future international relations. During the 1980s he was managing editor of the journal International Security.