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Paul Krugman is the world's preeminent economist, having won the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics. An insightful, outspoken Op-Ed columnist for the *New York Times*, he is a passionate and articulate speaker, with a gift for relating global economic events to his audiences, and committed to speaking the truth as he sees it in the most compelling terms. He is the author of several books, including most recently, *The Conscience of a Liberal*, and of *The Great Unraveling*, a bestseller. In response to the current financial crisis, Professor Krugman has released an updated edition of his prescient 1999 book, *The Return of Depression Economics*.

Mary Bonauto has been the Civil Rights Project Director at Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) since 1990. Her practice concentrates on impact litigation for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, as well as people living with HIV or AIDS. She has litigated widely in the state and federal courts and agencies of the six New England states since 1990 on issues of employment discrimination, custody, free speech and civil rights. In 1999, she and two Vermont co-counsel won a ruling that same-sex couples are entitled to all of the benefits and protections of civil marriage in the case of Baker v. State of Vermont. This ruling prompted the Vermont legislature to enact the nation's first civil union law for same-sex couples. She was lead counsel in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, which resulted in the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court declaring that prohibiting civil marriage for same-sex couples is unconstitutional. Mary is a graduate of Hamilton College and Northeastern University School of Law. She serves as a Vice Chair of the Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Committee of the IRR Section of the ABA.

Derek Walcott was born in 1930 in the town of Castries in Saint Lucia, one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has had a strong influence on Walcott's life and work. Both his grandmothers were said to have been the descendants of slaves. His father, a Bohemian watercolourist, died when Derek and his twin brother, Roderick, were only a few years old. His mother ran the town's Methodist school. After studying at St. Mary's College in his native island and at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, Walcott moved in 1953 to Trinidad, where he has worked as theatre and art critic. At the age of 18, he made his debut with *25 Poems*, but his breakthrough came with the collection of poems, *In a Green Night* (1962). In 1959, he founded the Trinidad Theatre Workshop which produced many of his early plays. Walcott has been an assiduous traveller to other countries but has always, not least in his efforts to create an indigenous drama, felt himself deeply-rooted in Caribbean society with its cultural fusion of African, Asiatic and European elements. For many years, he has divided his time between Trinidad, where he has his home as a writer, and Boston University, where he teaches literature and creative writing.

Mark Daly's research focuses primarily on statistical genetics and is moving in several exciting directions. Work in the Daly lab is focused on understanding patterns of variation in the human genome and translating that knowledge into more effective statistical methods for finding the variation responsible for the disease. Daly was recently appointed to a new position as a Whitehead/Pfizer Fellow in computational biology. He comes to bioinformatics via a physics background. He received his BS in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989 and joined the Whitehead Institute shortly thereafter as a senior software engineer. In 1996, he was appointed director of the Human Genetics Informatics group at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research. Daly is active in the traditional statistical genetics field of linkage analysis. His group has developed GENEHUNTER software, which is used by hundreds of labs worldwide, for performing statistical analysis designed to identify genomic regions containing disease risk factors in families. He also serves as an advisor and analyst to several international genetic research collaborations studying inflammatory bowel disease and psoriasis.

Historian Stanley I. Kutler has been a part of the Law School faculty since 1987, and specializes in American legal and political institutions. He has published extensively in a wide range of fields within American history, concentrating on American constitutional history and the 20th century. Most recently he is probably best known as the author of *Abuse of Power: The New Nixon Tapes*. Professor Kutler's other books include *The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon*; *The American Inquisition*, winner of the Silver Gavel Award, American Bar Association, 1983; *Privilege and Creative Destruction: The Charles River Bridge Case*; and *Judicial Power and Reconstruction Politics*. In addition, Professor Kutler has authored or edited a half-dozen textbooks in various fields of American history. His scholarly articles have appeared in leading history and legal periodicals. Most recently, he has edited the four-volume work, *Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century America*, winner of the prize for the best reference work by the Association of Book Publishers, and *The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War*.