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Scott Ollinger earned a Bachelor's degree in Ecology and Environmental Science from Purchase College in 1989 and Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Natural Resources from the University of New Hampshire in 1992 and 2000. Prior to joining the EOS/CSRC faculty, he served as a Research Scientist in Complex Systems Research Center from 1995 to 2000. His research interests span a variety of topics within the fields of ecology and biogeochemistry including carbon and nitrogen cycling, forest productivity and succession, plant-soil interactions, remote sensing, ecosystem modeling and the effects of multiple environmental stressors on forests. He is currently active in several research projects that involve a combination of field studies and modeling.

Since completing the Natural Resources graduate program at UNH in 1994, Mary Martin has continued working at the Complex Systems Research Center as a research assistant professor. Martin's work has focused primarily on the use of hyperspectral remote sensing data for the determination of forest productivity, nutrient cycling and species classification. This work has utilized data from NASA's Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) which has been flown extensively over a number of sites in the northeastern US. This work is a multi-investigator effort involving UNH faculty/staff and researchers from the US Forest Service Norteastern Station in Durham. Extensive field data collections, GIS data, remote sensing imagery, and ecosystem modeling are combined in this effort to scale relationships derived from intensive plot level sampling to the full extent of our image data.

Born in Plymouth, Vermont, on July 4, 1872, Coolidge was the son of a village storekeeper. He was graduated from Amherst College with honors, and entered law and politics in Northampton, Massachusetts. Slowly, methodically, he went up the political ladder from councilman in Northampton to Governor of Massachusetts, as a Republican. En route he became thoroughly conservative. As President, Coolidge demonstrated his determination to preserve the old moral and economic precepts amid the material prosperity which many Americans were enjoying. He refused to use Federal economic power to check the growing boom or to ameliorate the depressed condition of agriculture and certain industries. His first message to Congress in December 1923 called for isolation in foreign policy, and for tax cuts, economy, and limited aid to farmers. He rapidly became popular. In 1924, as the beneficiary of what was becoming known as "Coolidge prosperity," he polled more than 54 percent of the popular vote.

Randall Kenan, writer, biographer of James Baldwin, and author of *The Fire This Time* (2007), looks at the life of Baldwin in the context of today -- where we are with civil rights, religion and impoverished African Americans.

Richard Smith is an independent historian. For more than a decade he has been “becoming” Thoreau: dressing up in meticulous 19th-century regalia, reading his essays in front of crowds, fielding questions (in the first person) from the public, about the man’s personal life and politics.

Lewis H. Lapham is a national correspondent for *Harper's Magazine*. He is also the editor of *Lapham's Quarterly*, a journal of history which debuted spring of 2007. Mr. Lapham is the author of numerous books, including* Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, Gag Rule,* and *Pretensions to Empire*. *The New York Times* has likened him to H.L. Mencken; *Vanity Fair *has suggested a strong resemblance to Mark Twain, and Tom Wolfe compared him to Montaigne. Mr. Lapham currently writes *Notebook*, a bi-monthly essay for *Harper's* that won a National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity. He has also written for *Life, Commentary, the National Review, the Yale Literary Magazine, Elle, Fortune, Forbes, the American Spectator, Vanity Fair, Travel and Leisure, Golf, Golf Digest, Parade, Channels, Maclean's, the London Observer, the New York Times*, and *the Wall Street Journal*. Lewis H. Lapham was inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors' Hall of Fame in February of 2007. A native of San Francisco, Mr. Lapham has studied history at Yale College and Cambridge University.

Barbara Haber is the author of *From Hardtack to Home Fries: An Uncommon History of American Cooks and Meals*. Praise for the book came from *Julia Child*, *Gourmet Magazine*, and other food notables as well as academic historians, and a chapter appeared in Best Food Writing 2002. Haber has also written on food topics for *Harvard Magazine*, *Yankee Magazine*, the *Los Angeles Times*, the *Dictionary of American History*, *Notable American Women* and many other popular and professional publications, including *Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking* and *From Betty Crocker to Feminist Food Studies*, which she co-edited with Arlene Avakian. Barbara Haber currently serves on the awards board of the James Beard Foundation where she initiated and serves as curator for Beard on Books, a speaker series featuring notable food writers and cookbook authors.

Armand Nicholi is a practicing psychiatrist, Harvard University professor and author of *The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life*.

Ward's academic career has included teaching posts and professional connections with Ohio State University, the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the University of Calgary, and the California Institute of Technology. He was elected as a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences in 1984. Peter Ward specializes in the Cretaceous Tertiary extinction event and mass extinctions generally. He has published books on biodiversity and the fossil record. His 1992 book *On Methuselah's Trail* received a "Golden Trilobite Award" from the Paleontological Society as the best popular science book of the year. Ward is co-author, along with astronomer Donald Brownlee, of the best-selling *Rare Earth: Why Complex Life Is Uncommon in the Universe*, published in 2000. In that work, the authors suggest that the universe is fundamentally hostile to advanced life, and that, while simple life might be abundant, the likelihood of widespread lifeforms as advanced as those on Earth is marginal. According to Ward's April 2007 book, *Under a Green Sky*, all but one of the major extinction events in history have been brought on by climate change the same global warming that occurs today. The author argues that events in the past can give valuable information about the future of our planet.

Jean Frazier is director of the Child and Adolescent Neuropsychiatric Research Program and the co-director of CHA's Center for Child and Adolescent Development. Dr. Frazier also serves as an assistant professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Frazier is currently involved in research to study the possible clinical and biological associations of the psychotic process in youths with mental illness. In addition, Dr. Frazier has published numerous articles and book chapters and as been honored by the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) and the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society.