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Robert Selman served as chair of the Human Development and Psychology area from 2000 to 2004. He is the founder within this area of the Risk and Prevention Program in 1992 and served as its first director through 1999. At the Harvard Medical School, he is professor of psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, where he serves as senior associate at the Judge Baker Children's Center and at the Department of Psychiatry at Children's Hospital Boston. Selman has engaged in research and practice focused on how to help children develop social awareness and engagement competencies as a way to reduce risks to their health and to promote their social relationships as well as their academic performance. Currently, he does practice-based research, studying interpersonal and intergroup development across the age range from preschool through high school. His current work on the promotion of children's understanding of ways to get along with others from different backgrounds is conducted in the context of literacy and language arts curricula at the elementary level. Past work focused on the treatment of psychological disorders of youth in day school and residential treatment and the prevention of these disorders in children and adolescents placed at risk.

Carol Hampton Rasco is President and CEO of Reading Is Fundamental, Inc., America's oldest and largest nonprofit children's and family literacy organization. Prior to holding this position, Rasco was the executive director for government relations at the College Board. From 1997 through 2000, Rasco served as the Senior Adviser to US Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley, and as director of the America Reads Challenge, a four year national campaign to promote the importance of all children reading well and independently by the end of the third grade. Previously, Rasco worked for four years in the White House as domestic policy adviser to the president and directed the Domestic Policy Council.

Catherine Snow is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from McGill and worked for several years in the linguistics department of the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include children's language development as influenced by interaction with adults in home and preschool settings, literacy development as related to language skills and as influenced by home and school factors, and issues related to the acquisition of English oral and literacy skills by language minority children. She has co-authored books on language development (e.g., *Pragmatic Development* with Anat Ninio) and on literacy development (e.g., *Unfulfilled Expectations: Home and School Influences on Literacy*, with W. Barnes, J. Chandler, I. Goodman & L. Hemphill), and published widely on these topics in referred journals and edited volumes. Snow's contributions to the field include membership on several journal editorial boards, co-directorship for several years of the Child Language Data Exchange System, and editorship of Applied Psycholinguistics. She served as a board member at the Center for Applied Linguistics and a member of the National Research Council Committee on Establishing a Research Agenda on Schooling for Language Minority Children. She chaired the National Research Council Committee on Preventing Reading Difficulties in Young Children, which produced a report that has been widely adopted as a basis for reform of reading instruction and professional development. She currently serves on the NRC's Council for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and as president of the American Educational Research Association.

Jennifer Steele received her B.A. in psychology in 1995, and B.Ed. in 1996 from Queen's University. She then completed an Ed.M. in 1997 at the Harvard School of Education, and an M.A. in 1999 at the Harvard University Department of Psychology. Currently Steele is pursuing my Ph.D. in social psychology. Her research interests focus primarily on stereotyping and interpersonal expectancies. One main line of research that Steele has been pursuing examines the effect of gender and race primes on people's attitudes, evaluations, and behavior. Another line of research looks at the development of stereotypes among children. She have also been examining women's experiences with discrimination and stereotype threat in male-dominated academic areas.

Robert Serpell is Professor of Psychology at the University of Zambia. From 2003 to 2006 he was Vice-Chancellor of the University. He has conducted numerous studies on gaps in academic performance between ethnic groups, finding that even within a given society, different cognitive characteristics are emphasized from one situation to another and from one subculture to another. These differences extend not just to conceptions of intelligence but to what is considered adaptive or appropriate in a broader sense. Serpell's work shows how conceptions of intelligence vary from culture to culture, and that the majority of these views do not reflect Western ideas. Serpell and others have found that people in some African communities--especially where Western schooling has not yet become common--tend to blur the Western distinction between intelligence and social competence. In rural Zambia, for instance, the concept of nzelu includes both cleverness (chenjela) and responsibility (tumikila).

Michael T. Klare is the Five College Professor of Peace and World Security Studies, a joint appointment at Amherst College, Hampshire College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Director of the Five College Program in Peace and World Security Studies, a position he has held since 1985. Before assuming his present post, he served as Director of the Program on Militarism and Disarmament at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC. Professor Klare has written widely on US defense policy, the arms trade, and world security affairs. He is the author of numerous books. Professor Klare is also the defense correspondent of The Nation, and a contributing editor of Current History. Michael Klare serves on the board of directors of the Arms Control Association, and the advisory board of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch; he is also a member of the Committee on International Security Studies of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dorinda Carter Andrews is an assistant professor of teacher education. Her research interests include enhancing African-American student school achievement, examining how race impacts the teaching and learning process, and urban teacher preparation. Her current research projects focus on the racial and achievement self-conceptions of urban African American students and pre-service teachers' development of the necessary dispositions and critical consciousness for urban teaching.

P. Gabrielle Foreman is a literary historian and specialist on race and nineteenth-century reform movements. She is the author of dozens of articles and reviews, the editor or author of several books and has served on the editorial and consulting boards of some of the leading journals in American literature. Her most recent publications include *Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century* (forthcoming) and* Harriet Wilson's Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black* (Penguin Classics 2005) in which she and her co-editor "picked up one of the coldest trails in nineteenth-century African American studies" by uncovering the last forty years in the life of one of the most important early black women writers.

Richard C. Levy entered Emerson College in Boston in 1964. He majored in television and cinematography. After earning his BA, he joined Paramount Pictures International as intern to the President; this led to a career promoting feature films internationally. For Paramount, Levy did campaigns for over 30 films, including The Odd Couple and Barbarella . In 1971, Levy became a producer himself, co-founding a company and producing the first of over two dozen film and TV documentaries. In 1980, Levy was appointed to the Senior Executive Service of the Federal government, where he later became a principal architect of WORLDNET, U.S.I.A.'s interactive satellite network. In the meantime, Levy had begun to apply his creativity to inventing. Levy's invention specialty was, and remains, toys and games. Levy developed a line of Duncan yo-yo key chains in 1998. In the same year came the crowning achievement to date of Levy's career in toys and games: his licensing and co-development of Furby.In the past twenty years, Richard C. Levy has co-developed over 200 toys and games. Levy has worked extensively with major toy companies like Hasbro and Mattel. Yet he remains independent, with over 200 products and over 30 design and utility patents to his credit. In fact, Richard C. Levy has become a recognized supporter and advisor of aspiring independent inventors, through his frequent public appearances, interviews and the 12 books he has written.

Carol Bundy has written for film and art publications in both the UK and the US. She has two sons and lives in Cambridge, MA. She became interested in her great-great-great uncle, Charles Russell Lowell, when his worn saddle bags, rusted sword and spurs turned up after her grandmothers death in 1983.