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George Mitchell became familiar with the workings of the U.S. Senate in the 1960s, when he served as executive assistant to Democratic senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. In 1980, when Muskie resigned to become secretary of state, Mitchell was appointed to fill the vacancy. As a senator, he became a leading figure for the Democratic Party, and was credited with helping his party win back the majority in the Senate in 1986. Senator Mitchell was elected majority leader in 1989, a position he held until his retirement from the Senate in 1995. He was known among his colleagues in the Senate as an honest leader and skillful legislative strategist. After leaving the Senate, Mitchell was instrumental in negotiating a peace agreement in Northern Ireland and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Senator Mitchell returned to the Senate in 1999 to participate in the Leader's Lecture Series.

**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.

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.

Mr. Kaplan, the founder and chairman of the Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers, and his wife, Rita, have been in the forefront of unselfish philanthropy in support of arts, education, religion, health and social welfare for many years. They are the founders of the Rita J. and Stanley H. Kaplan Comprehensive Cancer Center at NYU and serve on the boards of many Philanthropic institutions, too numerous to list here.

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.

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.

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.

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.