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Jerry Remy is a former second baseman in Major League Baseball who is currently enjoying success in broadcasting, working for the New England Sports Network (NESN). He began as NESN's Boston Red Sox color analyst in March of 1988, teaming up with veteran play-by-play announcer Ned Martin. He now broadcasts along with play-by-play announcer Don Orsilo. Voted Massachusetts' favorite TV announcer by *Sports Illustrated* in 2004, Remy has been honored with 4 Emmy Awards and was named the Massachusetts Sportscaster of the Year by the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association in 2004. In 1971, Remy was drafted in the 8th round by the California Angels. He played three seasons for the Angels starting in 1975 before being traded to the Boston Red Sox. He played second base for the Red Sox from 1978-1985, when a knee injury forced his retirement during spring training of 1986. Remy had his best year in 1978 when he batted .278, scored 87 runs, stole 30 bases and was selected to the American League All-Star team. He finished his career with a .275 average, 208 stolen bases and a .981 fielding percentage. Bill James in his *Historical Abstract* rated him as the 100th greatest second baseman of all time, as of 2002.

Sheldon M. Stern is historian and director of the American History Project for High School Students at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts.

Ernest Green was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, on September 22, 1941. Green made history as the only senior among the Little Rock Nine. His place in Arkansas civil rights history was solidified when he became the first African-American to graduate from the previously all-white high school in May of 1958. An active member of the community from an early age, Green regularly attended church. He was involved in the Boy Scouts and eventually became an Eagle Scout. He was a student at Horace Mann High School before volunteering to integrate all-white Central High School. Green persevered through a year of daily harassment by some of his fellow students to become the first African-American Central High graduate on May 25, 1958. Sitting with Green's family at the event was the Martin Luther King, Jr., who attended the graduation virtually unnoticed. After graduating from high school, Green attended Michigan State University, earning a bachelor's degree in 1962 and a master's degree in 1964 in sociology. Afterwards, he served as the director for the A. Phillip Randolph Education Fund from 1968 to 1977. He then was appointed as the assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Affairs during President Jimmy Carter's administration from 1977 to 1981. Currently, Green is managing director at Lehman Brothers in Washington, D.C. and has been with the company since 1987. He has served on numerous boards, such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation.

Mish Michaels is an Emmy Award winning broadcast meteorologist and environmental reporter. She joined the WBZ-TV Weather Team in September 2001. Before joining the WBZ-TV Weather Team, Michaels worked for The Weather Channel (TWC) as co-host of Atmospheres, a prime-time weather magazine show. Prior to that, she worked for WHDH (NBC) in Boston from 1992-2000. During that time, she was twice named "Boston's Best Meteorologist" by the Improper Bostonian. Before joining WHDH, she worked as weekend meteorologist/environmental reporter for WMUR-TV 9 in Manchester, New Hampshire. She was born in Kolkata, India. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Meteorology from Cornell University in New York and Master's degree in Technology from Harvard University.

Anouar Majid is founding chair and professor of English at the University of New England and the author of *Freedom and Orthodoxy: Islam and Difference in the Post-Andalusian Age*, *Unveiling Traditions: Postcolonial Islam in a Polycentric World*, and *Si Yussef*, a novel. He is also co-founder and editor of *Tingis*, a Moroccan-American magazine of ideas and culture.

Howard Zinn grew up in Brooklyn in a working-class, immigrant household. At the age of 18 he became a shipyard worker and three years later joined the Air Force. He flew bomber missions during World War II, after which he returned to Brooklyn, got married, and occupied a basement apartment. His experiences in the shipyard and in the Air Force helped shape his opposition to war and passion for history. He went to college under the GI Bill and received his Ph.D. in history from Columbia University. He taught at Spelman College, where he served as an advisor to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and worked with young Civil Rights Movement activists, including Alice Walker and Marian Wright Edelman. He was fired from Spelman for his support of the students. Zinn led antiwar protests, went to Vietnam with Daniel Berrigan, and testified in Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers trial. His politically engaged life brought him into many arenas: imprisonment for civil disobedience, fights for open debate in universities, and activist work from the Vietnam era to the present. Zinn is the author of dozens of books, including the classic *A People's History of the United States* and *Declarations of Independence*. His essays have appeared in more than 20 books, and his plays include *Emma*, *Unsafe Distances*, and *Marx in Soho*. Zinn has won numerous awards, including the Albert J. Beveridge Prize from the American Historical Association, the Thomas Merton Award, the Eugene V. Debs Award, the Upton Sinclair Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and the Havens Center Award for Lifetime Contribution to Critical Scholarship. His best-known work, *A People's History of the United States*, earned the New England Book Award for nonfiction and was nominated for an American Book Award.

A former high school teacher and college professor, Dr. Urbanski is an active proponent of change in education. In Rochester, he proposed and designed an internship program for new teachers; a peer review intervention plan; a career ladder; and a homework hot-line service for students. Dr. Urbanski is the director of the newly established Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN), aimed at creating a new vision of teachers' unions that supports needed changes in education. Dr. Urbanski has appeared on several nationally-broadcast television programs, including the NBC *Today Show*, ABC *News World Report*, CBS *Newswatch*, and PBS *MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour*. Articles about him and his work have appeared in *U.S. News and World Report*, *Teacher Magazine*, *EducationWeek*, *The New York Times*, *The American Teacher*, *Newsweek*, *Fortune Magazine*, *Business Week*, *Los Angeles Times*, and many other publications.

Evan Thomas was made Editor at Large of *Newsweek* in September of 2006. He is the magazine's lead writer on major news stories and the author of many longer features, including *Newsweek*'s special behind-the-scenes issues on presidential elections, and more than a hundred cover stories. Thomas was pivotal in spearheading *Newsweek*'s award-winning coverage on the war on terror from the Washington, D.C. bureau. His reporting and writing on the terror events of September 11 and the Iraq War contributed to *Newsweek*'s being honored with the most prestigious awards in the magazine industry-the National Magazine Award for General Excellence for 2002 and 2004. Since 1992, Thomas has been a regular weekly panelist on the syndicated public affairs talk show, *Inside Washington*. He has appeared on numerous television shows as a commentator, including: NBC's *Meet the Press*, *TODAY*, CBS's *Face the Nation*, ABC's *Nightline*, *Good Morning America*, CNN's *Larry King Live*, PBS's *Charlie Rose*, and *The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer*. Thomas is also the author of six books, all published by Simon & Schuster: *Sea of Thunder*, about the war in the Pacific (2006), a *New York Times* bestseller; *John Paul Jones*, a biography of the American revolutionary (2003), a *New York Times* bestseller; *Robert Kennedy: His Life* (2000); *The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA* (1995); *The Man to See: The Life of Edward Bennett Williams* (1991); and *The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made* (with Walter Isaacson, 1986). In 2003-04, Thomas was a visiting professor at Princeton. In 2004-05, he was a visiting professor at Harvard, and in 2006-2007, he was a visiting professor at Harvard and Princeton. In the fall of 2007 he will begin a five-year term at Princeton as Ferris Professor of Journalism. He is a fellow of the Society of American Historians and a former trustee of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression. He is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School. He lives with his wife and two children in Washington, D.C.

Roberta Schaefer, the founding Executive Director of The Research Bureau, was elected President and CEO in 2008. Under her direction, the Bureau has grown from a one-person office preparing studies on municipal issues to a five-person regional center of information and expertise in all areas of public policy in Central Massachusetts. In the 24 years of its existence, Dr. Schaefer has researched, authored and edited more than 150 reports and organized over 140 public forums on issues of concern to the Greater Worcester region. These programs and reports reach a broad audience throughout the region. She is often called upon to testify before local, regional and state committees, and has been the featured speaker for public service organizations and business events. Since 2000, Dr. Schaefer has overseen The Research Bureau's citizen-informed government performance measurement program funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, which has received local, state, and national recognition for its citizen engagement and collaboration with government leading to measurable improvements in government performance. Dr. Schaefer holds a B.A. from Queens College of the City University of New York and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. Dr. Schaefer served as a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education from 1996 to 2007 and served as Vice-chair from 1998 to 2001. She is also a director of the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, and a corporator of Bay State Savings Bank, Greater Worcester Community Foundation, and the Worcester Art Museum. With her husband, David Schaefer, Professor of Political Science at Holy Cross College, she has co-edited two books (Sir Henry Taylor's *The Statesman* and *The Future of Cities*) and authored many articles in professional journals.

Nancy Burnham graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1987 with a PhD in physics. Her dissertation concerned the surface analysis of photovoltaic materials. As a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the Naval Research Laboratory, she became interested in scanning probe microscopy, in particular its application to detecting materials properties at the nanoscale. After three years as a von Humboldt Fellow in Germany at Forschungszentrum Juelich, she spent another 6 years in Europe, principally at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland, all the while pursuing the mechanical properties of nanostructures and instrumentation for nanomechanics. She became an associate professor of physics at WPI in January of 2000. Her international experience also includes sejours at the University of Bordeaux, Tokyo Institute of Technology, and the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm (an exchange school with WPI). Invited, tutorial, or plenary speaker at approximately 40 conferences, author or co-author of roughly 60 publications with an h-index of 23, she is as well active in professional societies as, e.g., Secretary of the Nanometer Structures Committee of the IUVSTA and Treasurer of the Nanoscience and Technology Division of the AVS. She was the recipient of the 2001 Nanotechnology Recognition Award from the latter organization and was a 2002 Institute of Physics of Ireland Lecturer.