Forum Network

Masha Gessen is a Russian and American journalist, author, and activist who writes in both Russian and English and has built a career in journalism in Russia and the United States. Gessen identifies as a lesbian and has written extensively on LGBT rights and help founded the Pink Triangle Campaign in Moscow. She has been described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist." Gessen voluntarily left Russia in 2013 when tightening anti-gay and lesbian policies threatened her family.

Paul Greenberg is the author of the James Beard Award-winning New York Times bestseller Four Fish and a regular contributor to The New York Times. He has also written for National Geographic Magazine, GQ, The Times (of London), Vogue, and lectures on seafood and the environment around the world. He is currently a fellow with The Safina Center and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation. His most recent book, American Catch, is published by the Penguin Press and explores how the United States, a country that controls more ocean than any other on earth, came to be a seafood debtor nation, importing more than 90% of its seafood from abroad.

Peter Molnar is a professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Aquaculture project lead, Conservation Department at the New England Aquarium and 2013 John H. Cunningham Award Winner.

Elizabeth Hope Cushing, Ph.D., is the author of a forthcoming book about Boston landscape architect Arthur A. Shurcliff (1870–1957), based on her doctoral dissertation for the American and New England Studies program at Boston University. She is also a coauthor, with Keith N. Morgan and Roger Reed, of the newly published book Community by Design. Cushing is a practicing landscape historian who consults, writes, and lectures on landscape matters. She has written cultural landscape history reports for the Taft Art Museum in Cincinnati, the National Park Service, the Department of Conservation and Recreation of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and other institutions and agencies.

Jesse Bellemare is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Smith College. His research focuses on questions in plant ecology, biogeography and evolution at a variety of spatial and temporal scales. In particular, he is interested in how historical processes or effects may influence the contemporary distribution of plant species and the present-day structure of plant communities.

Professor Ned Friedman is the Director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University and an Arnold Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. His research program focuses on the organismic interfaces between developmental, phylogenetic and evolutionary biology. Remarkable recent advances in the study of the phylogenetic relationships of organisms have provided the raw materials for critical studies of character evolution in plants, animals, fungi, and all other forms of life. Armed with hypotheses of relationships among organisms, he seeks to explore how patterns of morphology, anatomy and cell biology have evolved through the modification of developmental processes.

Noah Wilson-Rich is a behavioral ecologist, a beekeeper, and the founder of The Best Bees Company™. He is a 2007 graduate from the Bee School at the Essex County Beekeeper’s Association in Topsfield, MA. Noah earned his B.S. in Biology at Northeastern University (2005) and his Ph.D. in Biology at Tufts University (2011).