Forum Network

Patricia Thrower Barmeyer is a partner in King & Spaldings' Atlanta office and the head of the firms Environmental Practice Group. She joined the firm in 1990 after serving 17 years as an assistant attorney general for the State of Georgia. At King & Spalding, Ms. Barmeyer has concentrated her practice in environmental litigation in the areas of water, waste, and air, as well as the defense of major environmental tort cases. Chambers USA Leading Lawyers for Business 2007 ranks Ms. Barmeyer as a Star Individual, and the top environmental lawyer in Georgia. Chambers also describes her as the consummate professional, the best out there, and mentions her amazing presentations in court.

Marc Pickard is a television reporter and anchor for 11Alive News, an NBC affiliate station in Atlanta, Georgia. Pickard has received several regional Emmy awards for his news reporting in Atlanta.

Chris Matthews hosts *Hardball with Chris Matthews*, Monday through Friday on MSNBC. Matthews is also the host of *The Chris Matthews Show*, a syndicated weekly news program produced by NBC News and distributed by NBC Universal Television Distribution. Matthews is a regular commentator on NBCs "Today" show. A television news anchor with remarkable depth of experience, Matthews has distinguished himself as a broadcast journalist, newspaper bureau chief, Presidential speechwriter, and best-selling author. Matthews covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the first all-races election in South Africa and the Good Friday Peace Talks in Northern Ireland. In 1997 and 1998, his digging in the National Archives produced a series of San Francisco Examiner scoops on the Nixon presidential tapes. Matthews has covered American presidential election campaigns since 1988, including the five-week recount of 2000. In 2005 Matthews covered the funeral of Pope John Paul II. In March 2004, he received the David Brinkley Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism. He has also been awarded The Abraham Lincoln Award from the Union League of Philadelphia and in 2005 he received the Gold Medal Award from the Pennsylvania Society.

James Surowiecki has been a staff writer at *The New Yorker* since 2000, responsible for "The Financial Page". Surowiecki came to *The New Yorker* from *Slate*, where he wrote "the Moneybox column". He has also been a contributing editor at *Fortune* and a staff writer at *Talk*. Previously, he was the business columnist for New York magazine. He has contributed to *The Wall Street Journal*, *Wired*, *the New York Times Magazine*, *the Washington Post*, and *Lingua Franca*, and has written on subjects ranging from Silicon Valley to college basketball. His book, *The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations*, was published in 2004.

**Yochai Benkler** is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked economy and society.

Cassandra Pybus is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney, and is the founder of the Australian Humanities Review. Pybus has published extensively on Australian, American and Transatlantic history. Her interests span as broadly as Australian social history, colonial history in North America, South East Asia, Africa and Australia, slavery and the history of labor, and the history of Tasmanian Aborigines. She has won numerous awards, most recently the Adelaide Festival Prize for Non Fiction in 2001 for her controversial book The Devil and James McAuley.

Jack Murrah was born in rural Alabama in 1949 and graduated from public high school in Birmingham in 1966. He attended Vanderbilt University, where he earned a bachelors degree in philosophy in 1971. Later he earned a masters degree in English from Middlebury College. Between 1970 and 1978, he taught high school at the Alabama boys reform school, the Chamberlain-Hunt Military Academy in Mississippi, and Baylor School in Chattanooga. In 1978 he joined the staff of the Lyndhurst Foundation, where he has served as a program officer, executive director, and, since 1989, and president. Lyndhurst is a private foundation that provides support for environmental conservation, public school reform, downtown and inner-city revitalization, and cultural activities, primarily in Chattanooga and the surrounding region. Currently he serves on the boards of the National Center for Family Philanthropy, the Rural School and Community Trust, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Community Impact of Chattanooga, and the Tennessee Aquarium. He is also a member of the Mayors Community Education Alliance in Chattanooga.

Grant Romer came to George Eastman House in 1975 upon entering the Graduate Photography Program at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He received his bachelor's degree from Pratt Institute where he began formal study of the history of photography in 1964 while a student of fine arts. Specializing in the history and practice of the daguerreotype, Romer began working with Alice Swan, then photograph conservator at George Eastman House. Following Swan's departure in 1978 and the establishment of the institution's conservation profile, Romer became its conservator. With strong commitment to sharing the learning resources of the Museum, he opened the laboratory to others through internships, contributing to the professional development of many of the international leaders in the field today. In response to a growing demand for learning opportunity in the specialty of photograph preservation, Romer established the Certificate Program in Photographic Preservation and Archival Practice at GEH in 1989, which eventually served as the basis for the current Advanced Residency Program in Photograph Conservation, which he now directs. Romer is well known worldwide as a lecturer and author on many topics of photographic history and conservation.