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Robert Penn Warren was born in Guthrie, Todd County, Kentucky, on April 24, 1905. He entered Vanderbilt University in 1921, where he became the youngest member of the group of Southern poets called the Fugitives, which included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Donald Davidson, and Merrill Moore. Warren's first poems were published in *The Fugitive*, a magazine which the group published from 1922 to 1925. The Fugitives were advocates of the rural Southern agrarian tradition and based their poetry and critical perspective on classical aesthetic ideals. Though regarded as one of the best poets of his generation, Warren was better known as a novelist and received tremendous recognition for *All the King's Men*, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1947. Warren's poetry became less formal and more expansive, garnering even higher critical acclaim: his *Promises: Poems, 1954-1956* won the Sidney Hillman Award, the Edna St. Vincent Millay Memorial Award, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 1979 he earned a third Pulitzer Prize, this time for *Now and Then: Poems, 1976-1978*. Warren served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1972 until 1988, and was selected as a MacArthur Fellow in 1981. On February 26, 1986, Warren was named the first U.S. Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He died September 15, 1989.

Allen Tate (1899-1979), American poet, critic, biographer, and editor, was a founder and editor of *the Fugitive*. Tate's earliest publications included the interpretative biographies *Stonewall Jackson* (1928) and *Jefferson Davi*s (1929). His first collection of verse, *Poems, 1928-31*, was published in 1932. While teaching English literature at several colleges, including Princeton, he held the chair of poetry at the Library of Congress from 1934 to 1944. He edited *the Sewanee Review* from 1944 to 1946. After 1951 he taught English literature at the University of Minnesota and lectured extensively at universities throughout the country. Tate's creative work always echoed his preoccupations as a southerner. His penetrating and original novel, *The Fathers* (1938), which is experimental in form and style and in many ways similar to some of William Faulkner's fiction, is a tortured exploration of the guilt and moral significance of Tate's heritage as a son of the Confederacy. In typical modernist fashion, Tate was determined in his poetry to be "unromantic." His poetic masterpiece, the "Ode to the Confederate Dead" (1928), is an elegy characterized by the density of its imagery, irony, and irresolvable ambiguity. Tate died in Nashville, TN, on Feb. 9, 1979. During his lifetime, he published 20 books and received many literary honors, including the Bollingen Prize for poetry.

Born in Battle Creek, Michigan, Sheehan graduated from Battle Creek College and received his master's and Ph.D. degrees in organic chemistry from the University of Michigan. He began a 31-year teaching career at MIT in 1946. Sheehan's inventiveness extended beyond medical science. At the beginning of World War II, he and W.E. Bachmann of the University of Michigan devised a new and practical method of manufacturing the important military high explosive RDX (cyclonite), which replaced TNT as the basic explosive for rocket, bomb, and torpedo warheads. In 1953 and 1954 he served as a scientific liaison officer with the American Embassy in London for the Office of Naval Research. He was later a scientific adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson. During his lifetime he was awarded more than 40 patents.

As a mathematics student at Jesus College, Cambridge, Bronowski co-edited with William Empson the literary periodical *Experiment*, which first appeared in 1928. Bronowski would pursue this sort of dual activity, in both the mathematical and literary worlds, throughout his professional life. He was also a strong chess player, earning a half-blue while at Cambridge and composing numerous chess problems for the British Chess Magazine between 1926 and 1970. He received a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1935, writing a dissertation in algebraic geometry. From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at the University College of Hull. Bronowski was an associate director of the Salk Institute from 1964.

Margaret Mead (1901-78) taught generations of Americans about the value of looking carefully and openly at other cultures to better understand the complexities of being human. Scientist, explorer, writer, and teacher, Mead, who worked in the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1926 until her death, brought the serious work of anthropology into the public consciousness. In addition to her work at the Museum, Margaret Mead taught, wrote more best-selling books, contributed a regular column to Redbook magazine, lectured, and was frequently interviewed on radio and television. A deeply committed activist, Mead often testified on social issues before the United States Congress and other government agencies. She hoped that through all of these efforts others would learn about themselves and work toward a more humane and socially responsible society.

Born in Argentina, Golijov grew up in Eastern Europe and moved to Israel in 1983 to study with Mark Kopytman at the Rubin Academy in Jerusalem. He moved to the US in 1986, where he earned his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, studying with George Crumb. Golijov has been Associate Professor of Music at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, since 1991, and also serves as a faculty member at the Boston Conservatory and the Tanglewood Music Center. Golijov's impressive list of commissions is quite long and includes the St. Lawrence String Quartet, the Kronos Quartet, the Spoleto USA Festival, Lincoln Center, the Boston Symphony, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Schleswig-Holstein Festival. His most well-known work, "La Pasin Seg?n San Marcos" ("St. Mark's Passion"), was commissioned by Helmuth Rilling to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Johann Sebastian Bach's death. Premiered in 2000 by the Schola Cantorum of Caracas, the piece has subsequently been performed in the US and recorded on the Hnnsler label. Golijov has served as composer-in-residence at Music from Marlboro, Spoleto, Merkin Hall in New York City and the LA Philharmonic's Music Alive series.

Tod Machover has been widely recognized as one of the most important and innovative composers of his generation. His music breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries, offering a synthesis of acoustic and electronic sound, of symphony orchestras and interactive computers, of operatic arias and rock songs, and that delivers serious and powerful messages in an accessible and immediate way. After studying composition at the Juilliard School with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions, Machover was Director of Musical Research at Pierre Boulez's IRCAM Institute in Paris (1978-85). He is Associate Professor of Music and Media at the MIT Media Lab, where he is also co-director of the new *Things That Think *consortium. Machover's music has been commissioned and performed by many of the world's most important musicians and ensembles, such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the London Sinfonietta, the Ensemble InterContemporain, the Ensemble Modern, and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. His work has received numerous prizes and awards, and in 1995 he was named a "Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres," one of France's highest cultural honors. Machover's award-winning opera "VALIS" was commissioned by the Centre Pompidou in Paris to celebrate its tenth anniversary in 1987. He composed an unusual mini-opera, "Media/Medium," in 1994 for the magicians Penn and Teller, who toured it throughout the United States. In addition to his work as a composer, Machover is widely noted as a designer of new technology for music. He is the inventor of Hyperinstruments, a technology that uses smart computers to augment musical expression. Some of these hyperinstruments have been designed for such diverse virtuosi as Yo-Yo Ma and Prince, and the "Hyperstring Trilogy" is one of the culminating points of this development. Another direction that hyperinstrument work has taken since 1991 has been towards instruments, tools and environments for non-professional musicians in an attempt to bring creativity and expression to everyday life. The Brain Opera is the culminating point to date of this path. After the Brain Opera, Machover will be working on a new hyperstring work for the Kronos Quartet, and an opera about the CIA for the Houston Grand Opera.

Theater, film and opera director Julie Taymor's most recent film is *Frida*, starring Salma Hayek and Alfred Molina. The film garnered six Oscar nominations, winning two. Taymor made her feature film directorial debut in 1999 with *Titus*, starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Based on Shakespeare's play, *Titus Andronicus*, her adapted screenplay is published in an illustrated book by Newmarket Press. On her work for the stage, Taymor has received numerous awards for her play, *The Lion King*, which opened at the New Amsterdam Theater in 1997, including two Tony Awards: for best direction of a musical and for her original costume designs. The Lion King most recently premiered in South Africa and opens in Paris in October 2007. Taymor's stage production of *Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus* was produced off- Broadway by Theatre For a New Audience in 1994. Other directing credits include *The Tempest*, *The Taming of the Shrew*, *The Transposed Heads*, and* Liberty's Taken*, an original musical co-created with David Suehsdorf and Elliot Goldenthal. In 1991 Taymor received a MacArthur genius Fellowship. She has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, two OBIE Awards, the first Annual Dorothy B. Chandler Award in Theater, and the 1990 Brandeis Creative Arts Award. An illustrated book on her career, *Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire*, was recently expanded and revised by Harry N. Abrams. Her book, *The Lion King: Pride Rock on Broadway*, is published by Hyperion. An illustrated book, *Frida: Bringing Frida Kahlo's Life and Art to Film*, is available from Newmarket Press.

Professor of biomedical engineering, University Professor, and co-director of the Center for BioDynamics, Professor Collins is part of the team of scientists who created the world's first genetic toggle switch. This mechanism is designed to control gene activity and has potential applications for treating a variety of diseases. For his extraordinary agility of mind and for his exceptional teaching ability, Professor Collins received the Metcalf Cup and Prize, Boston University's most prestigious teaching award. Professor Collins has been named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. Designation as HHMI investigators gives this elite group creative license to pursue novel, high risk avenues of research, with a total of more than $600 million awarded during their first 5-year term. Once established, investigators typically receive about $1 million per year.

Dr. Angela Belcher is a materials chemist with expertise in the fields of biomaterials, biomolecular materials, organic-inorganic interfaces and solid state chemistry. The focus of Dr. Belchers research is understanding and using the process by which nature makes materials in order to design novel hybrid organic-inorganic electronic and magnetic materials on new length scales. Her research is very interdisciplinary in nature and brings together the fields of inorganic chemistry, materials chemistry, biochemistry, molecular biology and electrical engineering. Among her awards are the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering (2000), and the Du Pont Young Investigators Award (1999). Her research was mentioned in a July 2001 *Forbes* magazine cover story on nanotechnology.

Leonard P. Guarente is an American biologist best known for his research on life span extension in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. He is currently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is Novartis Professor of Biology. Guarente is recognized as the leading proponent of the hypothesis that caloric restriction slows aging by activation of Sirtuins. Leonard Guarente has written an autobiography titled *Ageless Quest: One Scientist's Search for Genes That Prolong Youth*. The book was published in 2003 by Cold Spring Harbor Press.