What matters to you.
0:00
0:00
NEXT UP:
 
Top

Forum Network

Free online lectures: Explore a world of ideas

Funding provided by:

All Speakers

  • Nils Daulaire is president and CEO of the Global Health Council, the world's largest membership alliance dedicated to saving lives by improving health throughout the world. Before assuming leadership of the Council, Dr. Daulaire served as the senior international health advisor to President Bill Clinton, developing an integrated global strategy that encompassed programs totaling over $1 billion annually. He was the U.S. lead negotiator on health at the Cairo International conference on Population and Development in 1994, the Beijing World Conference on Woman in 1995 and the Rome World Food Summit in 1996. He represented the US at five World Health Organization (WHO) annual assemblies. Dr. Daulaire's research interests focus on child health and survival. He has provided technical assistance to more than 20 countries in all regions of the world and speaks seven languages. A Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of Harvard University, Dr. Daulaire received his MD from Harvard Medical School in 1976 with residency training in family medicine at the University of Colorado. He received his master's in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University in 1978.
  • Colleen Mone Hardy is a field epidemiologist with the International Rescue Committee, a non-governmental organization that provides humanitarian assistance, protection and resettlement services to refugees and victims of armed conflict. In this position, she provides technical support to International Rescue Committee's health programs in a number of countries. Colleen has worked in a variety of humanitarian settings with the IRC, the World Food Program (WFP) and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in Africa and S.East Asia. She represented IRC on an interagency assessment team, which included US military, UN and Non-governmental agencies, off the west coast of Sumatra Island, following the tsunami. She is currently working in Baton Rouge, Louisiana with a five member IRC team, assisting with a number of assessments.
  • Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist specializing in domestic and global public health, health policy and medicine. She is a contributing writer at the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy of the University of Minnesota and has just completed a term as a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellow. From 1995-2006, McKenna was a national desk science and medical writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she covered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, becoming the only reporter to be embedded with a CDC investigative team during the 2001 anthrax-letter attacks. She reported from the 2005 tsunami and from Hurricane Katrina, as well as from Southeast Asia, Africa and the Arctic. McKenna has covered avian and pandemic influenza since 1997, when she wrote the first story in the American media on the potential threat posed by avian flu H5N1. Previously, Maryn McKenna worked for *The Boston Herald*, where stories she co-wrote on illnesses among veterans of the first Persian Gulf War led to the first Congressional hearings on Gulf War Syndrome, and at the Cincinnati Enquirer, where her stories on the association between local cancer clusters and contamination escaping a federal nuclear weapons plant contributed to a successful nuclear-harm lawsuit by residents. Ms. McKenna is a cum laude graduate of Georgetown University and has a master's degree with highest honors from Northwestern University. She has held short fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the University of Maryland and in 1998-1999 was the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow in Medicine at University of Michigan's schools of medicine and public health. In 2006, she was an inaugural Health Journalism Fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu and is now an Associate of the Center.
  • Associate Professor, Department of Public Health and Family Medicine Adjunct Associate Professor, Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Engineering Dr. Griffiths' research includes: - The human, animal, and environmental epidemiology of the emerging pathogen Cryptosporidium; - Development of an ultrastable measles vaccine for use where there are is no refrigeration or during emergencies; - the influence of malnutrition and environmental factors, such as air pollution and heavy metals, on common infectious diseases such as diarrhea and pneumonia. - Dr. Griffiths has a long interest in waterborne diseases, ranging from research on the biology of the pathogens to their epidemiology and to public policy and regulation.
  • Brenda Wilson is an award-winning correspondent and editor for NPR on national and international public health. She has developed a consistent body of work, examining the link between human behavior, social conditions, health and disease. For more than a decade, Wilson has reported on the global HIV/AIDS epidemic, other infectious diseases and public health issues. She has traveled throughout Africa and India interviewing people from all walks of life, including heads of state, international health experts, development specialists and others. Wilson was awarded a Kaiser Foundation Media Fellowship in 1999 to study the impact of AIDS on migrant workers in South Africa. She also shared a DuPont/Columbia Award for *Breaking the Silence*, an NPR series on AIDS in the black community, which also won an award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Wilson has worked at NPR as a producer and a reporter in Washington, covering social policy and the White House. She began her NPR career in 1979 as Associate Producer for *Morning Edition*. She has a BA degree in English literature from Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia.
  • Mike Lemonick is a senior science writer at *Time* magazine in New York. He has worked there for 12 years, though he left for a short while in 1988 to become executive editor at *Discover* magazine. Before coming to Time, he was a senior editor at *Science Digest* magazine for three years and before that he was a graduate student in journalism at Columbia University. Lemonick got his undergraduate degree from Harvard.
  • Simon Winchester studied geology at Oxford and has written for *Conde Nast Traveler*, *Smithsonian*, and *National Geographic*. He is the author of *A Crack in the Edge of the World*, *Krakatoa*, *The Map That Changed the World*, *The Professor and the Madman*, *The Fracture Zone*, *Outposts*, *Korea*, among many other titles. He lives in Massachusetts and in the Western Isles of Scotland.
  • Adam Pertman was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his writing about adoption in The Boston Globe, where he was a senior reporter and editor for 22 years before turning his career toward adoption. His book, Adoption Nation was named Book of the Year by the National Adoption Foundation. Pertman's other honors include the Angel in Adoption Award from the US Congress, the Special Friend of Children Award from the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatrists, and the Friend of Adoption Award from the ODS Adoption Community of New England among others. Pertman's commentaries have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun, Miami Herald and on NPR, among others. He has been a guest on many radio and television programs, including Oprah and The Today Show.
  • Helen R. Deese is the Caroline Healey Dall editor for the Massachusetts Historical Society. In nineteenth-century Boston, amidst the popular lecturing of Ralph Waldo Emerson and the discussion groups led by Margaret Fuller, sat a remarkable young woman, Caroline Healey Dall (1822-1912): transcendentalist, early feminist, writer, reformer, and perhaps most importantly, active diarist. During the seventy-five years that Dall kept a diary, she captured all the fascinating details of her sometimes agonizing personal life, and she also wrote about all the major figures who surrounded her.
  • D. Brenton Simons has served as President and CEO (formerly Executive Director) of the New England Historic Genealogical Society since December 2005. Previously he served as Chief Operating Officer of the Society and, over more than a decade, held several other management positions at NEHGS. During his career he developed some of the Society's most popular services, including its website, www.NewEnglandAncestors.org, its member magazine, *New England Ancestors*, and its special publications imprint, the Newbury Street Press. He is most recently author of *Witches, Rakes, and Rogues: True Stories of Scam, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem in Boston, 1630-1775*, recipient of the 2006 Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History. He is also the author of *The Langhornes of Langhorne Park* (1997) and co-editor and originator of *The Art of Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England* (2001). His articles have appeared in several historical and genealogical journals. His book, *Boston Beheld: Antique Town and Country Views*, will be published by the University Press of New England in 2008. A graduate of Boston University, Mr. Simons is a Council member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, a Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and a member of The Society of the Cincinnati and The Society of Mayflower Descendants.
  • When 38-year-old Kica Matos became executive director of JUNTA for Progressive Action, she accepted the leadership of the oldest Latino community service organization in New Haven, Connecticut. But prior to her arrival, JUNTA had fallen into disrepair, even as New Haven's Latino population surged in number and need. In a few short years, Matos has transformed JUNTA into a model service provider and a powerful community force, expanding the organization's mission and programs and multiplying its client base with each passing year. Kica Matos spent her early career as a community and human rights advocate, working for such institutions as Amnesty International and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. She went on to earn a law degree from Cornell University and subsequently became an assistant federal defender in Philadelphia, where she represented death row inmates in state and federal courts. Matos observed that minorities and the disadvantaged represented a disproportionate number of the criminal justice system's bleakest cases. She decided to focus her work on community and social services in order to provide those at risk with alternatives to lives of crime and deprivation.