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Mahesh Sharma is the director of The Center for Teaching/Learning Mathematics of Framingham and Wellesley, MA, which is affiliated with Berkshire Mathematics in the UK. Professor Sharma is known nationally and internationally for his groundbreaking work in mathematics education. He is an author and editor of an international mathematics journal, *Focus on Learning Problems in Mathematics*, a consultant to public and private schools, a public lecturer, and a teacher-trainer. He also writes *Math Notebook*, a practical source of information for parents and teachers. His special field of interest is mathematics learning problems. He evaluates children and adults for their learning disabilities and also finds time to tutor students. This one-to-one work with students provides him with insight into their learning problems and he has developed a unique way of helping students to learn. This is called Vertical Acceleration. Through Vertical Acceleration one is able to help students make up the gaps in their learning in a very short period of time.

Colin Norman is a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the Johns Hopkins University, and an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute. He works on both theoretical and observational astrophysics in areas including the formation, structure, and evolution of galaxies, the physics of active galaxies, quasars, and starburst galaxies, the structures of the intergalactic and interstellar media, and star formation.

Chaisson's major interests are currently twofold: his scientific research addresses an interdisciplinary, thermodynamic study of physical, biological, and cultural phenomena, seeking to understand the origin and evolution of galaxies, stars, planets, life, and society, thus devising a unifying cosmic-evolutionary worldview of the Universe and our sense of place within it writ large. His educational work engages experienced teachers and computer animators to create better methods, technological aids, and novel curricula to enthuse teachers and instruct students in all aspects of natural science.

Jill Soloway is currently the Executive Producer of Showtime's *United States of Tara*. For four years Jill was a writer/Co-Executive Producer of HBO's *Six Feet Under*. She also worked on *Grey's Anatomy*, *Tell Me You Love Me*, and *Dirty Sexy Money*. Jill is in pre-production to direct her first feature film, *Tricycle*, and is writing the screenplay for *Marry Him*, a romantic comedy, for Warner Brothers and Tobey Maguire. She also adapted the screenplay for the sorority book *Pledged*. She is the author of the best-selling *Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants*, a hilarious, dirty, sad collection of essays and rants that was hailed as a post-feminist manifesto for the next generation. She is currently writing *And Then What*, a young adult novel for Harper Collins. It's about best friends, money and power that travels from Echo Park to Malibu and back again. Jill started off doing theater with her sister Faith in Chicago, where they created the stage phenomenon *The Real Live Brady Bunch*. Jill also created *Sit n' Spin*, a twice-monthly, standing-room-only night of comedic monologues and music. Recently, she co-founded OBJECT, a non-profit that seeks to engage young women in fun feminist activism.

Dr. Shara and his research group are conducting an exhaustive survey to inventory and "weigh" all 100,000 stars nearest to Earth. More than one billion stars are being examined in the search. The survey has already determined that many low luminosity stars remain undiscovered just a few light years away, and that a significant portion of the local "dark" matter is concentrated in stars 100 to 100,000 times fainter than the Sun. Dr. Shara uses the Hubble Space Telescope to survey the densest cores of globular clusters to retrieve and characterize the predicted collision products. These include some of the most exotic stars known to astrophysicists: "blue stragglers." By accurately weighing these stars, Shara and his collaborators have demonstrated that many are at least twice as massive as all other stars in a globular cluster. This strongly supports the hitherto theoretical collisional origin for blue stragglers.

Dimitar Sasselov has been a professor at Harvard since 1998. He arrived to CfA in 1990 as a Harvard-Smithsonian Center post-doctoral fellow. Between 1999 and 2003 he was the Head Tutor of the Astronomy Department. Dimitar was born in Bulgaria, and was educated at Sofia University, where he received his Ph.D. in Physics in 1988, almost concurrently working on his degree at the University of Toronto, Canada, where he received his Ph.D. in Astronomy in 1990. His research explores the many modes of interaction between radiation and matter: from the evolution of hydrogen and helium in the early universe to the study of the structure of stars. He is very fond of unstable stars - ones that pulsate regularly and allow us to determine distances to other galaxies. Most recently his research has led him to explore the nature of planets orbiting other stars. He has discovered a few such planets - with novel techniques that he hopes to use to find planets like Earth. He is the director of the new Harvard Origins of Life Initiative - a multidisciplinary center bridging scientists in the physical and in the life sciences, intent to study the transition from chemistry to life and its place in the context of the Universe.

Jay Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals, which he introduced in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. In April 2007 PressThink recorded its two millionth visit. He also blogs at the *Huffington Post*. In July 2006 he announced the debut NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. The first one was called Assignment Zero, a collaboration with Wired.com. A second project is OfftheBus.Net with the Huffington Post. In 1999, Yale University Press published his book, *What Are Journalists For?*, which is about the rise of the civic journalism movement. Rosen wrote and spoke frequently about civic journalism (also called public journalism) over a ten-year period, 1989-99. From 1993 to 1997 he was the director of the Project on Public Life and the Press, funded by the Knight Foundation. As a press critic and reviewer, he has published in *The Nation*, *Columbia Journalism Review*, *the Chronicle of Higher Education*, *The New York Times*, *the Washington Post*, *the Los Angeles Times*, *Newsday* and others. Online he has written for Salon.com, TomPaine.com and Poynter.org. A native of Buffalo, NY, Rosen had a very brief career in journalism at the Buffalo Courier-Express before beginning graduate study. He has a Ph.D. from NYU in media studies (1986).

As Director of Libraries, Ann J. Wolpert is responsible for the MIT Libraries and MIT Press. The MIT Libraries consist of five major collections, a number of smaller branch libraries in specialized subject areas, a fee-for-services group, and the Institute Archives. The Institute Archives and Special Collections preserve the historical records of MIT and the personal papers of many faculty members. The MIT Press publishes about 200 new books and more than 40 journals each year in fields related to or reliant upon science and technology. The Press is widely recognized for its innovative graphic design and electronic publishing initiatives. Ms. Wolpert's Institute responsibilities include membership on the Committee on Copyright and Patents, the Council on Educational Technology, the Deans' Committee, and the Academic Council. She chairs the Management Board of the MIT Press and the Board of Directors of Technology Review, Inc.

Born in Manhattan in 1952, Leora spent her childhood between Pound Ridge, New York, and Israel, traveling with her family to her mother's birthplace in Jerusalem every three years. She spent a long time as an actress and in the theater. But, during college, the influence of many of the writers who taught her was powerful, and she started to write. She earned her BA and MFA and was awarded a teaching fellowship for graduate work, all at Sarah Lawrence. After being optioned for a contract while still in graduate school, she worked for several years on a novel with an editor. She also began developing writing programs for psychiatric patients with her husband, now a psychiatrist. As the optioned novel failed, she spent her time creating programs for different mentally ill populations in New York City and also became a teacher of writing for homeless women. Her nonprofit organization operated in eight major psychiatric hospitals in the New York area and was fully funded for ten years. In the last few years, she co-founded the Emmett Till/Anne Frank program, a multicultural educational initiative for Afro-American and Jewish youth in Brooklyn.

Andrea Mitchell, the veteran NBC Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, is also the host of MSNBC'S "Andrea Mitchell Reports," an hour of political news and interviews with top news makers that airs each day at 1pm ET on MSNBC. Mitchell covered the entire 2008 presidential campaign, from the kickoff in February 2007, broadcasting live from every major primary and caucus state and all the candidate debates for NBC News and MSNBC programs, including Today, NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams, Hardball, Morning Joe and Meet the Press. She also covered Barack Obama's trip to Iraq, the Middle East and Europe during the presidential campaign. Mitchell currently covers foreign policy, intelligence and national security issues, including the diplomacy of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for all NBC News properties. As a featured political correspondent in 2004, Mitchell was a regular panelist on MSNBCs Hardball and was the first reporter to break the story that Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry had chosen Sen. John Edwards as his vice presidential running mate. In September 2005, Mitchell authored Talking Back, a memoir about her experiences as one of the first women to cover five presidents, congress and foreign policy. That year, Mitchell also received the prestigious Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from the John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 2004, the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) honored Mitchell with the Leonard Zeidenberg Award for her contribution to the protection of First Amendment Freedoms.