Forum Network

Eli Pariser is Executive Director of MoveOn.org Political Action and interim Executive Director of MoveOn.org Civic Action. Eli joined MoveOn in 2001, and directed MoveOn's campaign against the Iraq war, tripling MoveOn's member base in the process, which now includes over 3.3 million members. Eli was one of the co-creators of the Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest, and as Executive Director of MoveOn PAC raised over $30 million from over 350,000 small donors to run ads, develop a powerful field program, and support progressive candidates from John Kerry on down. Eli graduated summa cum laude in 2000 with a B.A. in Political Science from Simon's Rock College. He lives in Portland, Maine.

Lynn Rothschild is responsible for the overall management of Investigation 6 - Planetary Pioneers, and participates in efforts to identify new model organisms, performing the initial tests for UV and desiccation resistance, and mechanisms of resistance. She will also be involved in various EPO activities and co-organizing the Stanford Astrobiology and Space Exploration course.

Astronomer Jill Tarter is Director of the Institute's Center for SETI Research, and also holder of the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI. She is one of the few researchers to have devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere, and there are few aspects of this field that have not been affected by her work. Jill was the lead for Project Phoenix, a decade-long SETI scrutiny of about 750 nearby star systems, using telescopes in Australia, West Virginia and Puerto Rico. While no clearly extraterrestrial signal was found, this was the most comprehensive targeted search for artificially generated cosmic signals ever undertaken. Now Jill heads up the Institute's efforts to build and operate the Allen Telescope Array, a massive new instrument that will eventually comprise 350 antennas, each 6 meters in diameter. This telescope will be able to enormously increase the speed, and the spectral search range, of the Institute's hunt for signals. Indeed, being as much of an icon of SETI as Jill is, perhaps it is not surprising that the Jodie Foster character in the movie *Contact* is largely based on this real-life researcher.

Robin Chase is founder and CEO of GoLoco, an online ridesharing community. She also founded and leads Meadow Networks, a consulting firm that advises city, state, and federal government agencies about wireless applications in the transportation sector, and impacts on innovation and economic development. Robin is also founder and former CEO of Zipcar, the largest carsharing company in the world. She served on the Massachusetts Governor's Transportation transition team, and the Boston Mayor's Wireless Task Force. She is on the Board of the World Resources Institute. Robin lectures widely, has been frequently featured in the major media, and has received many awards in the areas of innovation, design, and environment. In 2009, she was included in the Time 100 Most Influential People. Robin graduated from Wellesley College and MIT's Sloan School of Management, and was a Harvard University Loeb Fellow.

Barnaby Evans is an artist who works in many media, including site-specific sculpture installations, photography, film, garden design, architectural projects, writing, and conceptual works. His original training was in the sciences, but he has been working exclusively as an artist for more than 25 years. Evans is best known for WaterFire, a sculpture that he installed on the three rivers of downtown Providence. In 1994, he created First Fire to celebrate the tenth anniversary of First Night Providence; in June 1996, he created Second Fire for the International Sculpture Conference and the Convergence International Arts Festival in Providence. With hundreds of volunteers and the broad support of the community, he established WaterFire as an on-going installation in 1997. Evans also created WaterFire Houston in 1998 and installed Moving Water for the Institute of Contemporary Arts Vita Brevis Program in Boston in 2001. Evans is currently exploring art installations for a number of other cities including St. Petersburg. Barnaby Evans received his Bachelors degree in biology and environmental science from Brown University in 1975. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humanities by Brown University and an honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by Rhode Island College, both in 2000.rnational Triennial Exhibition (in Switzerland) and Providences Renaissance Award in 1997.

Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. is a professor of economics at Harvard University. In addition to being affiliated with Harvard University he maintains offices at the National Bureau of Economic Research and WEB DuBois Institute. In January 2008, at age 30, he became the youngest African-American to ever receive tenure at Harvard. Fryer is widely regarded to be one of black America and Harvard's rising stars, having published numerous economics-related papers in prominent academic journals over the past few years. The New York Times ran an extensive profile of Fryer, entitled "Toward a Unified Theory of Black America," in March of 2005 that dealt extensively with Fryer's rough upbringing.

Neil Gershenfeld is the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms and heads the Media Lab's Physics & Media research group. His unique laboratory investigates the relationship between the content of information and its physical representation, from molecular quantum computers to virtuosic musical instruments. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art, rural Indian villages, the White House/Smithsonian Millennium celebration, automobile safety systems, the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers, Las Vegas shows, and Sami reindeer herds. He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including *Fab*, *When Things Start To Think*, *The Nature of Mathematical Modeling*, and *The Physics of Information Technology*, and has been featured in media such as *The New York Times*, *The Economist*, CNN, and *the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour*. Gershenfeld has a BA in physics with high honors from Swarthmore College, a PhD from Cornell University, was a junior fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.

Marc Hauser is professor of psychology, organismic and evolutionary biology and biological anthropology at Harvard University. He is also co-director of the Mind, Brain and Behavior Program, a fellow at the Center for Ethics and director of the Cognitive Evolution Lab. His research focuses on the evolutionary and developmental foundations of the human mind, with the specific goal of understanding which mental capacities are shared with other nonhuman primates and which are uniquely human. Among his publications are *Moral Minds: How nature designed a universal sense of right and wrong* (2006, Harper Collins, New York and Time Warner, London) and the forthcoming *Evilicious: explaining our evolved taste for being bad* (Viking/Penguin-USA; Random House-UK).

President: Bob Meyers joined the foundation in 1993 as director of its Washington Journalism Center. He was appointed president of the foundation in 1995. From 1989 to 1993 Meyers was director of the Harvard Journalism Fellowship for Advanced Studies in Public Health. He is a former reporter for the Washington Post, and a former assistant city editor at the San Diego Union. He has written two books, Like Normal People and D.E.S.: The Bitter Pill. Educated in the New York City public schools system and at UCLA, he was awarded an academic fellowship at Harvard's Center for Health Communication in 1987-88. He is a member of the Fellowship Advisory Board of the Rosalynn Carter Fellowships for Mental Health Journalism. He has lectured at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Tsinghua University in Beijing.