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  • David Charbonneau joined the faculty in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University in August 2004. His research focuses on the development of novel techniques for the detection and characterization of planets orbiting nearby, Sun-like stars. Dr. Charbonneau is a founding member of the Trans-Atlantic Exoplanet Survey, which uses a network of small, automated telescopes to survey tens of thousands of stars for periodic eclipses that indicate the passage of orbiting planets. In 2005, he led the team that made the first direct detection of light emitted by a planet outside the Solar system. In 2004, the Astronomical Society of the Pacific awarded him the Robert J. Trumpler Award for his graduate thesis entitled Shadows and Reflections of Extrasolar Planets. He was recently named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, and awarded a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.
  • David L. Kirp is a professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley. A former newspaper editor as well as an academic, his interests range widely across social policy. Throughout his career, he has written about gender, race, education, affirmative action, housing and AIDS. Much of his work addresses the question of justice, not as theory but in practice.
  • Henry Corra is a New York City based documentary filmmaker best known for his highly acclaimed films *Umbrellas* (1995), *George *(2000), *Frames* (2004), *Same Sex America* (2005) and the Emmy-nominated film *NY77: The Coolest Year in Hell* (2007). In 1994 Corra launched his own production company, Corra Films Inc. Corra Films, located in the heart of downtown Manhattan, draws on the talents of some of New York's most innovative and original filmmakers, editors, artists, musicians and designers who share a commitment to exploring and expanding the boundaries of documentary film language and the nonfiction narrative approach. Corra's films have been exhibited worldwide in theatrical venues in New York City, San Francisco, Paris and Berlin, and in broadcast venues including HBO, SHOWTIME, LOGO, CBS, PBS, VH1, ARTE and CHANNEL 4.
  • Born in Hong Kong and raised in Boston, Ellie Lee is one of those artists to whom pushing boundaries seems second nature. An animator with two award-winning shorts, Lee is also a seasoned documentarian. Her striking, charcoal-animated documentary, *Repetition Compulsion*, dealing with abused women, went on to become the first animated film to be broadcast on the acclaimed PBS documentary series, P.O.V. "It was conceived originally as a documentary, but the animation came about because I had these skills and abilities in that field and that seemed like the best way to tell the story, with the movement of the charcoal drawings capturing the violence without needing to actually show the women's faces." In 2000, Lee made the transition to live action, fiction narrative with her latest work, the haunting and elegiac short, *Dog Days*, a cautionary tale that takes place in a futuristic wasteland. "With Dog Days I really felt that my past as an animator and studying doc filmmaking at Harvard really came together to help make it a better film, says Lee. The film took top honors at the 2000 Hamptons and Florida Film Festivals, and is currently running on IFC.
  • Beatty joined *The Atlantic Monthly* as a senior editor in September of 1983, having previously worked as a book reviewer at *Newsweek* and as the literary editor of *The New Republic*. In addition to editing many of *The Atlantic*'s major nonfiction pieces, Beatty is in charge of the book-review section, and he has contributed numerous articles to the magazine himself. Recent subjects have spanned the globe: NATO, the United States Navy, and the Irish Troubles among them. His 1993 contribution to *The Atlantic Monthly*'s Travel pages, "The Bounteous Berkshires," earned these words of praise from *The Washington Post*: "The best travel writers make you want to travel with them. I, for instance, would like to travel somewhere with Jack Beatty, having read his superb account of a cultural journey to the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts." Beatty is also the author of *The World According to Peter Drucker*, published in 1998 by The Free Press and called "a fine intellectual portrait" by Michael Lewis in the *New York Times* Book Review. Born, raised, and educated in Boston, Beatty wrote a best-selling biography of James Michael Curley, the Massachusetts congressman and governor and Boston mayor, which Addison-Wesley published in 1992.
  • Congressman Stephen F. Lynch was first sworn in to the United States Congress in October 2001, following the sudden passing of legendary Congressman John Joseph Moakley. He worked as a structural ironworker for 18 years and was eventually elected to serve as president of The Iron Workers Union, the youngest president in the history of the 2000 member union. In 1994, Congressman Lynch was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives. After just 14 months in office, he was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate in a special election. In the Senate, he served as the Chair of the Joint Committee on Commerce and Labor. In the 111th Congress, Congressman Lynch is a member of the Financial Services Committee and the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, where he serves as Chairman on the Subcommittee on Federal Workforce, Postal Service and the District of Columbia. Lynch is also a member of the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs. Lynch continues to serve as co-chair of the Task Force on Terrorism and Proliferation Financing, a bipartisan Congressional panel that monitors the status of national and international efforts to track and stop the flow of funds to terrorist groups and works to strengthen our national anti-terrorist finance strategy.
  • Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic received her Ph.D in chemical engineering from the University of Belgrade, Serbia in 1980. She is currently a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. She also serves as the director of the Laboratory for Stem Cell and Tissue Engineering at Columbia. Professor Vunjak-Novakovich has also taught at Tufts University and the University of Belgrade, as well as work as a research Scientist at MIT.
  • Alan Tonelson is a Research Fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization studying U.S. economic, national security, and technology policy. Tonelson is also a columnist for the Foundation's globalization website, Tradealert.org and a Research Associate at the George Washington University Center for International Science and Technology Policy. Tonelson's book on globalization, *The Race to the Bottom*, was published in 2000. Tonelson comments on economic and foreign policy issues frequently for radio and television programs such as *The Newshour with Jim Lehrer* and *The Nightly Business Report*. His articles and reviews have appeared in many leading national publications, including *Foreign Affairs*, *The Atlantic*, *Foreign Policy*, *The New York Times*, and *The Washington Post*. Tonelson has also lectured frequently on these subjects at universities, government agencies, and civic and business groups in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. A former Associate Editor of Foreign Policy and Fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute, Tonelson holds a B.A. with highest honors in history from Princeton University.
  • Ross was born in San Francisco and grew up in Marin County. His Jewish mother and Catholic stepfather raised him in a non-religious atmosphere. Ross graduated from University of California, Los Angeles in 1970 and did graduate work there, writing his doctoral dissertation on Soviet decision-making. He later became religiously Jewish after the Six Day War. In 2002 he co-founded the Kol Shalom synagogue in Rockville, Maryland. During President Jimmy Carter's administration, Ross worked under Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz in the Pentagon. There, he co-authored a study recommending greater U.S. intervention in "the Persian Gulf Region because of our need for Persian Gulf oil and because events in the Persian Gulf affect the Arab-Israeli conflict." During the Reagan administration, Ross served as director of Near East and South Asian affairs in the National Security Council and Deputy Director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (1982-84). Ross returned briefly to academia in the 1980s, serving as executive director of the Berkeley-Stanford program on Soviet International Behavior from 1984-1986. In the mid-1980s Ross co-founded with Martin Indyk the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)-sponsored Washington Institute for Near East Policy ("WINEP"). His first WINEP paper called for appointment of a "non-Arabist Special Middle East envoy" who would "not feel guilty about our relationship with Israel." In the President George H. W. Bush administration he was director of the United States State Department's Policy Planning Staff, working on U.S. policy toward the former Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany and its integration into NATO, arms control, and the 1991 Gulf War. He also worked with Secretary of State James Baker on convincing Arab and Israeli leaders to attend the 1991 a Middle East peace conference in Madrid, Spain.