Participants
Bill Blakemore became a reporter for ABC News 46 years ago, covering a wide variety of stories. He spearheaded ABC’s coverage of global warming, traveling from the tropics to polar regions to report on its impacts, dangers, and possible remedies.
Read MoreTom Ashbrook is an award-winning journalist brought to public radio by the attacks of September 11, 2001, when he was enlisted by NPR and WBUR-Boston for special coverage, after a distinguished career in newspaper reporting and editing. He is the host of On Point. Ashbrook’s journalism career spans twenty years as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, and author.
Read MoreBorn in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. In the early 1960s, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and while there, earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation.
Read MoreDavid Hallberg has danced the title role in Apollo, Solor in La Bayadère, Albrecht in Giselle, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and George Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, among many others, for the American Ballet Theatre.
Read MoreA native of Bolivar, New York, soprano Joélle Harvey is quickly becoming recognized as one of the most promising young talents of her generation. She is the recent recipient of a 2009 Sara Tucker Study Grant from the Richard Tucker Foundation.
Read MoreMonty Jones is co-winner of the prestigious 2004 World Food Prize, awarded for his discovery of the genetic process to create the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) which gives higher yields, shorter growth cycles and more protein content than its Asian and African parents.
Read MoreTod Machover, called “America’s Most Wired Composer” by the Los Angeles Times, is celebrated for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries.
Read MoreRobert Naczi is a plant systematist, who specializes in documenting the changing plant life of the Northeast. He is a leading authority on the flora of the eastern United States, the sedge genus Carex (Cyperaceae), and the Western Hemisphere Pitcher Plants (Sarraceniaceae).
Read MoreGeorge Bonanno is a pioneering researcher in the science of bereavement and loss. He is a professor of clinical psychology at the Teacher’s College of Columbia University, and under his direction, the Loss, Trauma and Emotion Lab is investigating how human beings cope with extreme adversity.
Read MoreMatt Mountain has been the Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute since September 1, 2005. He leads the 400-person organization responsible for the science operations and education and public outreach of the Hubble Space Telescope and of its planned successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.
Read MoreLeVar Burton has been capturing the admiring attention of both audiences and his industry peers for three decades and continues to enjoy longevity truly rare within the industry. His deftness in avoiding stereotype continues to be a hallmark of an incredibly diverse career.
Read MoreLesley Stahl is one of America’s most honored and experienced broadcast journalists, her five-decade career marked by political scoops, surprising features and award-winning foreign reporting. She was CBS’ first female White House correspondent and moderator of Face The Nation.
Read MorePeter Staley has been a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of TAG, the Treatment Action Group. He served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) for 13 years.
Read MoreEdwin Olson is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on autonomous robots, ranging from self-driving cars to teams of robots that work together to perform search and rescue missions. He received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 for his work in robust robot mapping.
Read MoreDr. Emily Rauscher received her B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in Physics and Astrophysics. Rauscher then came to New York City for grad school, obtaining a Ph.D. in Astronomy from Columbia University.
Read MoreSuresh Jagannathan joined DARPA in September 2013. His research interests include programming languages, program analysis and verification, and concurrent/distributed systems.
Read MoreWarren “Woody” Hoburg was selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class, and. In 2020, NASA announced that he would be one of 18 astronauts chosen for the …
Read MoreDan Brown is the author of nine #1 bestselling novels, including The Da Vinci Code, which has become one of the bestselling books of all time and his much-anticipated new novel, The Secret of …
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