Speakers:
All Years
2008
Martin Wattenberg
New Media Artist
An IBM mathematician whose work focuses on information visualization and its application to collaborative computing, journalism, bioinformatics, and art.
2007
Emmanuel Akyeampong
Professor of History and African Studies
Loeb Harvard College professor and former chair of the African Studies Committee, a leading social historian of Africa, and president of the African Public Broadcasting Foundation, working to create a renaissance on the continent through outreach and education.
2007
Kecia Ali
Professor of Religion
Author and Boston University professor whose work focuses on Islamic religious texts, especially jurisprudence, and women in both classical and contemporary Muslim discourses.
2007
Jay Allison
Broadcast Journalist
Independent radio and television documentary maker, known to NPR listeners as the curator of the series This I Believe.
2007
Jonathan Bachrach
New Media Artist
Research scientist at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory who has developed a number of arts applications, including “String Beings,” a 2007 collaboration with Martha Mason’s Snappy Dance Theater, musician Lucia Lin, and composer Michael Rodbach.
2007
Joan Brugge
Cell Biologist
Professor and chair of the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School and research scientist working to identify and understand the mechanisms involved in cancer development.
2007
Erik Demaine
Mathematician
The MIT Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Professor in Computer Science and one of the founders of "origami mathematics," which has applications such as folding telescopes and understanding how proteins fold.
2007
Michael Gandolfi
Composer, Music Professor
Internationally renowned composer and teacher of composition whose latest work, "The Garden of Cosmic Speculation"--a seventy-minute orchestral composition inspired by Charles Jencks's Scotland landscape of earthworks and installations – represents for the composer a magnificent joining of physics and architecture.
2007
Edward Glaeser
Urban and Social Economist
Harvard professor of economics whose work has focused on international disparities in social welfare systems and the role of cities as centers of idea transmission.
2007
David Kang
Specialist on East Asia
Professor at Dartmouth, author, and an expert on the history and politics of China and North Korea.