Past Events

Mike Halsall is Senior Network and Information Security Analyst at MIT, and currently sits on a number of steering committees for various Information Sharing and Analysis Centers. He has 18 years working in both corporate and academic environments, having held positions at IBM, AT&T, Bell Atlantic, Vermont Technical College and Middlebury College. As a fellow for The Center, he will be exploring various frameworks for making ethical decisions in the domain of computer security. Because one can’t discuss computer security without discussing privacy, privacy implications will be a dominant theme in the exploration of ethical decision making frameworks in the computer security field.

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan is a scholar and teacher of Sufism in the lineage of his grandfather, Hazrat Inayat Khan. He received his B.A. (Hons) in Persian Literature from the London School of Oriental and African Studies, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Religion from Duke University. Pir Zia is founder of Seven Pillars House of Wisdom, an interspiritual, interdisciplinary fellowship dedicated to the unfolding of wisdom in our time, and also of Sulūk Academy, a school of contemplative study with branches in the U.S. and Europe. His forthcoming publication, Saracen Chivalry: Counsels on Valor, Generosity and the Mystical Quest, will be published by Suluk Press, an imprint of Omega Publications, and is due November, 2012. 

Tenzin Gyatso, the XIVth Dalai Lama, is a moral figure and spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born to a farming family on July 6, 1935 in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. He was recognized, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, at the age of two as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the XIIIth Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are believed to be Embodiments of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving humanity. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. Most recently he was awarded the United States Congressional Gold Medal in 2007 in recognition for his “many enduring and outstanding contributions to peace, non-violence, human rights and religious understanding.” He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness.His Holiness is committed to the promotion of the human values of compassion, forgiveness, tolerance, contentment and self-discipline – what he calls secular ethics – and also promotes religious harmony and understanding among the world’s major religious traditions.

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Brother David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B. was born in 1926 in Vienna, Austria.  He studied art, anthropology, and psychology, receiving a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna.  Since 1953 he has been a monk of Mount Saviour Benedictine monastery in New York.  He was one of the first Roman Catholics to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue.

For decades, Brother David has divided his time between periods of a hermit’s life and extensive lecture tours. His audiences included starving students in Zaire and faculty at Harvard and Columbia, Buddhist monks and Sufi retreatants, New Age commune residents and naval cadets, Green Berets and international peace conference participants.

He has contributed to books and periodicals from the Encyclopedia Americana to the New Age Journal. He authored Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer and A Listening Heart, both reprinted and anthologized for more than two decades. Brother David co-authored Belonging to the Universe, with physicist, Fritjof Capra, and The Ground We Share on Buddhist and Christian practice with Robert Aitken Roshi. His most recent book is Deeper Than Words: Living the Apostles’ Creed.

Brother David co-founded www.gratefulness.org, a website supporting ANG*L (A Network for Grateful Living). It reaches more than 8,000 visitors daily, from over 200 countries.

Chade-Meng Tan (Meng) is a Google pioneer, an award-winning engineer, a New York Times bestselling author, a thought leader, and a philanthropist. He is also quite funny.

Meng is Google’s Jolly Good Fellow (which nobody can deny). Like many things in Google, his unusual job title started as a joke, but eventually became real. Meng was one of Google’s earliest engineers. Among many other things, he helped build Google’s first mobile search service, and headed the team that kept a vigilant eye on Google’s search quality. After a successful 8-year stint in Engineering and 2 years as GoogleEDU’s Head of Personal Growth, he now serves with Google’s Talent Team.  His current job description is, “Enlighten minds, open hearts, create world peace”.

One of Meng’s main projects at Google is a groundbreaking mindfulness-based emotional intelligence course called Search Inside Yourself, which was featured on the front page of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times. Search Inside Yourself is also the title of Meng’s New York Times bestselling book which has been endorsed by world leaders such as President Carter of the United States and President Nathan of Singapore, business leaders such as Eric Schmidt of Google and John Mackey of Whole Foods Markets, and spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama and Deepak Chopra. Meng hopes Search Inside Yourself will eventually contribute to world peace in a meaningful way.

Outside of Google, Meng is the Founder and (Jolly Good) President of the Tan Teo Charitable Foundation, a small foundation dedicated to promoting Peace, Liberty and Enlightenment in the world. He is a Founder and the Chairman of the Search Inside Yourself Leadership Institute (SIYLI). He is a Founding Patron of Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE).  He is also a Founding Patron of the World Peace Festival, and adviser to a number of technology start-ups.

Meng earned his MS in Computer Science from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He went to Santa Barbara mainly for the beach, but didn’t mind the graduate degree either. He has won many computing-related awards, including the Championship of Singapore’s National Software Competition. Prior to coming to the United States, Meng had a successful engineering career in Singapore. (He knew it was successful because nobody offered to fire him).

Muriel Médard is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 1995 to 1998, she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Professor Médard received B.S. degrees in EECS and in Mathematics in 1989, a B.S. degree in Humanities in 1990, a M.S. degree in EE 1991, and a Sc D. degree in EE in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. She has served as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, as an Associate Editor in Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as an Associate Editor for the OSA Journal of Optical Networking. She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, the Joint special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking on Networking and Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensic and Security: Special Issue on Statistical Methods for Network Security and Forensics. She serves as an associate editor for the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

Kentaro ToyamaKentaro Toyama (www.kentarotoyama.org) is a researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book that argues that the intrinsic growth of people and institutions should be the primary focus of global development. Previously, Toyama co-founded Microsoft Research India, where he started an interdisciplinary research group to understand how electronic technology could support the socio-economic development of the world’s impoverished communities. The group’s projects – including Digital Green, MultiPoint, and Text-Free UI – have been seminal in ICT4D research, even as Toyama has gone on to be a vocal critic of techno-utopian hype in development. Prior to his time in India, he did computer vision research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Toyama graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a bachelors degree in Physics.

Manish Bhardwaj is the CEO and co-founder of Innovators In Health (IIH), a non-profit committed to ensuring that the rural poor suffering from
tuberculosis (TB) get care that matches the best in the world. As of early 2012, IIH provided access to care to a catchment of 85,000 residents in rural Bihar, India.

Prior to IIH, Manish was a co-founder and Vice President at Engim Inc., a private venture backed wireless semiconductor startup. Manish has won several awards including the IBM Research Fellowship, the MIT Graduate Student Council teaching award, and the Compaq Gold Medal. He has Ph.D. and S.M. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Bachelor of Applied Science from the Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore. A native of India, he has lived in Singapore, Indonesia, Austria and the U.S.

Jonathan Foley is the director of the Institute on the Environment (IonE) at the University of the Minnesota, where he is a professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. He also leads the IonE’s Global Landscapes Initiative. Foley’s work focuses on the sustainability of our civilization and the global environment. He and his students have contributed to our understanding of global food security, global patterns of land use, the behavior of the planet’s climate, ecosystems and water cycle, and the sustainability of the biosphere. This work has led him to be a regular advisor to large corporations, NGOs and governments around the world. Foley joined the University of Minnesota in 2008, after spending 15 years on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin, where he founded the Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. He and his colleagues have published numerous articles in the scientific literature, including highly cited work in Science, Nature and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has also written many popular articles and essays, including pieces in the New York Times, Scientific American, SEED, E360, the Guardian, Momentum, and elsewhere. His public presentations on global issues have been featured at hundreds of venues, including the Aspen Environmental Forum, the Quatauqua Institution, and TED. Foley has won numerous awards and honors, including the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Award; the J.S. McDonnell Foundation’s 21st Century Science Award; an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellowship; and the Sustainability Science Award from the Ecological Society of America. In 1997, President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.

Shirin Ebadi is a lawyer, human rights activist, and the recipient of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her work defending the rights of women and children in Iran, and advocating an interpretation of Islam which is compatible with democracy and human rights. She is the first Iranian and Muslim woman to receive the prize. Ebadi received a law degree from the University of Tehran in 1965, and became one of the first female judges in Iran.

In 1975, she was the first Iranian woman to preside over a legislative court. Following Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, Ebadi was demoted to the position of a clerk in the court she had presided over because the revolution deemed women unfit to serve as judges. Unable to accept the discrimination against her, she resigned, and although her application was repeatedly rejected, finally obtained a license to open a law firm. For the next two decades, Ebadi devoted her life to the promotion of women’s rights, the defense of children, and political activists. Her organization, the Association for Human Rights Advocates, provides pro bono legal service to political prisoners in Iran. Shirin Ebadi has spoken out strongly against discrimination and injustice in her country, at times despite great risk to her own safety.

In 2000, she spent a month in solitary confinement as a result of defending the family of a student killed by the police in protests in Tehran. Shirin Ebadi’s principal arena is the struggle for basic human rights and the fundamental value that political power in a community must be built on democratic elections. She favors dialogue as the best path to changing attitudes and resolving conflict, and as a conscious Muslim believes there is no conflict between Islam and fundamental human rights.

Dr. Ebadi is the founder of three NGOs in Iran, The Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Child, The Association for Human Rights Advocates, and the Organization against Mines in Iran. She is the author of 14 books, including available in English a memoir Iran Awakening; Refugee Law in Iran; and, The Golden Cage.

Rosalind Picard
Founder and Director of the Affective Computing Research Group, MIT Media Laboratory

Rosalind W. Picard is founder and director of the Affective Computing Research Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and co-director of the Things That Think Consortium, the largest industrial sponsorship organization at the lab. The author of over a hundred peer-reviewed scientific articles in multidimensional signal modeling, computer vision, pattern recognition, machine learning, and human-computer interaction, Picard is known internationally for pioneering research in affective computing and, prior to that, research in content-based image and video retrieval. She is a graduate with honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

George Barbasthasis
Singapore Research Professor of Optics and Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT

Dr. George Barbastathis is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and Faculty Resident with the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre. He received the Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens in 1993, and the M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech in 1994 and ’97, respectively. Between 1997-99 he was a Post-doctoral Research Associate with the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Between 2006-2007 he was Visiting Scholar with the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Harvard University. He has been the recipient of the Nikolaos Kritikos award in Mathematics, the 3M Innovation Award, the NSF Young Investigator Award, and the Esther & Harold E. Edgerton junior chair at MIT. He and his team at the SMART center developed an “invisibility cloak” using a very simple and inexpensive system. This method of using Science to hide objects in plain sight was voted in the top 10 breakthroughs in Physics in 2010.

Jose Gomez-Marquez
Program Director, Innovations in International Health Initiative, MIT

Jose Gomez-Marquez is the program director for the Innovations in International Health initiative at MIT. He leads a team of multidisciplinary team of scientists to design medical devices for developing countries. He is co-inventor of the Aerovax Drug Delivery System, a device for mass delivery of inhalable drugs and vaccines to remote populations and the X out TB program, which aims to increase TB therapy adherence in developing countries using novel diagnostics and mobile technology. Recently, the group has developed the MEDIKit, a series of design building blocks that empower doctors and nurses in developing countries to invent their medical technologies.

Jose serves on the European Union’s Science Against Poverty Taskforce and has participated as an expert advisor in the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is an instructor of MIT’s D-Lab: Health, a course on designing global health technologies at MIT. Jose is a 3 time MIT IDEAS Competition winner, including two Lemelson Awards for International Technology. In 2009, Jose was selected to Technology Review’s T35, which also named him Humanitarian of the Year. In 2011 he was named a TED Fellow. Born and raised in Honduras he currently lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Susan S. Sibley
Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, MIT

Professor Silbey is Leon and Anne Goldberg Professor of Humanities, and Professor of Sociology and Anthropology. Professor Silbey is the recipient of numerous prizes and awards including John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowships (2009), the Harry Kalven Jr. Prize for advancing the sociology of law (2009), Doctor Honoris Causa from Ecole Normale Superiere Cachan, in Paris (2006). She is also Past President of the Law & Society Association, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Silbey received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Chicago and post-graduate training in ethnography in the Sociology Department of Brandeis University. She has written about the social organization of law in diverse institutional and informal settings including attorney general’s offices, courts, schools, private homes, businesses and scientific laboratories; she has also studied alternative forms of dispute resolution including negotiation and mediation. She has edited Studies in Law, Politics and Society (1990-1997) and the Law & Society Review (1998-2000). In 1998, she published The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life (with Patricia Ewick) describing the ways in which Americans imagine, use, and construct the rule of law, in 2003, In Litigation: Do the ‘Haves’ Still Come Out Ahead? (edited with Herbert Kritzer), and in 2008 Law and Science I, Epistemological, Evidentiary, and Relational Engagements, and Law and Science II, Regulation of Property, Practices, and Products.

Silbey’s current research looks at the roles and conceptions of law in scientific laboratories, comparing the place of law in expert communities and popular culture, with special attention to the ways in which complex technological organizations observe and govern themselves. She is supervising an experiment in ethnographic fieldwork on the development of new safety regimes in research labs. In addition, she is completing a six year longitudinal study of engineering education, following a cohort of students through four different engineering schools.

Can mobile phones be used to improve rural healthcare?

How do you design user interfaces for an illiterate migrant worker?

What value is video technology to a farmer earning $1 a day?

Interventionist projects in “information and communication technology for development” (ICT4D) seek to answer these kinds of questions, but the excitement has also generated excessive hype about the power of technology to solve the deep problems of poverty. In this talk, I will present several persistent myths of ICT4D, offer a theory of “technology as amplifier” which explains the gap between rhetoric and reality, and provide recommendations for engineers and scientists interested in contributing to a better world. My hope is to suggest that while technology might not save the world, technologists have much to contribute.

Kentaro Toyama is a researcher in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. He is working on a book that argues that the intrinsic growth of people and institutions should be the primary focus of global development. Previously, Toyama co-founded Microsoft Research India, where he started an interdisciplinary research group to understand how electronic technology could support the socio-economic development of the world’s impoverished communities.

The Center in partnership with the Dalai Lama Foundation and University of Southern California is pleased to announce a multi-disciplinary meeting on “Secular Ethics, Human Values, and Society” with His Holiness the Dalai Lama on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011. Visit the USC web site for more information and registration: http://dalailama.usc.edu/

Don Morrison is the Chief Operating Officer of Research In Motion. Don oversees all domestic and international operations focusing on the development and execution of a world-class, customer-driven organization to support the BlackBerry wireless solution. Before joining RIM in 2000, Don undertook a number of senior leadership positions in Canada, the United States, Europe and the Middle East with AT&T and Bell Canada. Don is the founder of the Golden Thread Charitable Foundation and the Morrison Centre for Peace and Conflict Research. He is on the board of HealthyKids International and is a member of the Strategic Planning Committee for SickKids Hospital Foundation. Don holds an MBA and BA from the University of Toronto and also participated in the Executive Program at the University of Virginia, Darden Business School.

Muriel Médard is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. She was previously an Assistant Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and a member of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. From 1995 to 1998, she was a Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Optical Communications and the Advanced Networking Groups. Professor Médard received B.S. degrees in EECS and in Mathematics in 1989, a B.S. degree in Humanities in 1990, a M.S. degree in EE 1991, and a Sc D. degree in EE in 1995, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. She has served as an Associate Editor for the Optical Communications and Networking Series of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, as an Associate Editor in Communications for the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and as an Associate Editor for the OSA Journal of Optical Networking. She has served as a Guest Editor for the IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology, the Joint special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory and the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking on Networking and Information Theory and the IEEE Transactions on Information Forensic and Security: Special Issue on Statistical Methods for Network Security and Forensics. She serves as an associate editor for the IEEE/OSA Journal of Lightwave Technology. She is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Information Theory Society.

The Reverend Mpho A. Tutu, an Episcopal priest, is the founder and Executive Director of the Tutu Institute for Prayer & Pilgrimage.

Ms. Tutu has run ministries for children in the downtown Worcester, Massachusetts; for rape survivors in Grahamstown, SA; and for refugees from South Africa and Namibia at the Phelps Stokes Fund in New York City. She earned her MDiv from Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and began her ordained ministry at Historic Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia.

Ms. Tutu is an experienced preacher, teacher, and retreat facilitator. With her father, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, she has authored the recently published book, “Made for Goodness”.

The Reverend Mpho Tutu is the Chairperson Emeritus of the board of the Global AIDS Alliance, the Chairperson of the Board of Advisors of the 911 Unity Walk, and a trustee of Angola University.

Ms Tutu is married to Joseph Burris; they have two daughters, Nyaniso and Onalenna.

Philip F. Mangano is President and CEO of The American Round Table to Abolish Homelessness, whose mission is to be a strategic partner with every level of government and every element of the private and faith-based sectors to prevent and end the long misery of homelessness for our poorest neighbors. Internationally recognized for his bold leadership on an issue seen as intractable, Mr. Mangano’s unique blend of business experience, public service, and personal commitment energize partners to focus on solutions. The Round Table is committed to strategies that are research and data driven, performance-based, consumer-centric, and results-oriented and to rapid dissemination of innovation, information, and inspiration to its partners. For the past seven years, Mr. Mangano led the national strategy to prevent and end homelessness in his position as the Executive Director of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness. Mr. Mangano was appointed as the Council’s Executive Director in 2002, serving under both President George Bush and in the first 100 days of the Obama Administration. Mangano’s successful results-oriented strategies and innovative initiatives focused the Council’s mission to coordinate the Federal response to homelessness and to create partnership throughout government and the private sector to end homelessness. His new strategies resulted in an unprecedented national partnership of 20 Federal agencies, 53 Governors, and over 1,000 Mayors and County Executives partnered in over 350 local jurisdictional Ten Year Plans. With his leadership, new interagency and community collaborations have been established across the country. The prioritization by the Council on the prevention of homelessness and rapid re-housing of homeless people focused Federal policy and encouraged local plans and investments from the public and private sectors.

Robert V. Taylor is Chair of the Desmond Tutu Peace Foundation in New York. Born and raised in South Africa, Robert saw firsthand the potential for peace making when oppressed people find the courage to be who they are through discovering their voices and trusting their imagination. In 1980 his mentor, Archbishop Desmond Tutu sent Robert to the United States to avoid imprisonment for his anti-apartheid activity. A graduate of Rhodes University in South and Union Theological Seminary in New York he eventually became the highest ranking openly gay clergy person in the Episcopal Church at the time. He lectures nationally on compassion, peace-making and reconciliation engaging audience across the United States in realizing their full human potential and impact in the world.

His lecture will address the way in which reconciling peacemaking is a grounding transformative ethic in our personal lives and in society reorienting how we perceive ourselves and others. He will explore the ways in which technology and social media offer ground breaking opportunities for creating a new normalcy to local and global peace-making and reconciliation, and how this expands our understanding of the inter-connectedness of all people with implications for reframing the landscape of power dynamics among diverse peoples. He will draw on his own involvement in creating an open source peace platform with its potential for a transformative ethic of human engagement.

Dave M. Walker is President and CEO of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. In this capacity he leads the Foundation’s efforts to promote federal financial responsibility and accountability today in order to create more opportunity tomorrow.

Prior to assuming his position with the Foundation in March of 2008, Dave served as the seventh Comptroller General of the United States and head of the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) for almost ten years. This was one of Dave’s three presidential appointments each by different Presidents from both major political parties during his 15 years of total federal service.

Dave also has over 20 years of private sector experience, including approximately 10 years as a Partner and Global Managing Director of Human Capital Services for Arthur Andersen LLP. During this period, he also served as one of the two Public Trustees for Social Security and Medicare.

In addition to his leadership responsibilities at the Foundation, Dave serves on various boards and advisory groups, including as Chairman of the United Nations Independent Audit Advisory Committee, as a member of The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board’s Advisory Committee, and as a member of the Trilateral Commission. Dave has authored three books. The most recent, Comeback America, shows how we can return to our nation’s founding principles, and outlines a number of sensible solutions to get America back on track. He is a frequent writer and commentator, and is a subject of the critically acclaimed documentary I.O.U.S.A.

Phillip L. Clay is the MIT chancellor and professor of city planning. As chancellor, he is one of the Institute’s two most senior academic officers, with oversight of: graduate and undergraduate education, student life, student services, and the management of certain MIT large-scale institutional partnerships.

Widely known for his work in U.S. housing policy and community-based development, Professor Clay has been involved in several studies that earned national attention. Professor Clay is a founding member of the National Housing Trust, which focuses on housing preservation. He is also president of the Board of The Community Builders, Inc. the country’s largest nonprofit affordable housing developer. In addition, Professor Clay has served on the policy advisory council of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae). He served as Chairman of the Board of a local community college from 2002 to 2006. He serves as a member and Vice Chair of the MasterCard Foundation board, serves on the Kresge Foundation Board, and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative Board of Directors. In addition, he serves on the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Professor Phillip Clay received his bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his doctorate in city planning from MIT. A member of the MIT faculty since 1975, he served as associate head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning from 1990 to 1992 and as department head from 1992 to 1994. From 1994 to 2001, Professor Clay served the Institute as associate provost. His publications include two books: Neighborhood Renewal: Middle-Class Resettlement and Incumbent Upgrading in American Neighborhoods, and Neighborhood Politics and Planning (with Rob Hollister).

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in 30 languages, and has been a best seller in many countries. Goleman’s latest book is Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The book argues that new information technologies will create “radical transparency,” allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made – changing every thing for the better. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, was published in 2006. Social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence, can now be understood in terms of recent findings from neuroscience. Goleman’s book describes the many implications of this new science, including for altruism, parenting, love, health, learning and leadership.

Louis L. Bucciarelli received his B.S. from Cornell University (Mechanical Engineering, 1959) an M.Aero.E from the same institution (1960) and his Ph.D. from MIT (Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1966). He was Director of MIT’s Technology Studies Program, and has been a Curator of Science and Technology at the Smithsonian, held various visiting appointments at the University of Sussex, at the Centre de Sociologie de l’Innovation (Ecole des Mines, Paris), at Delft Technical University, at Denmark’s Institute of Technology, and Cambridge.

Elliot Ring ’50 has held several positions in his long career as an engineer. Beginning with his work at Hybrid Rocket Development, General Electric; Propulsion Chief, Titan Missile, Martin Marietta; Chief Engineer, Martin Marietta, Orlando, Florida Division. He retired as Corp. Director of Engineering, Raytheon Co., Mass. His book Rocket Propellant and Pressurization Systems, Prentice Hall, 1964 is still considered a seminal work in the field.

David A. Mindell received his B.S. (Electrical Engineering, 1988) and his B.A. (Literature, 1988) from Yale University and his Ph.D. from MIT (History of Technology, 1996). He was a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow and a fellow at the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology. Before coming to MIT he worked as a staff engineer in the Deep Submergence Laboratory of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, where he is currently a visiting investigator.

Dan Siegel received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry. He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative. An award-winning educator, Dan Siegel is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine where he is a Co-Investigator at the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development (cbd.ucla.edu) and is Co-Director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center (marc.ucla.edu).

Sondra Crosby, MD, is an internist and former Co-Director of the Boston Center for Refugee Health and Human Rights at Boston Medical Center. She is an Associate Professor of Medicine at the Boston University School of Medicine.

Dr. Crosby’s clinical practice focuses on care of asylum seekers, asylees and refugees, and she has written over 200 affidavits documenting medical and psychological sequelae of torture. She has published scholarly papers in multiple peer-reviewed journals in the field of caring for survivors of torture and recently was awarded the 2008 Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award by the Arnold P. Gold Foundation.

Michael Alan Grodin, MD, is Professor of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights in the Department of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health, where he has received 20 teaching awards including the Norman A. Scotch Award for Excellence in Teaching. Dr. Grodin is Professor of Socio-Medical Sciences and Community Medicine and Psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine. In addition, Dr. Grodin is a Professor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences and Director of the Project on Medicine and the Holocaust at the Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies. He completed his B.S. degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his M.D. degree at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, his postdoctoral and fellowship training at UCLA and Harvard, and he has been on the faculty of Boston University for the past 30 years.

Robert Truog, MD, is Professor of Medical Ethics, Anaesthesiology & Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a Senior Associate in Critical Care Medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston. Dr. Truog received his medical degree from the University of California, Los Angeles and is board certified in the practices of pediatrics, anesthesiology, and pediatric critical care medicine. He also holds a Master’s Degree in Philosophy from Brown University and an honorary Master’s of Arts from Harvard University.

Dr. Truog practices pediatric critical care medicine at Children’s Hospital Boston, and served as Chief of the Division for ten years. His current major administrative roles include Director of Clinical Ethics in the Division of Medical Ethics and the Department of Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, Director of the Institute for Professionalism and Ethical Practice at Children’s Hospital, and Chair of the Harvard Embryonic Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee (ESCRO).

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in 30 languages, and has been a best seller in many countries. Goleman’s latest book is Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The book argues that new information technologies will create “radical transparency,” allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made – changing every thing for the better. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, was published in 2006. Social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence, can now be understood in terms of recent findings from neuroscience. Goleman’s book describes the many implications of this new science, including for altruism, parenting, love, health, learning and leadership.

Deborah Ancona is the Seley Distinguished Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and Faculty Director of the MIT Leadership Center.Deborah’s pioneering research into how successful teams operate has highlighted the critical importance of managing outside the team’s boundary as well as inside it. This research has led directly to the concept of X-Teams as a vehicle for driving innovation within large organizations. Her book, X-teams: How to Build Teams That Lead, Innovate, and Succeed was published by Harvard Business School Press in June, 2007.

Deborah’s work has also focused on the concept of distributed leadership, and the development of research-based tools, practices, and teaching/coaching models that enable organizations to foster creative leadership at every level. This work was highlighted in a recent article in the Harvard Business Review, In Praise of the Incomplete Leader, February, 2007. 

In addition to X-Teams, Deborah’s studies of team performance have also been published in the Administrative Science Quarterly, the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the Sloan Management Review. Her previous book, Managing for the Future: Organizational Behavior and Processes (South-Western College Publishing, 1999, 2005) centers on the skills and processes needed in today’s diverse and changing organization. 

Deborah received her BA and MS in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and her Ph.D. in management from Columbia University. She has served as a consultant on leadership and innovation to premier companies such as AT&T, BP,Credit Suisse First Boston, HP, Merrill Lynch, Newscorp, and Vale.

Greg Norris founded and directs Sylvatica, an international life cycle assessment institute which consults onLCA to the UN, governments in the US and abroad, a variety of Fortune 500 companies, industrial associations, and smaller companies, and the non-profit sector. He is Visiting Professor with the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas, where he helps the ASC advance the availability of valid and transparent life cycle inventory data, and its application to spur innovation for sustainability. Norris has lead the development of the methods, modeling, and software to implement LCA within the US Green Building Council’s LEED rating system. He is Senior Fellow with GreenBlue, providing LCA guidance to their Sustainable Packaging Coalition, and through the SPC to Wal-Mart and the US EPA. Norris founded Earthster, an open source sustainable information platform, and New Earth, a global fund for community-driven sustainable development. Norris teaches LCA at Harvard, and is Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is an editor for the International Journal of LCA and the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

Dr. Aseem Inam has practiced as an architect, urban designer and planner in Los Angeles, Montreal, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, St. Louis, and Washington DC. Most recently, he led multidisciplinary teams on urbanist initiatives in the Caribbean, California, and on the U.S.-Mexico border. Early in his career, he created and lead the rural habitat development program in Gujarat, India. His essay, Meaningful Urban Design, received an Honorable Mention for the best writing on the future of American urbanism and was published in the Journal of Urban Design, and his book, Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities, was published by Routledge, New York in 2005. In 2009 at MIT, he received the Excellence in Teaching Award in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and was selected as an inaugural Fellow at the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values.

The talk is co-sponsored by the Residential Scholars Program at Simmons Hall and the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values, and is supported by a generous contribution from the William R. (1956) and Betsy P. Leitch Endowment.

Sallie W. (Penny) Chisholm
Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies
Professor of Biology

Kerry A. Emanuel
Professor of Atmospheric Science
PAOC Director
Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Edward DeLong
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Division of Biological Engineering

Troy Duster is a Professor of Sociology at New York University. Having received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University and M.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles, Professor Duster’s area of research and interest include, sociology of science; sociology of knowledge; deviance and control; sociology of law; race and ethnicity. His fellowships and honors include, 2002 Hatfield Scholars Award; American Sociological Association’s DuBois-Johnson-Frazier Award (5/2001); Social scientist to the National Advisory Commission for The Decade of Behavior – 2000-2001; Member, American Association for the Advancement of Science Ethical; Social Issues Panel, Genetic Therapy Germline Intervention.

Dara Entekhabi
Director, Earth System Initiative
Bacardi and Stockholm Water Foundations Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences
Director, Ralph M. Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering

Edward DeLong
Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Division of Biological Engineering

Alan Wallace, Ph.D. a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, has taught Buddhist theory and meditation throughout Europe and America since 1976. Having devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama, he went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford.

With his unique background, Alan brings deep experience and applied skills to the challenge of integrating traditional Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world.

Clifford Saron, Ph.D. is currently an Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California at Davis (http://mindbrain.ucdavis.edu), and faculty member of the UC Davis M.I.N.D. Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1999 studying interhemispheric visuomotor integration under the direction of Herbert Vaughan, Jr. Dr. Saron has had a long-standing interest in brain and behavioral effects of meditation practice. He is Principal Investigator of The Shamatha Project, a unique longitudinal study of the effects of intensive meditation training based on the practice of meditative quiescence (shamatha) and cultivation of the four immeasureables (loving kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity) on attention-related skills and emotion regulation. The Shamatha Project is the most comprehensive and multimethod study to date regarding the potential effects of long-term intensive meditation practice on basic mental and physical processes related to cognition, emotion, and motivation. His other primary research interest focuses on investigating brain and behavioral correlates of sensory processing and multisensory integration in children on the autistic spectrum.

Alan Wallace, Ph.D. a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism since 1970, has taught Buddhist theory and meditation throughout Europe and America since 1976. Having devoted fourteen years to training as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama, he went on to earn an undergraduate degree in physics and the philosophy of science at Amherst College and a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford.

With his unique background, Alan brings deep experience and applied skills to the challenge of integrating traditional Indo-Tibetan Buddhism with the modern world.

Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who lectures frequently to professional groups, business audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in 30 languages, and has been a best seller in many countries. Goleman’s latest book is Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything. The book argues that new information technologies will create “radical transparency,” allowing us to know the environmental, health, and social consequences of what we buy. As shoppers use point-of-purchase ecological comparisons to guide their purchases, market share will shift to support steady, incremental upgrades in how products are made – changing every thing for the better. Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships, was published in 2006. Social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence, can now be understood in terms of recent findings from neuroscience. Goleman’s book describes the many implications of this new science, including for altruism, parenting, love, health, learning and leadership.

Richard J. Davidson is the Director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the W.M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He was educated at New York University and Harvard University, where he received his B.A. and Ph.D., respectively, in psychology. Over the course of his research career he has focused on the relationship between brain and emotion. He is currently the William James Professor and Vilas Research Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. He is co-author or editor of thirteen books, including Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature and The Handbook of Affective Science. Professor Davidson has also written more than 250 chapters and journal articles. He is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including the Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was a member of the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute of Mental Health. He was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in May, 2006 and in November, 2006 he received the first Mani Bhaumik Award from UCLA for advances in the understanding of the brain and the conscious mind in healing. In 1992, as a follow-up from previous Mind and Life meetings, he was a member of a scientific team doing neuroscientific investigations of exceptional mental abilities in advanced Tibetan monks.

Fr. Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O. (born 1923) is a Trappist monk (Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance) and priest. He was born in New York City, and attended Deerfield Academy, Yale University, and Fordham University, graduating in December 1943. He is a founder of the Centering Prayer movement and of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd.

Keating entered the Cistercian Order in Valley Falls, Rhode Island in January, 1944. He was appointed Superior of St. Benedict’s Monastery, Snowmass, Colorado in 1958, and was elected abbot of St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts in 1961. He returned to Snowmass after retiring as abbot of Spencer in 1981, where he established a program of ten-day intensive retreats in the practice of Centering Prayer, a contemporary form of the Christian contemplative tradition.

He is one of three architects of Centering Prayer, a contemporary method of contemplative prayer, that emerged from St. Joseph’s Abbey in 1975. Frs. William Menninger and Basil Pennington, also Cistercian monks, were the other architects. In 1984, along with Gustave Reininger and Edward Bednar, he co-founded Contemplative Outreach, Ltd., an international, ecumenical spiritual network that teaches the practice of Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina, a method of prayer drawn from the Christian contemplative tradition. Contemplative Outreach provides a support system for those on the contemplative path through a wide variety of resources, workshops, and retreats. Fr. Keating also helped found the Snowmass Interreligious Conference in 1982 and is a past president of the Temple of Understanding and of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue among other interreligious activities.

Fr. Keating is author of several books and lives at St. Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado.

Michael J. Sandel is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government at Harvard University, where he has taught political philosophy since 1980. He is the author of Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge University Press, 1982, 2nd edition, 1998), Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Harvard University Press, 1996), Public Philosophy: Essays on Morality in Politics (Harvard University Press, 2005), and The Case against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering (Harvard University Press, 2007). His work has been translated into Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, and Korean. His writings also appear in general publications such as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and The New York Times. Sandel’s courses include “Ethics, Biotechnology, and the Future of Human Nature,” “Markets, Morals, and Law,” and “Globalization and Its Critics.” His undergraduate course, “Justice,” has enrolled over 14,000 students. In 2007, Harvard made the Justice course available to alumni around the world through webstreaming and podcasting. A recipient of the Harvard-Radcliffe Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize, Sandel was named a Harvard College Professor in 1999, and in 2008 was recognized by the American Political Science Association for a career of excellence in teaching. Sandel has lectured to academic and general audiences in North America, Europe, Japan, China, India, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand. He has been a visiting professor at the Sorbonne (Paris), delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Oxford University, and in 2007 gave a series of eight lectures at universities throughout China. From 2002 to 2005, Sandel served on the President’s Council on Bioethics, a national body appointed by the President to examine the ethical implications of new biomedical technologies. The recipient of three honorary degrees, Sandel is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. A summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Brandeis University (1975), Sandel received his doctorate from Oxford University (D.Phil.,1981), where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

Born in Mauritania, raised in Mali, trained as filmmaker in the Soviet Union and residing in France and Ethiopia, Abderrahmane Sissako will be Abramowitz Artist-in-Residence at MIT from April 19-May 2, 2009. While at MIT, Sissako will be investigating economic violence in Africa.

Sissako’s films meditate on Africa’s position in a globalized world. A past recipient of the Geneviève McMillan and Reba Stewart Fellowship for Distinguished Filmmaking at the Harvard Film Archives (HFA)will be returning to HFA for a screening of Bamako on April 20th. Bamako marks a departure from Sissako’s recent work, turning away from the film-essay of Life on Earth (1998) and the observational style of Waiting for Happiness (2002) to instead fuse modernist aesthetics with populist elements from any number of genres. The film’s Brechtian centerpiece is a trial, held in the Malian capital of Bamako, whose defendant is Western capitalism itself, facing charges that it has forcibly kept a decolonized Africa impoverished and oppressed. Alternating between the monologues that make up the testimony and a series of episodes from the daily life that continues around the trial – and sometimes interrupts (or even undermines) the proceedings – Sissako continues to explore the intertwining of public and private, global and local, modern and traditional so central to his earlier films, although now with a broader palate of tones than before, ranging from the farcical to the ironic and from the satirical to the quietly tragic.

Carol Gilligan is an ethicist and psychologist currently appointed as a University Professor at the New York University. She received an A.B. in English literature from Swarthmore College, a masters degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. Her landmark book In A Different Voice (1982) is described by Harvard University Press as “the little book that started a revolution.” Following In A Different Voice, she initiated the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development and co-authored or edited 5 books with her studentsMapping the Moral Domain (1988), Making Connections (1990), Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing resistance (1991), Meeting at the Crossroads: Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development,(1992) – a New York Times notable book of the year, and Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships (1995). She received a Senior Research Scholar award from the Spencer Foundation, a Grawemeyer Award for her contributions to education, a Heinz Award for her contributions to understanding the human condition and was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans. Her more recent publications include The Birth of Pleasure: a new map of love (2002), Kyra: a novel (2008), and, with David A. J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy’s Future (2009).

Steven Hamburg is an ecosystem ecologist specializing in the impacts of disturbance on forest structure and function. He came to Brown in 1995 after spending a year at Environmental Defense working on climate change related issues and nine years at the University of Kansas where he directed the Environmental Studies Program and served as Environmental Ombudsman. He received his graduate training at Yale University, held a post-doctoral position at Stanford University and was a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University. At Brown he is the concentration advisor for the environmental science concentration and serves as Research Director of the Global Environment Program at the Watson Institute in International Studies. He has published widely including in Nature and Science and has served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He currently works on climate change mitigation issues with the corporate sector.