People

Aleksandr Ilitchev received an MA in International Relations and Journalism from the Moscow State Institute for International Relations in 1974.He wasa career diplomat, with the United Nations Secretariat since 1992. The areas of responsibility include Northeast Asia, as well as the ASEAN Regional Forum and regional security issues. Aleksandr accompanied the current Secretary-General and his predecessor on many trips to Asia, and was advisor to the Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for the Korean Peninsula (2003-2005). Prior to joining the United Nations, he served continuously in the Russian Foreign Ministry from 1974 with the assignments at the Permanent Mission to the United Nations (Alternate Representative to the Security Council and Senior Counsellor) (1990-1992); Personal Assistant to Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze (1986-90); USA Department of the Foreign Ministry (global and regional security issues) (1985-86); Embassy in Washington, DC (1979-1985) and the US Department of the Foreign Ministry (1978-1979), as well as in Syria (1974-77).

Aleksandra Fleszar is an associate professor of German and Russian at the University of New Hampshire.

is a Slovenian philosopher whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. She is a Slovenian psychoanalytic theorist and philosopher who along with Mladen Dolar and Slavoj Žižek have in large measure been responsible for the popularity in North America (and Europe) of a politically infused Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Often mistaken for British, Alessandro Nivola has established himself as one of the American actors most likely to assume a flawless English accent in his films. Nivola, whose combination of charismatic good looks, vowel-laden name, and work in a number of British films have both confused and delighted critics and viewers, is actually a product of the East Coast. He was a student at the Tony Philips Exeter Academy and Yale University; by the time he was a sophomore at Yale, he had landed an agent and was making regular trips to New York City for auditions. Nivola got his first professional jobs with the Yale Repertory Theatre and a Seattle-based company. He broke into films in 1997 with a small role in *Inventing the Abbotts* and the more substantial part of Nicolas Cage's psychotic genius brother in John Woo's *Face/Off*. He then crossed the ocean, and the accent barrier, to star in the British noir drama *I Want You* (1998), which cast him as an enigmatic man with a dark past, and in Patricia Rozema's adaptation of *Mansfield Park* (1998). It was the latter film that gave Nivola his first significant dose of recognition and respect, with critics and viewers alike marveling at his portrayal of the dashing and morally dubious Henry Crawford, not to mention his seamless English accent. Nivola again worked with a largely British cast and crew the following year to make Kenneth Branagh's musical version of *Love's Labour's Lost* (2000), in which he played a king whose vow to forsake love for intellectual enlightenment becomes severely jeopardized by the arrival of a comely French princess (Alicia Silverstone) and her ladies in waiting. That same year, he returned to the other side of the Atlantic to portray a Backstreet Boys-type singer in Mike Figgis' *Time Code* (2000), an experimental feature filmed entirely in one take.

Alex Beam burst on the Boston scene in 1988 with TGIF, a Boston Globe column on business news and commentary. Beam was born in 1954 and graduated from Yale University. He spent some formative years in Moscow, started his journalism career as a researcher for Newsweek magazine, then shifted to Business Week where he reported from Los Angeles and Moscow. His second novel, The Americans are Coming!, is available through St. Martin's Press.

Alex de Waal is the Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation. Considered one of the foremost experts on Sudan and the Horn of Africa, his scholarly work and practice has also probed humanitarian crisis and response, human rights, HIV/AIDS and governance in Africa, and conflict and peace-building. His latest book is Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine (Polity Press 2017). He is also the author of The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa (Polity Press, 2015). Following a fellowship with the Global Equity Initiative at Harvard (2004-06), he worked with the Social Science Research Council as Director of the program on HIV/AIDS and Social Transformation, and led projects on conflict and humanitarian crises in Africa (2006-09). During 2005-06, de Waal was seconded to the African Union mediation team for Darfur and from 2009-11 served as senior adviser to the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel for Sudan, where he took on a number of roles in the negotiations leading to the independence of South Sudan. He was on the list of Foreign Policy’s 100 most influential public intellectuals in 2008 and Atlantic Monthly’s 27 “brave thinkers” in 2009.

DeFronzo is the Executive Director of Piers Park Sailing Center, which offers 100 percent accessible recreational, educational, and personal growth opportunities for people of all ages and abilities in Boston Harbor. Piers Park empowers participants to become stewards of a stronger community, advocates for a healthy Boston Harbor, and leaders of individual and family wellness.

Alexander Hertel-Fernandez is a fourth year PhD student in Government and Social Policy. His research interests include social insurance, taxes, inequality, and the politics of business and labor organization in advanced democracies.

Alex Jones is Director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy and Laurence M. Lombard Lecturer in the Press and Public Policy. He covered the press for TheNew York Times from 1983 to 1992 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. In 1992, he left the Times to work on The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (also coauthored with Tifft), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award in biography. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a host of National Public Radio's On the Media, and host and Executive Editor of PBS's Media Matters. He is on the boards of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, International Center for Journalists, Foundation of the Society of Professional Journalists, Harvard Magazine, Nieman Foundation, Black Mountain Institute, the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet, and other professional organizations.

Alex Krieger has combined a career of teaching and practice, dedicating himself in both to improving the quality of place and life in our major urban areas. Alex is the founding Principal of Chan Krieger Sieniewicz which merged with NBBJ in 2009. He is a Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1977. During his tenure he has served as Chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Design, Director of the Urban Design Program, and Associate Chairman of the Department of Architecture. Alex is a frequent advisor to mayors and their planning staffs, and serves on a number of boards and commissions. Among these: Director of the NEA's Mayor's Institute in City Design; Boston Civic Design Commission; Providence Capital Center Commission; and the New England Holocaust Memorial committee. In September 2012, President Barack Obama appointed Alex to serve on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.

Alex Lemon is the author of the poetry collections *Hallelujah Blackout* (Milkweed Editions), *Mosquito* (Tin House Books 2006), *At Last Unfolding Congo* (horse less press) and the memoir *Happy* (Scribner 2010). A play will be published by cinematheque press in 2010. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines, including *Esquire*, *Best American Poetry 2008*, *AGNI*, *BOMB*, *Gulf Coast*, *jubilat*, *Kenyon Review*, *New England Review*, *Open City*, *Pleiades* and *Tin House*. He was awarded a 2005 Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2006 Minnesota Arts Board Grant. He co-edits *LUNA: A Journal of Poetry and Translation* with Ray Gonzalez and is a frequent contributor to *The Bloomsbury Review*.

**Alex Myers** is a writer, teacher, speaker, and activist. At Phillips Exeter Academy, Alex came out as transgender, and was the first transgender student in that Academy's history. After Exeter, Alex earned his bachelor's at Harvard University, studying Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, and living in the Dudley Co-op. Alex was also the first openly transgender student at Harvard and worked to change the University's nondiscrimination clause to include gender identity. Subsequent to earning a master's degree in religion at Brown, Alex has pursued a career in teaching English at secondary schools. He completed his Master's of Fine Arts in fiction writing at Vermont College of Fine Arts, where he began his work on \_Revolutionary\_.

Alex Nowrasteh is the immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. An economist by training, Nowrasteh has published widely in the mainstream press, including The Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury, and Richmond Times-Dispatch, as well as online for the Huffington Post.

Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland helped to create and direct the Media Lab, where he directs the Human Dynamics research group and leads the Connection Science initiative. One of the most-cited scientists in the world, Forbes recently declared him one of the "7 most powerful data scientists in the world" along with Google founders and the Chief Technical Officer of the United States. He is a founding member of advisory boards for Google, AT&T, Nissan, and the UN Secretary General, and a serial entrepreneur who has co-founded more than a dozen companies including social enterprises such as the Data Transparency Lab, the Harvard-ODI-MIT DataPop Alliance, and the Institute for Data-Driven Design. Pentland and his students pioneered computational social science, organizational engineering, wearable computing (Google Glass), image understanding, and modern biometrics. His most recent books are Social Physics (Penguin Press, 2014) and Honest Signals (MIT Press, 2008). He received his BS in computer science from the University of Michigan, and his PhD in computer science, psychology, and AI from MIT. Pentland is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a leader within the World Economic Forum, and has received numerous awards and prizes including the McKinsey Award from Harvard Business Review, the 40th Anniversary of the Internet from DARPA, and the Brandeis Award for work in privacy.