People

Benjamin Roe is the general manager of WDAV-FM in Davidson, NC. Most recently NPR's director of music and music initiatives, he is a public radio professional with more than 25 years of public radio and media experience. He is a Grammy and Peabody award-winning producer.

Ben Ross was president of the Action Committee for Transit for 15 years. His new book about the politics of urbanism and transit, Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, is published by Oxford University Press.

Benjamin Taylor received a 2021 Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His memoir 'Here We Are' was published by Penguin Books in May 2020. His previous memoir, 'The Hue and Cry at Our House', received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize and was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice; his 'Proust: The Search' was named a Best Book of 2016 by Thomas Mallon in The New York Times Book Review and by Robert McCrum in The Observer (London). Taylor is a past fellow and current trustee of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and serves as president of the Edward F. Albee Foundation.

Benjamin van Rooij is a Senior Lecturer at the Van Vollenhoven Institute. He has studied Dutch Law and Chinese Languages and Culture, both at Leiden University. After a short period in legal practice, he started to work at the VVI in June 2000. Since then, Benjamin has been carrying out research on various aspects of law and administration in China and the administrative implementation of law in general. In his PhD-thesis, which was awarded a cum laude, honors distinction, he focused on the local implementation of national resource protection legislation in Southwestern China, analyzing interactions between processes of lawmaking, compliance, violation and enforcement. His current research activities include political law enforcement campaigns in China, pollution regulation in developing countries, developmental lawmaking, and recent trends in law and development studies. Apart from research, Benjamin is active as a lecturer, teaching courses in Chinese Law, Legal Systems Worldwide, Law and Culture, Law Governance and Development, and Anthropology of Law. Concurrently as a member of the institute’s management team, he is also coordinator of the institute’s teaching programs and China activities.

uses food microbial communities to address fundamental questions in microbial ecology and evolution. He received his B.Sc. from Cornell University in 2003 and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2010. He developed an interest in food microbial communities as a post-doc with Rachel Dutton at Harvard's FAS Center for Systems Biology. Benjamin is a passionate promoter of microbial literacy through teaching and writing. He has taught food microbiology courses at the Harvard Summer School and Boston University's Gastronomy Program and has taught classes or workshops at Formaggio Kitchen, the San Francisco Cheese School, and for artisan food guilds across the country. Benjamin is a regular contributor to the food magazine \_[Lucky Peach](http://luckypeach.com/ "")\_ and writes an online series about the biology of food for \_Boston magazine\_. He is a co-founder of MicrobialFoods.org, a website that digests the science of fermented foods.

For the past 50 years Benjamin Zander has occupied a unique place as a master teacher, deeply insightful and probing interpreter, and as a profound source of inspiration for audiences, students, professional musicians, corporate leaders, politicians and more. He has persistently engaged well-informed musical and public intellectuals in a quest for insight and understanding into the western musical canon and the underlying spiritual, social, and political issues that inspired its creation.

Benji Rogers is a British-born, New York-based entrepreneur, technologist, musician, and the founder of Pledge Music. An early pioneer of the direct artist-to-fan model of distributing music, Rogers founded Pledge Music based on the belief that artists should share the process of their artistic output, not just the finished product. Straddling the worlds of technology and music, Rogers uses his dual background to advise a range of tech and music companies on how to bridge the divide between their industries. To address the unique challenges facing artists releasing their work in the digital economy, Rogers also co-founded the Dot Blockchain Music Project, an attempt to create a decentralized global registry of music rights using blockchain technology that will overhaul the commercialization and movement of music online. In addition to these projects and his ongoing role with Pledge, Rogers is also an instructor at Berklee College of Music on digital trends and strategies in the industry. A dedicated patron of arts and creativity in all its forms, Rogers’ work is rooted in a belief in the democratizing power of the internet; he will always be “loving your work.”

Bennett Freeman is senior vice president for Social Research and Policy for Calvert, a socially responsible mutual fund. For three years prior to this Freeman headed Burson-Marsteller's corporate social responsibility practice group in the U.S. Freeman joined B-Ms corporate social responsibility practice in mid-2003 and sits on the board of directors of the U.S. division of the global aid group, Oxfam America, as well as being a member of the Business and Economic Relations Group of Amnesty International USA. At Burson-Marsteller Freeman led "firms client advisory work on corporate responsibility policy frameworks, risk assessments, stakeholder engagement and communications strategies addressing global issues such as human rights, labor rights, the environment and sustainable development." In 2002, he co-authored an independent Human Rights Impact Assessment of BPs Tangguh project in Papua, Indonesia, the first such assessment conducted of a major energy project in the world." "As U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights and Labor from 1999 to early 2001, Freeman was responsible for conducting the State Departments bilateral human rights diplomacy around the world.

Bennett Parten is an assistant professor of history at Georgia Southern University whose area of expertise is the Civil War period. He is a native of Royston, Georgia, and completed his PhD in history at Yale University. His writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Zocalo Public Square, and The Civil War Monitor, among others.

A giant of the hard bop era, saxophonist and composer Benny Golson originally hails from Philadelphia, Penn. He began studying piano at the age of 9, but was soon seduced by the tenor saxophone sounds he heard on jazz records. Golson's career blossomed after graduating from Howard University, when he joined up with "Bull Moose" Jackson's blues band. There, he met pianist and composer Tadd Dameron, who encouraged Golson's budding talent at writing music. Golson spent a brief period with Dameron's band before joining Dizzy Gillespie's globetrotting big band, where his tenor playing and compositional abilities gained even more recognition. Artists like James Moody, Miles Davis and Dizzy himself recorded Golson's "Blue Walk," "Stablemates" and "Whisper Not" respectively. His tunes became an integral part of the group's repertoire some would become enduring jazz standards, such as "I Remember Clifford," "Along Came Betty," and "Killer Joe." At the end of the 1950s, Golson set out with trumpeter Art Farmer and formed the Jazztet, a hard bop quintet. After several years of touring, Golson took time away from the bandstand to concentrate on composing. He moved to Hollywood and began focusing on composing and arranging for commercials, television programs and films. Golson made a serious return to the stage and the studio in the late '70s, freelancing extensively with the likes of Woody Shaw and Pharoah Sanders. In 1982, he rejoined Art Farmer with a new version of the Jazztet. Golson has also devoted much of his time to jazz education though teaching, clinics and even writing textbooks for a new generation of musicians. He continues to record and tour regularly.

Benson Gray grew up in Old Town, Maine, and has always loved canoes, so it was exciting to discover that many others shared an appreciation for these wonderful boats. His work with computers, combined with an interest in the history of canoes, has led to some fascinating collaborations. In the 1990s, he initiated a project to scan the Old Town Canoe Company catalogs, which later evolved into a much larger effort encompassing a variety of canoe manufacturers, with significant help from Dan Miller and others. His largest wooden canoe history project involved scanning most of the Old Town, Carleton, and Kennebec build records. These projects have made the history of canoes more accessible to everyone, but the true essence of an organization like the Charles River Museum lies in connecting people who share an interest in wooden canoes.

Although not a member of Gerald Ford's congressional or White House staff, Benton L. Becker played an integral role in some of the most important events of the US President's career, including the investigation of Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Ford's confirmation as Vice President, the Nixon pardon, and the disposition of Nixon's papers.