People

Bhaamati Borkhetaria is a reporter at CommonWealth Beacon.

Bianca Hillier is a reporter for The World.

Bianca Vázquez Toness is the Managing Editor and Correspondent for K-12 Education at WGBH Radio. She has covered everything from technology to immigration to presidential elections, but keeps coming back to stories about kids and schools. She's worked for Minnesota Public Radio, WBUR and Bloomberg News. She was a 2016-2017 Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT.

M. Bilal Kaleem is the Executive Director of the Muslim American Society of Boston (MAS Boston). MAS Boston, the largest Muslim organization in New England, operates the newly completed, $16 million Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. Bilal received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. from MIT, and is currently pursuing graduate study in sociology and religion at Boston University with some coursework at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. His focus is Muslim civic engagement. He also serves on the board of the Greater Boston Interfaith Organization (GBIO), the Massachusetts Immigration and Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), and the Center for Jewish Muslim Relations (CJMR). He has also served as a mentor at the Somali Development Center serving youth from Somalia.

Bilal is currently engaged in an entrepreneurial venture (GEO2 Technologies), after having spent time in strategic management consulting at The Boston Consulting Group. GEO2 is an advanced materials company, commercializing novel substrate technologies for filtration and other uses. He is one of the co-founder and am presently the VP of Product Development. Prior to BCG, Bilal received his Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the guidance of Professor Mario Molina. His research focused on atmospheric chemistry, particularly the microphysics of the tropospheric inorganic aerosols, the fate of soot in urban environments, heterogeneous nucleation of particulates, cloud condensation properties of organics and soot, and thermodynamics of nanometer-sized organic and inorganic particles.

Bill Briggs writes for MSNBC.com, covering business, travel, and health. He is the coauthor of Amped: A Soldier's Race for Gold in the Shadow of War (Wiley, 2008). He earned seven national writing awards for the Denver Post, from investigative journalism to humor pieces. His articles ranged from an exposé on a sexual predator coaching youth basketball to a series of stories revealing dysfunction and financial irregularities within the U.S. Olympic Committee. Briggs also has written for the Financial Times, the Miami Herald, and the Nashville Banner, covering business, sports, health, travel, and crime. Briggs has one daughter, Andrea, a college student. He lives in Denver, Colorado, with his wife, Nancy.

Bill Bryson has said of his origins, “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.” In 1973 he settled in England and wrote travel articles for the English newspapers The Times and The Independent. In 1989, he published The Lost Continent, a sidesplitting account of his road trip across small-town America. In 1995, he moved his family back to the States, so his children could experience "being American," but returned to the UK in 2003. Since then, he has written several more books, including notable bestsellers, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, A Walk in the Woods, I'm A Stranger Here Myself (published in Britain as Notes from a Big Country), and In a Sunburned Country (published in Britain as Down Under).

Bill Buzenberg became executive director of the Center for Public Integrity in December 2006. He has been a journalist and news executive at newspapers and in public radio for more than 35 years. Most recently, as senior vice president of news at American Public Media/Minnesota Public Radio, Buzenberg launched such programming initiatives as American RadioWorks.

From 1955 to 1991, Bill Cavness was the voice of WGBH Radio. He hosted many live broadcasts including numerous classical music programs and from 1958 to his retirement in 1991, he produced and hosted a daily weekday program, called *Reading Aloud*. Before there were books on tape, Bill revived what he referred to as "an old family custom" of reading stories aloud. The series began in 1958 with Doctor Zhivago. This was before Pasternak's book was readily available and the reading was Bill's way to share the book with a larger audience. During the holidays, Bill would turn his attention to literature about the season including on several occasions over the 33 years, Charles Dickens' *A Christmas Caro*.