Peter Coyote, Elliot Gerson, Brian Greene, John Holdren, David Katz, Lawrence Lessig, Sandra Day O'Connor, Shelby Steele and Damian Woetze share their big ideas at the opening to the 2008 Aspen Ideas Festival.
Bio
Peter Coyote
Peter Coyote is an American actor and author. He has acted in over 70 films and has narrated many documentaries and audio books. His voice work includes narrating the opening ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics. He has also served as an announcer during Oscar telecasts.
He is the co-founder, with Emmett Grogan, of the San Francisco Diggers and a veteran of the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Coyote became a member, and later chairman, of the California State Arts Council from 1975 to 1983. He shifted from acting on stage to acting in films in the late 1970s.
Elliot Gerson
Elliot Gerson is executive vice president for Seminars and Public Programs at the Aspen Institute. Gerson is responsible for the Aspen Institute's seminars, including the Executive Seminar, topical and custom seminars, and those offered in Socrates programs. He also manages the Institute's public programs, including the Aspen Ideas Festival and the World Biomedical Forum.
As American secretary of the Rhodes Trust, he manages the US Rhodes Scholarships. He is also a founding trustee of the Mandela Rhodes Foundation Trust, which focuses on African higher education and leadership; a director of the International Biomedical Research Alliance, affiliated with the National Institutes of Health; and director of a Kabul-based logistics, security, and construction company focused on the reconstruction and redevelopment of Afghanistan.
He was a US Supreme Court clerk and has practiced law, held executive positions in state and federal government and in a presidential campaign, served as president of leading insurance and health care companies, and served on many nonprofit boards, especially in the arts and humanities.
Brian Greene
Brian Greene is Professor of Physics and co-director and co-founder of the Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics at Columbia University.
Greene has worked on mirror symmetry, relating two different Calabi-Yau manifolds (concretely, relating the conifold to one of its orbifolds). He also described the flop transition, a mild form of topology change, showing that topology in string theory can change at the conifold point.
John P. Holdren
John P. Holdren is Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at the Kennedy School, as well as Professor of Environmental Science and Public Policy in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University.
He is also the Director of the Woods Hole Research Center and the immediate past President and current Chair of the Board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
His work focuses on causes and consequences of global environmental change, analysis of energy technologies and policies, ways to reduce the dangers from nuclear weapons and materials, and the interaction of content and process in science and technology policy.
David Katz
David L. Katz MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP is a nationally renowned authority on nutrition, weight control, and the prevention of chronic disease.
He is an Associate Professor (adjunct) of Public Health Practice, and formerly the Director of Medical Studies in Public Health, at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Katz directs the Yale Prevention Research Center which he co-founded in 1998.
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society.
He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and a professor at the University of Chicago.
He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and for Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court. For much of his career, he has focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright.
Recognized for arguing against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online, he is CEO of the Creative Commons project, and he has been a columnist for Wired, Red Herring, and The Industry Standard.
Dalia Mogahed
Dalia Mogahed is a senior analyst and executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies. With John L. Esposito, Ph.D., she is coauthor of the forthcoming book Who Speaks for Islam? Listening to the Voices of a Billion Muslims.
Mogahed provides leadership, strategic direction, and consultation on the collection and analysis of Gallup's unprecedented surveying of more than one billion Muslims worldwide. She also leads the curriculum development of an executive course on findings from the Gallup Poll of the Muslim World.
Prior to joining Gallup, Mogahed was the founder and director of a cross-cultural consulting practice in the United States, which offered workshops, training programs, and one-to-one coaching on diversity and cultural understanding. Mogahed's clients included school districts, colleges and universities, law enforcement agencies, and community service organizations, as well as local and national media outlets.
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sandra Day O'Connor is a retired Associate Justice. She was born in El Paso, Texas, March 26, 1930. She received her B.A. and LL.B. from Stanford University.
She served as Deputy County Attorney of San Mateo County, California from 1952-1953 and as a civilian attorney for Quartermaster Market Center, Frankfurt, Germany from 1954-1957.
From 1958-1960, she practiced law in Maryvale, Arizona, and served as Assistant Attorney General of Arizona from 1965-1969. She was appointed to the Arizona State Senate in 1969 and was subsequently reelected to two two-year terms. In 1975 she was elected Judge of the Maricopa County Superior Court and served until 1979, when she was appointed to the Arizona Court of Appeals.
President Reagan nominated her as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, and she took her seat September 25, 1981. Justice O'Connor retired from the Supreme Court on January 31, 2006.
Shelby Steele
Shelby Steele is the Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He specializes in the study of race relations, multiculturalism, and affirmative action. He was appointed a Hoover fellow in 1994.
Steele has written widely on race in American society and the consequences of contemporary social programs on race relations.
In 2006, Steele received the Bradley Prize for his contributions to the study of race in America. In 2004, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal. Steele is the author of White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era and most recently A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win.
Damian Woetzel
Damian Woetzel is director of the Aspen Institute's arts program and Harman-Eisner Artist-in-Residence Program. A former principal dancer with New York City Ballet, Woetzel is also the artistic director of the Vail International Dance Festival, the founding director of the Jerome Robbins Foundation's New Essential Works Program, and he works with Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Connect Program in the New York City public schools. He is active as a director and producer, and among his recent projects, Woetzel was the director of the first performance of the White House Dance Series hosted by First Lady Michelle Obama and an arts salute to Stephen Hawking at Lincoln Center for the World Science Festival. Woetzel has been a visiting lecturer at Harvard Law School. In 2009, President Obama appointed Woetzel to the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.
The framers of the Constitution foresaw a "People's," house, one which was not a lifelong job. But one which was always in the process of changing, the representatives as well as the laws.
This presentation, on the whole, shows the inimitable force of ideas and the power that they confer on the person who takes the ideas and puts them into use.
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