Arianna Huffington is the chair, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington
Post Media Group, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of 13 books. In May of 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that quickly became one of the most widely read, linked to, and frequently cited media brands on the Internet. In 2012, the site won a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. In 2013, she was named to the Forbes Most Powerful Women list. In 2006, and again in 2011, she was named to the TIME 100, TIME magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was 16, and graduated from Cambridge University with a master’s in economics. At 21, she became president of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union. She serves on several boards, including EL PAIS, PRISA, the Center for Public Integrity, and the Committee to Protect Journalists. Her 14th book, The Success Myth: The Third Metric Beyond Money and Power, was published by Crown in March of 2014.
Sheryl Petty, EdD, is a principal associate at the Annenberg Institute for School
Reform at Brown University, a national educational equity and systems change consultant, and an associate consultant with Movement Strategy Center (Oakland, California) and Management Assistance Group (Washington, D.C.). She is lead designer for the Transforming Education Systems Alliance (TESA), which focuses on promoting aligned approaches to democratic education across sectors including policy, practice, community organizing, educator preparation and development, research, messaging, framing and communications, capacity building, standards and curriculum, and assessment. A fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Opportunity Policy in Education, she served as executive director of California Tomorrow — a research, advocacy, and training nonprofit specializing in strategies that foster equity and inclusion across the pre-kindergarten to community college (preK-14) spectrum, and managed the equity and community engagement approaches at the Stupski Foundation. She holds a bachelor of arts in mathematics, a master’s in systematic and philosophical theology, and a doctorate of education in educational leadership and change. Her expertise includes equity-driven change process facilitation, strategic visioning and analysis, coaching, and fostering collaborative relationships for the improvement of our collective life.
Edward Slingerland, PhD, is a professor of Asian studies and the Canada
research chair in Chinese thought and embodied cognition at the University of British Columbia, where he also holds adjunct appointments in philosophy and psychology. His research specialties and teaching interests include “warring states”; Chinese thought; religious studies (comparative religion, cognitive science, and evolution of religion); cognitive linguistics (blending and conceptual metaphor theory); ethics (virtue ethics and moral psychology); and the relationship between the humanities and the natural sciences. His publications include Effortless Action: Wu-wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford 2003), The Analects of Confucius (Hackett 2003), What Science Offers the Humanities: Integrating Body &
Culture (Cambridge 2008), and Creating Consilience: Integrating the Sciences and Humanities (coedited with Mark Collard; Oxford, 2012), as well as more than 20 referred articles in top journals in a wide variety of fields. He is currently PI on a large Canadian government grant on “The Evolution of Religion and Morality,” and director of the Cultural Evolution of Religion Research Consortium (CERC) and the Database of Religious History (DRH). His latest work — a trade book entitled Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity (Crown/Random House), which integrates ancient Chinese and modern scientific understandings of spontaneity — was published in March of 2014.
Shawn Clement is a Salesforce & IT Consultant for the Mind & Life Institute. Shawn worked full-time at the Mind & Life Institute from 2018 to mid-2019 on the Advancement and IT teams, prior to moving to DC to work with a Jewish non-profit. He received his masters in Higher Education from the University of Virginia and BA in Special Education from Winthrop University. Shawn enjoys learning new things, playing video games, and exploring new cities.
Phil Walker is a Creative Content Producer at the Mind & Life Institute. Phil is a filmmaker and producer from Atlanta with a BA in Media Arts from the University of South Carolina. He worked at Georgia Tech in Communications for eight years where he produced global media projects in partnership with the Carter Center and the United Nations. In 1998, Phil started his own production company and made several feature documentaries and numerous short films presented on PBS and other outlets. Awards include a regional Emmy Award (1995), the Kodak Vision Award (Slamdance Film Festival 2010) and a THEA award (2016).
Emiliana Simon-Thomas is the Science Director at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center. A Berkeley native, she earned her PhD in Psychology studying how emotional and cognitive processes interact to shape behavior and brain activity. During her post-doc, Emiliana studied the biological correlates and social functions of pro-social emotions like compassion, gratitude, and awe. She then served as Associate Director/Senior Scientist at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford, examining how compassion, both innate and learned, benefits health and well-being. At the GGSC, she oversees the student research fellowship program, runs key initiatives like Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude, and provides an expert scientific voice on the key roles that social connection, support, and belonging play in well-being to audiences worldwide. She also co-teaches The Science of Happiness, a BerkeleyX MOOC that has enrolled over 600,000 people from all over the world, as well as the Science of Happiness at Work Professional Certificate Series. She regularly lectures on the biological underpinnings of social connection, as well as empirically-supported approaches to improving interpersonal dynamics – like practicing mindfulness, and increasing compassion, gratitude, and generosity. Alongside her academic and popular writing, Emiliana recently co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Compassion Science, a transdisciplinary compendium of articles from world-class researchers. Emiliana’s work leverages cutting edge scientific insights to help people live better lives individually, in relationship with others, within organizations and communities, and society-wide.
Otto Scharmer, author of Theory U and co-author of Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-system to Eco-system Economies, is an action researcher who co-creates innovations in learning and leadership that he delivers through classes and programs at MIT, MITx U.Lab, the Presencing Institute, and through innovation projects with organizations in business, government and civil society around the world. He is a senior lecturer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. He is co-founder of the Presencing Institute. Through MITx and edX.org he currently delivers the U-Lab, a new type of social entrepreneurship MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) that uses presencing practices of co-sensing and co-creating emerging futures with a platform of 25,000 participants from 191 countries that collaborate through more than 100 self-organized U.Lab Hubs across countries and cultures. Scharmer holds a PhD in economics and management from Witten-Herdecke University in Germany. For more information visit www.ottoscharmer.com or www.presencing.com.
Sharon Daloz Parks, author of Leadership Can Be Taught: A Bold Approach for a Complex World is a teacher/speaker, theorist, and consultant. For sixteen years she held faculty and research positions at Harvard University in the schools of Divinity, Business, and the Kennedy School of Government. She currently teaches at Seattle University and is a senior fellow at the Whidbey Institute. Her other writings include Big Questions, Worthy Dreams, and the co-authored, Common Fire: Leading Lives of Commitment in a Complex World.
Vusi Mahlasela is simply known as ‘The Voice’ in his home-country, South Africa. He is celebrated for his distinct, powerful voice and his poetic, optimistic lyrics. His songs of hope connect Apartheid-scarred South Africa with its promise for a better future. Raised in the Mamelodi Township, where he still resides, Vusi became a singer-songwriter and poet-activist at an early age teaching himself how to play guitar and later joining the Congress of South African Writers. After his popular debut on BMG Africa, “When You Come Back,” Vusi was asked to perform at Nelson Mandela’s inauguration in 1994. Vusi has released seven studio albums to-date and has toured globally and shared the stage with Dave Matthews Band, Sting, Paul Simon, Josh Groban, Ray LaMontagne, Natalie Merchant, Taj Mahal, among many others.
In light of his international and national acclaim, the SAMA Awards (South African Music Awards) honored Vusi with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. Vusi was proud to have been an ambassador to Nelson Mandela’s 46664 campaign (an awareness effort surrounding the HIV/AIDS crisis in South Africa) and holds an honorary doctorate degrees from the prestigious Rhodes University in Grahamstown, SA and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Additionally, South Africa’s former President Jacob Zuma awarded Vusi with the National Order of Ikhamanga, recognizing him for “drawing attention to the injustices that isolated South Africa from the global community during the Apartheid years.”
