Robin Bernstein Ph.D. combines field and laboratory research to understand how nutrition, disease, and environment shape growth patterns in infants and children, across generations and within species. An associate professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado Boulder, she heads a longitudinal study of rural African infants studying causes of growth failure in low-income countries. She also works with the American Association of Physical Anthropologists to expand opportunity for women in science.

Jim Cahill J.D., a lifelong resident of New Brunswick, has served the city continuously since 1980, first as assistant city attorney and, since 1991, as its seven-term mayor. During his tenure, New Brunswick has experienced a transformative period of growth and investment, the result of targeted community collaborations and innovative public-private partnerships. Today, this once-struggling city is recognized as the state’s premier health care hub and its fastest-growing urban center.

William R. Clark Ph.D. is the Charles Puryear Professor of Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University and head of its Department of Political Science. While focused on political business cycles, monetary policy, and central bank independence, he also publishes on political methodology, party systems, and the political economy of development. His paper “An Exit, Voice, and Loyalty Model of Politics” won the British Academy’s Brian Barry Prize and is forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science.

Bhairavi Desai is the executive director and a founding member of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA). In 1998, she helped to organize the NYTWA with an initial membership of 700 workers; today, the union represents 18,000 taxi drivers in New York City and is working under a charter from the AFL-CIO to build a national union. A native of Gujarat, India, Desai has also worked for the rights of battered women and won the Leadership for a Changing World Award from the Ford Foundation in 2005.

Mike DuHaime is among the most accomplished political operatives in the country and was named the 2014 Campaign Strategist of the Year by the American Association of Political Consultants. DuHaime has served as political director of the Republican National Committee and in senior positions for President George W. Bush, Governor Chris Christie, Senator John McCain, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, among others. A Rutgers adjunct faculty member, he teaches a popular course on political campaigning.

Maggie Moran has served in senior roles for major public affairs campaigns in New York and New Jersey, worked for two U.S. senators, managed statewide presidential and gubernatorial campaigns, and served as chief of management and operations for the State of New Jersey. Her work has placed her on Campaigns & Elections’ “Influencers 500” list and PolitickerNJ’s “Power List” five times. She is co-managing partner of Kivvit, a leading national public affairs firm, and a Rutgers visiting professor.

Olga Anna Duhl Ph.D. is the Oliver E. Williams Professor of Languages and founder and co-chair of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Early Modern Studies Program at Lafayette College. An internationally recognized scholar of French literature, she has published seven books including, in 2013, a critical edition of La Nef des folles (“The Ship of Foolish Maidens”). She studies, translates, and reviews late medieval and early Renaissance French drama, rhetoric, textual criticism, and comparative literature.

Rich Edson is a Washington, D.C.-based correspondent for the Fox News Channel, where he covers the White House, Congress, politics, and breaking news. He previously worked for the Fox Business Network, joining the startup channel months before the financial crisis. As a reporter, he has broken details of the U.S. auto bailout, the 2011 debt-ceiling deal, and the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, among others. He was also the winner of the 2010 Funniest Journalist stand-up comedy competition.

Mike Emanuel joined the Fox News Channel in 1997 and currently serves as senior political and chief congressional correspondent. In the 2016 presidential race, he covered the campaigns of both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Previously he was a White House correspondent for Fox, covering almost five years of the Bush administration and an early period of the Obama administration. This proud Rutgers alumnus has fond memories of broadcasting sports on WRSU-FM.

Wendy Gillette is a reporter, anchor, and producer who has worked as a freelancer in New York City for more than a decade. She juggles multiple roles at CBS Newspath, which provides national and international stories to affiliate stations nationwide; anchors business reports for NY1 and other Time Warner stations across the country; and fills in as an anchor at FiOS1 News, Verizon’s local news for New Jersey and New York. She also produces stories for her online travel channel.

T. Sean Herbert is an award-winning journalist who has traveled to many parts of the world telling stories for ABC News, CBS News, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, and more. He was news director of the cable channel RNN TV and helped to launch CNBC’s news magazine, Business Nation, as well as ESPN’s news magazine, E:60. He has worked with the late Mike Wallace, Ed Bradley, and Morley Safer, as well as Dan Rather, Scott Pelley, and Charlie Rose, and is a frequent guest lecturer on press freedoms, ethics, and interview techniques at Rutgers.

Jessica Kurdali is the senior director of talent recruitment and development for NBC News. Kurdali’s responsibilities include scouting and recruiting all on-air and production talent for NBC and MSNBC. She develops new talent, tracks prospective talent, and produces talent auditions. Kurdali has also been involved with coverage of major news events, including Hurricane Katrina, the Olympics, the Paris terror attacks, and the presidential elections.

William Gaudelli Ed.D. is a leader in the field of global citizenship education and teacher education and development. He currently serves as associate professor and chair of the Department of Arts and Humanities at Teachers College of Columbia University. He has published more than 50 scholarly articles and is the author or editor of three books, including, this year, Global Citizenship Education: Everyday Transcendence. He is also cofounder of the Global Competence Certificate Program for educators and served a term as a member of the South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education.

Mike Graziano Ph.D. is currently vice president of drug safety evaluation at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). Prior to joining the company in 2003, he was a director of toxicology programs at Pfizer/Parke-Davis Pharmaceutical Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After graduating from Rutgers, he received a master of science in veterinary toxicology from Louisiana State University and a doctorate in toxicology from the University of Kentucky and was a postgraduate research toxicologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sandra Harding Ph.D. is a distinguished research professor at UCLA with scholarly interests in the philosophy of science and feminist and postcolonial theory. She has authored or edited 17 books and special journal issues, including The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader (2011) and Objectivity and Diversity: Another Logic of Scientific Research (2015). A past coeditor of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, she consults to such international agencies as UNESCO and the United Nations.

Robin Jeshion Ph.D., a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California, focuses on philosophy of language, specializing in general versus singular thought, the semantics of proper names, and the nature of pejorative expressions. Her research extends to the epistemic foundations of mathematics and logic. She has been a Burkhardt Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies and received a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences.

Lenny Kaye is the longtime lead guitarist for the poet-rocker Patti Smith. He is a noted record producer for artists from Suzanne Vega to Pussy Riot, and musical historian with books including Waylon, the life story of Waylon Jennings, and You Call It Madness, a study of the romantic singers of the 1930s. His anthology of 1960s garage rock, Nuggets, was chosen by Rolling Stone as one of the most important albums of all time. Next year he and Rutgers’ Class of 1967 celebrate their 50th anniversary.

Alice Kessler-Harris Ph.D. is the R. Gordon Hoxie Professor Emerita of American History at Columbia University. After earning her doctorate from Rutgers, she returned to the university to teach from 1989 to 1999. Kessler-Harris writes about women and work and the influence of gender on social policy. Her prize-winning books include the classic Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States and In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America.

Norman Kleeblatt is the Susan and Elihu Rose Chief Curator of The Jewish Museum in New York. He has curated such major exhibitions as Action/Abstraction: Pollock, De Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976, The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth, and Justice, and Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities. His articles have appeared in major art journals and his work has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Rockefeller Foundation.

Kenneth H. Klipstein II is director of Watershed Protection Programs for the New Jersey Water Supply Authority, where he manages the watersheds of the Raritan and Manasquan rivers and advises on water issues statewide. He serves as president of the Board of Trustees of the New Jersey Conservation Foundation, cofounded by his grandfather in 1960. His philanthropic work, through the E.C. Klipstein Foundation, supports environmental education, conservation policy, and innovative environmental solutions.

Eric J. LeGrand, the former Rutgers football player, suffered a severe spinal cord injury in a game against Army in 2010. Today, LeGrand works tirelessly on his recovery and his life mission: to inspire others to test their limits. A sought-after motivational speaker and nonprofit leader, he has been presented with the Unsung Hero Award by the New Jersey Hall of Fame and the Jimmy V Award for Perseverance. His jersey number, 52, is the first to be retired in the history of Rutgers football.

Sarah-Jane Leslie Ph.D., the Class of 1943 Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, studies how we categorize and generalize information about the world around us. Most recently, she has examined gender gaps in educational and career choices, work recognized by Edge as among the most interesting scientific findings of 2015. Her work is covered extensively in the media, including by the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, and she has appeared on NPR, WHYY, and CBC Radio.

As head of NOAA Research—the research office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—Craig McLean J.D. directs the agency's entire research enterprise, including all programs and laboratories. Over a 30-year career with NOAA, he has served as a commissioned officer on board hydrographic, oceanographic, and fisheries research ships and was the founding director of its Office of Ocean Exploration. An attorney practicing marine resource law, he has been awarded the U.S. Department of Commerce Silver and Bronze Medals.

John H. McWhorter V Ph.D., an associate professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, specializes in language change and language contact. He writes and speaks widely on language and its relation to race, politics, and cultural history. His books include The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language; The Word on the Street, about dialects and Black English; and Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music in America and Why We Should, Like, Care.

Anne Milgram J.D. is a professor of practice and distinguished scholar in residence at NYU School of Law, focusing on criminal justice reform through smart data and technology. Attorney General of New Jersey from 2007 to 2010, she served as the state’s chief law enforcement officer and led investigations into street gangs, public corruption, gun violence, and securities and mortgage fraud. Earlier in her career, she was counsel to U.S. Senator Jon Corzine and a state, local, and federal prosecutor.

Khalil Gibran Muhammad Ph.D. is professor of history, race, and public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and the Suzanne Young Murray Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. Focused on racial criminalization in modern U.S. history, he is the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, which won the 2011 John Hope Franklin Best Book Award in American Studies. He is former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Elora Mukherjee J.D. is an associate clinical professor of law at Columbia Law School, where she directs the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. She will be a visiting clinical associate professor of law at Yale Law School in the spring of 2017. Her areas of research include immigration law, civil rights, police misconduct, prisoners’ rights, and housing discrimination. She was previously a staff attorney at the ACLU Racial Justice Program and is the founder of the Refugee Reunification Project.

Shane Myers served as director for immigration and visa security on the staff of the National Security Council, the principal forum used by the White House for consideration of national security and foreign policy. He has served abroad in Mexico, Germany, Bolivia, and Venezuela and is currently assigned to the staff of the Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs. In 2012, he was nominated for the American Foreign Service Association’s William R. Rivkin Constructive Dissent Award. In addition to his Rutgers degree, he holds a master of arts in diplomacy from Norwich University.

Paul M. Pietroski Ph.D. focuses his research on questions of linguistic meaning: What are word meanings? How are they related to concepts and our capacity to understand complex expressions? How do children acquire this remarkable capacity? He is the author of three books and numerous articles on topics that span philosophy, linguistics, and psychology. After receiving his doctoral degree from MIT, he taught at McGill University before moving to Maryland, where he is a professor of philosophy and linguistics at the University of Maryland. He has held visiting positions at Harvard University and the École Normale Supérieure.

Charles Ray, a Los Angeles-based artist, is best known for his sculptures of altered and refashioned familiar objects. His recent work pioneers the use of solid aluminum and stainless steel in life-sized—and larger—figural sculpture. He has had solo exhibitions around the world, including recent 18-year retrospectives at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland. His work has been featured in venues including Documenta IX, the Venice Biennale, and the Whitney Biennial.

Victoria Reed Ph.D. is the Monica S. Sadler Curator of Provenance at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, making her the first endowed curator of provenance at an American museum. She has conducted provenance research at the museum since 2003, researching and documenting the ownership history of its encyclopedic collection. She also investigates and resolves ownership claims on the museum’s holdings, and has overseen the return or restitution of works of art, including objects that were looted during the Nazi period, to their rightful owners.

Matthew Sponheimer Ph.D. is professor of anthropology and director of the Nutritional and Isotopic Ecology Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on using chemical (and other) approaches to study the ecology of early humans and their antecedents. He also studies other mammals, both living and dead, large and small, on the African continent. He publishes and lectures widely and is the coeditor of the book Early Hominin Paleoecology.

Manfred B. Steger Ph.D. is a professor of sociology and political science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and an honorary professor of global studies at RMIT University in Australia. He has served as an adviser on globalization to the U.S. State Department and sits on the advisory boards of globalization research centers around the world. His academic work, including 25 books, has been translated into 20 languages and has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others.

Amy R. Tuininga Ph.D. is the director of the PSEG Institute for Sustainability Studies at Montclair State University. She builds partnerships across academic, corporate, and community spheres to promote project-based, data-driven solutions that advance sustainability science and build resilient communities. Previously, at Fordham University, she held various executive leadership positions and was an associate professor of biology with a focus on the relationship between ecosystems and human actions.

Wei-Hua Wu Ph.D. is a professor at China Agricultural University, the top university in the area of agricultural science in China. His research at the university's State Key Laboratory of Plant Physiology and Biochemistry focuses on plant responses to nutrient deficiency and abiotic stress. He is an accomplished scientist and has had significant impact on plant science research and education within China and internationally.

William Yosses was executive pastry chef at the White House for seven years. He planned desserts for the First Family and their guests over two administrations and worked closely with Michelle Obama on her Let's Move initiative to improve healthy eating. His foundation, Kitchen Garden Laboratory, creates curricula to teach science through cooking and has run workshops for the New York City Board of Education and Harvard Medical School. He is also chef/owner of an artisanal pie-making company.