Seminars at Steamboat

Nancy Reid Gibbs is an author, speaker, presidential historian and commentator on politics and values in the United States. She joined TIME magazine as a part-time fact checker in 1983 and rose to become its Editor-in-Chief in 2013, the first woman to hold the position. She was one of the most published writers in the history of the magazine and wrote more cover stories than anyone else at TIME. Under her leadership, TIME’s digital audience expanded from 25 to 55 million and its video streams to more than one billion a year.

She remained at TIME as Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Director until September 2017, directing its news and feature coverage for more than 65 million readers worldwide. She was also a consultant to CBS News and an essayist for the News Hour on PBS, and co-authored with Michael Duffy two best-selling presidential histories: The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity (2012) and The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House (2007).

She has interviewed five U.S. presidents and multiple other world leaders, and lectures often on the American presidency, including at the Bush, Reagan, Carter, Johnson and Truman libraries.

In September 2017, while remaining an Editor at Large at TIME, she stepped down from her post as Editor in Chief and became Visiting Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. In 2019, she was additionally named Lombard Director of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center in Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The press release welcoming her to Harvard described her as “an extremely thoughtful and respected voice on issues of politics, values, and society” and noted that “her extensive knowledge and insights will help illuminate research and discussions at the school about the role of journalism in democracies and in the digital age.” She is still an Editor at Large at Time.

She graduated from Yale summa cum laude with honors in history and has a degree in politics and philosophy from Oxford, where she was a Marshall scholar.

When Andrew Selee became president of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in 2018, his predecessor noted that Selee “has a distinguished track record not only as a serious policy scholar but a leader who has thought deeply about think tank strategy and administration.”

Those qualities are especially apt for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan body working with a wide range of stakeholders on immigration and integration policies, with a focus on fact-based research, dialogue, and the development of new ideas in response to complex policy questions.

MPI has published more than 500 research reports and books, provided testimony before the U.S. Congress and parliamentary bodies in more than a dozen countries, advised numerous governments and civil-society organizations, and organized countless public and private conferences.

Dr. Selee’s own research focuses on migration globally and especially on immigration policies in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. He has written extensively on U.S.-Mexico relations, Mexican politics, U.S. immigration policy, organized crime, and democracy in Latin America. His most recent book is Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together (PublicAffairs, 2018).

Before joining MPI, Dr. Selee spent 17 years at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he founded the Center’s Mexico Institute and served for three years as executive vice-president, managing the Center’s day-to-day operations and global research agenda for its 135-member staff. Previously, he was a professional staffer at the U.S. Congress and worked on YMCA programs for migrant youth in Tijuana, Mexico.

His public opinion articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Americas Quarterly, and other media, and he writes a biweekly column for the Mexican newspaper El Universal. He is often interviewed in the press, including PBS, NBC, CBS, Fox News, NPR, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

He holds a PhD in policy studies from the University of Maryland; an MA in Latin American studies from the University of California, San Diego; a BA, Phi Beta Kappa, from Washington University in St. Louis; and a certificate in strategic perspectives on nonprofit management from Harvard Business School. He was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2017-2018, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and has previously taught at Johns Hopkins and George Washington universities and El Colegio de México.

Nathaniel Keohane has been called “one of the most original thinkers and inspirational leaders in the climate community.” He is president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit organization known nationally and internationally for its effectiveness in bringing stakeholders together to develop innovative, effective and durable climate policies. Keohane himself is known for his optimism about the role markets can play in resolving global warming.

Before becoming president of C2ES, Keohane was Senior Vice President for Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. He served in the Obama administration as special assistant to the president for energy and environment in the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council, developing and coordinating policy on a wide range of energy and environmental matters. He has also been an associate professor in the Yale School of Management and an adjunct professor at New York University.

He holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale and a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. He was an accomplished rower at Yale and held the Club Singles course record at the Head of the Charles for 20 years after it was set in 1997.

Craig Fugate is the former administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), during which time he organized recovery efforts for a record eighty-seven disasters in 2011 alone.  Before that, as director of the Florida Emergency Management Division, he coordinated the state’s response to Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne (the “Big 4 of ’04”), and Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Wilma in 2005.

At FEMA, Fugate emphasized a “whole community” approach to emergency management; spearheaded the effort to build capacity to stabilize catastrophic events within 72 hours; incorporated “Thunderbolt exercises” using fake disasters and lightning inspections to train emergency operations centers and helped develop smart phone apps for citizens to use to report problems to FEMA.

On a somewhat lighter side, he is also known for the unofficial “Waffle House Index” that FEMA still uses to help determine how much attention a specific disaster area requires.  He explains: “The Waffle House has a very simple operation philosophy: get open.”  So if the local Waffle House is up and running in the wake of a disaster, that’s probably not the most hard-hit area.  If it’s open but with a limited menu, power outages have probably knocked out freezers.  If it’s still closed, the situation there is really bad and needs immediate attention.

Fugate’s interest in combatting disasters goes back a very long way.  He trained as a volunteer firefighter while still in high school, attended fire college and paramedic school at Santa Fe College, and gradually rose through the ranks of Florida fire and rescue organizations until tapped by Florida Republican governor Jeb Bush in 2001 to become director of the Florida Emergency Management Division.  He was then appointed FEMA Administrator by President Obama, with bipartisan support in Congress, and served in that post throughout the Obama administration.

After leaving FEMA, Fugate founded Craig Fugate Consulting LLC.  He also founded disastersrus.org, a website with disaster planning advice and resources, and is a licensed amateur radio operator.  In November 2020, he was a volunteer member of the Biden presidential transition team for the Department of Homeland Security.

Heather Tanana is highly trained in environmental law and public health, and as a member of the Navajo Nation is dedicated to promoting indigenous rights. She has been asked to contribute to the water chapter for the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), which will analyze the effects of global change on the world’s natural environment, resources and social systems. The assessment, due in 2023, will be submitted to the President and Congress.

She is a visiting Professor at the University of California – Irvine School of Law and has become a nationally recognized researcher and educator specializing in the vexing questions at the junction of law, health and water policies. In 2021 she received an award from the American Bar Association for “distinguished achievement in environmental law and policy” for her work including the 2021 report Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribes in the Colorado River Basin, for which she served as lead author.

She is also an associate faculty member focusing on health policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. She holds a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College, a J.D. from the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law with a Certificate in Environmental and Natural Resources Law, and a Master’s of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health with a Certificate in American Indian Health.

Introductory remarks will be provided by Luke Runyon, KUNC Managing Editor and Reporter on the Colorado River Basin.

Also featured during this Seminar is “Dividing the Waters: How the Colorado River Compact Transformed the Southwestern Frontier”: https://youtu.be/CDHUbyDqgOk

Researched, written and produced by Steamboat Springs High School Senior Wren Capra, this ten-minute film features experts on the Compact, a legislative frontier, that recently crossed its centennial and continues to create controversy today.

Winner of numerous state & national awards including National Park Service Outstanding Entry; National Honorable Mention–June 2023 at National History Day (NHD) National Competition at the University of Maryland, College Park campus; Best Senior Project on Western History from Brigham Young University Charles Redd Center for the Humanities–April 2023 at University of Colorado at Denver NHD Colorado State Competition; 1st Place in Colorado State for Individual Senior Documentary–April 2023 at University of Colorado at Denver NHD Colorado State Competition; 1st Place in Mountain Region for Individual Senior Documentary–April 2023 in Summit County, CO

Matthew Rojansky is one of the country’s pre-eminent Russia scholars.  In early 2022 he became President and CEO of the U.S.-Russia Foundation, a private grant-making foundation established to promote the development of the private sector and the rule of law in Russia.  Since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he has leveraged his deep knowledge base, extensive personal contacts and the foundation’s funding into far-reaching expertise and involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict “writ large” – its effects not only on Russia and Ukraine but also on NATO, the European Union and beyond.

Prior to joining USRF, Rojansky served as Director of the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, the premier U.S. institution for research on Russia, from 2013 to 2021.  Between 2010 and 2013, he was Deputy Director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he founded Carnegie’s Ukraine Program.  From 2007 to 2010, he served as executive director of the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA).

Additionally Rojansky remains a Distinguished Fellow at the Wilson Center and his Wilson Center biography notes that he is “as much a regular at Congressional briefings and on prime-time news shows as he is on the streets of Moscow, Kyiv, or Berlin.”  He is also U.S. Executive Secretary for the Dartmouth Conference, a track-two U.S.-Russia conflict resolution organization begun in 1960, and member of the OSCE Cooperative Security Initiative and the Euro-Atlantic Security Leaders Group. 

Rojansky is regularly interviewed on TV and radio, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. He holds an A.B. from Harvard College and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

Wendy Weiser directs the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan think tank and public interest law center that works to revitalize, reform, and defend systems of democracy and justice.  Her program focuses on voting rights and elections, money in politics and ethics, redistricting and representation, government dysfunction, rule of law, and fair courts.  She founded and directed the program’s Voting Rights and Elections Project, directing litigation, research, and advocacy efforts to enhance political participation and prevent voter disenfranchisement across the country.

She has appeared frequently in national print and broadcast media, authored numerous articles on voting rights and election reform, litigated ground-breaking voting rights lawsuits, testified before both houses of Congress, and provided policy guidance to federal and state legislators and administrators across the country.

In addition to her publications and articles, she is a frequent public speaker and media commentator and has appeared on Fox News, CNN, PBS, ABC, and CBS.  She is often quoted in print media as well, and is an adjunct professor at the NYU Law School.

Before joining the Brennan Center, Weiser was a senior attorney at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund; a litigation associate at the corporate law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and a law clerk in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. She received her BA from Yale College and her JD from Yale Law School.

Jamie Metzl
“R/Evolution: Recasting Life in an Age of Radical Biotechnology”

Technology Futurist, Geopolitics Expert, Entrepreneur, Sci-Fi Novelist

Jamie Metzl is one of the world’s leading technology and healthcare futurists and author of the non-fiction bestseller, Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. He has appeared regularly on national and international media programs and his writings in science, technology, and global affairs are featured in publications around the world. He additionally earned the title of “the original COVID-19 whistleblower” for his leading role advocating for a full investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic. During his career, Jamie has served in the U.S. National Security Council, State Department, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and as a Human Rights Officer for the United Nations in Cambodia and was a member of the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing from 2019 to 2021.

American notions of liberty, property, and the role of government have shaped where we live, who succeeds, and what we must to do to achieve a new ‘American Dream’. Part of that dream for many families is a home of their own.

Christopher Ptomey is the Executive Director of the Urban Land Institute’s Terwilliger Center for Housing, which works to promote residential development and housing affordability. The Center is a key part of ULI’s efforts to leverage its nationwide local networks and 42,000 members to promote responsible land use, build sustainable communities, and create effective partnerships with private and public sector organizations and leaders. Terwilliger’s programs include extensive research, local and national convenings and consultations, and the Jack Kemp and Robert Larson awards programs that highlight innovative and best practices for improving housing affordability.

Ptomey himself has long-standing expertise in housing and community development policies at the local, state and federal level. Before joining the staff of ULI, Ptomey led the U.S. government relations and advocacy team at Habitat for Humanity International, where he focused on improving federal, state, and local housing policies and systems. Prior to that, he was federal liaison for the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, and he served five years as a senior legislative aide to former U.S. Representative Michael “Mac” Collins of Georgia.

In addition to his work at ULI, Ptomey currently serves as a governing board member for the National Housing Conference. He is a former Board member of the Grounded Solutions Network.

He holds a B.A. from Haverford College, a J.D. from George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, and a law license in his native Tennessee.

Cryptocurrencies have come of age holding the potential for faster and cheaper financial transactions than traditional payment models, creating alternative decentralized asset markets and driving significant innovation via the underlying networks that they run on. However, valid concerns exist and range from criminal activities such as money laundering and tax evasion to the safety of digital assets in a currently minimally regulated online world to the impact growth in cryptocurrency adoption might have on the stability of our financial markets. Come hear Lee Reiners, the executive director of Duke Law’s Global Financial Markets Center, provide us with a current state of affairs on the world of cryptocurrencies, what the future has in store for us with such digital assets and the public policy that needs to be put in place to ensure safe and well-functioning markets.

Lee Reiners joined the Duke Global Financial Markets Center as executive director in 2016. At Duke Law, Reiners teaches FinTech Law and Policy as well as seminars relating to financial policy and regulatory practice. His broad research agenda focuses on how new financial technologies fit within existing regulatory frameworks (here). His work has examined the risks associated with cryptocurrency derivatives (here), the rise of digital investment advice, and corporate governance failures within the financial industry (here and here). He writes frequently on FinTech and other financial regulatory matters on The FinReg Blog and speaks with financial policy experts on the Global Financial Markets Center’s podcast, The FinReg Pod.

Prior to joining Duke Law, Reiners worked for five years at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (FRBNY), first as a supervisor of systemically important financial institutions and then as a senior associate within the executive office. In the latter capacity, he helped coordinate the FRBNY’s engagement with international standard-setting bodies, such as the Bank for International Settlements and the Financial Stability Board. While at the FRBNY, Reiners worked closely with other federal and state regulatory agencies.

Reiners has previously taught corporate finance and managerial economics in the MBA Program at Saint Peter’s University. In 2004-2005, Reiners served as a U.S. Army communications specialist in Baghdad, Iraq.

Reiners received a BSc in business economics, summa cum laude, from the University of St. Thomas and a MPP with a global policy concentration from Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. Reiners holds the chartered financial analyst designation.