Michael Griffin was nominated by President George W. Bush and confirmed by the US Senate in April 2005 as the 11th Administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He leads the NASA team and manages the U.S. vision for space exploration.

Meg Lowman, better known as Canopy Meg, is the Director of Environmental Initiatives at New College of Florida. Her expertise involves canopy ecology, particularly plant-insect relationships, and spans over 25 years in Australia, Peru, Africa, the Americas, and the South Pacific.

William Garvelink is the current Ambassador of the US to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Prior to this appointment, Garvelink served as the Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Douglas Diekema, M.D., M.P.H., is Associate Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine with an adjunct appointment in the Department of Medical History and Ethics. He serves as Director of Medical Ethics and Chair of the IRB at Children's Hospital and Regional Medical Center. He currently serves on the Committee on Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Timothy George is the founding dean of Beeson Divinity School and has been at Beeson since its inception in 1988. He teaches church history, historical theology, and theology of the Reformers. He is currently serving as executive editor for Christianity Today along with serving on the editorial advisory boards of The Harvard Theological Review, Christian History, and Books & Culture.

Dr. James Abbington is an Associate Professor of Music and Worship at Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. His research interests include music and worship in the Christian church, African American sacred folk music, organ, choral music, and ethnomusicology.

Mr. Berg, a global nuclear expert, is Sr. Vice President of Infrastructure Development for UniStar Nuclear Energy, a joint venture of Constellation Energy and Électricité de France (EDF). He joined UniStar Nuclear Energy in February 2007 and is responsible for fleet wide training, workforce development, human resources, information technology, and establishing UniStar Nuclear Energy's key business and administrative processes necessary for the development of the company's emerging fleet of evolutionary power reactors.

I am an Associate Professor of English at Calvin College, where I have taught since 1996. I teach early modern British literature, world literature, Shakespeare, composition, and poetry.

For me, teaching and writing are mutually enriching actions. Teaching keeps me in contact with great literature of the past and present and with the unmatched vitality of young minds. Writing allows me to reflect, imagine, and enter a larger human conversation about things mundane and eternal.

In 2002, Tarcher/Putnam published my first book, "Great with Child: On Becoming a Mother" , a meditative account of my third pregnancy and my son's first year. My second book appeared in February 2005, published by Jossey-Bass, called "So Much More: An Invitation to Christian Spirituality", it is a kind of imaginative orientation to the Christian faith. My editor describes the book as "a doorway for people to look through and see home."

Chris Seiple is President of the Institute for Global Engagement (IGE). He previously held the position of Executive Vice President of IGE.

Before coming to the Institute, Seiple was an Earhart Fellow at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University , where he wrote his dissertation on "U.S.-Uzbekistan Relations," receiving his Ph.D. in 2007.

Sonia Nazario, a projects reporter for The Los Angeles Times , has spent more than two decades reporting and writing about social issues, earning her dozens of national awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her series, "Enrique's Journey," about the experiences of Latin American children who immigrate to join their parents in the United States. Expanding on the series, Nazario has written the book, Enrique's Journey , fully recounting the unforgettable odyssey of one Honduran boy who braves unimaginable hardship and peril to reach his mother in the United States. The story is now being turned into a miniseries by HBO.