Nolan Williams, M.D., is an assistant professor within the departments of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab at Stanford University.

Williams has a broad background in neuropsychiatry, completing residencies in both neurology and psychiatry. In addition, he has specific training and clinical expertise in the development of brain stimulation methodologies. Themes of his work include (a) examining the use of spaced learning theory in the application of neurostimulation techniques, (b) development and mechanistic understanding of rapid-acting antidepressants, and (c) identifying objective biomarkers that predict neuromodulation responses in treatment-resistant neuropsychiatric conditions.

He has published papers in many journals including Brain, American Journal of Psychiatry, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He has also contributed to two reviews related to novel therapeutics for neuropsychiatric conditions that have been published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

Results from his studies have gained widespread attention in journals such as Science and New England Journal of Medicine Journal Watch as well as in the popular press and have been featured in various news sources including Time, Smithsonian, and Newsweek.

Williams received an NIH R-series grant within two years of completing his residencies as well as two NARSAD Young Investigator Awards in 2016 and 2018 along with the 2019 Gerald R. Klerman Award. He started the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab in 2015. He has received several merit-based travel awards to attend and present at the annual meetings for American College of Neuropharmacology, Society of Biological Psychiatry, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Neuropsychiatric Association.

Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for President Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, war correspondent, and the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School, spent half of her career explaining complex geopolitical events and eight years at the UN helping to shape them.

As the 28th U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, and helped mobilize global action against ISIL. From 2009 to 2013, she served on the National Security Council as special assistant to the President and senior director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.

Called “a powerful crusader for U.S foreign policy as well as human rights and democracy” by Forbes, Power was named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” The American Academy in Berlin awarded her the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize. “She has an excellent and analytical mind,” said Kissinger, “I admire the way she has faced our challenges.”

Her book, A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. 

Before joining the U.S. government, Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a columnist for Time, and a National Magazine Award-winning contributor to the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

At the age of nine, she immigrated to the United States from Ireland. Power earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Beginning her career as a journalist, Power reported from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

Ambassador Power’s Athenaeum presentation is jointly sponsored by the Athenaeum, the Lecture in Diplomacy and International Security in Honor of George F. Kennan, Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and the President’s Leadership Fund, all at CMC.

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is the author of seven books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50.

In 2013, he published Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul, a memoir of his struggle with his sexuality, brought out as an ebook from The Atlantic Books. His previous book was Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, published in 2004 by Times Books (Henry Holt). His most recent ebook is Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy (Brookings, 2015). Although much of his writing has been on public policy, he has also written on topics as widely varied as adultery, agriculture, economics, gay marriage, height discrimination, biological rhythms, number inflation, and animal rights.

A graduate of Yale University, Rauch become a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina before moving to Washington in 1984. From 1984-89 he covered fiscal and economic policy for National Journal. In 1990 he spent six months in Japan as a fellow of the Japan Society Leadership Program.

In addition to the National Magazine Award, his honors include the 2010 National Headliner Award, one of the industry’s most venerable prizes. In 1996 he was awarded the Premio Napoli alla Stampa Estera for his coverage, in The Economist, of the European Parliament. In 2011 he won the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association prize for excellence in opinion writing. He has also won two second-place prizes (2000 and 2001) in the National Headliner Awards. His articles appear in The Best Magazine Writing 2005 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and 2007. He has appeared as a guest on many television and radio programs. 

Mr. Rauch’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.

Michele Moody-Adams is Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she has also served as dean of Columbia College and vice president for undergraduate education. She holds degrees from Wellesley College, the University of Oxford (where she was a Marshall Scholar), and Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls. She has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and she is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She is the author of Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy and is currently at work on a book entitled Renewing Democracy. She has also published numerous articles on moral psychology, justice, gender and race, academic freedom, and democratic disagreement.

Professor Moody-Adams' Athenaeum presentation is one of two keynote addresses for the Imagination and Social Justice Conference organized and sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the Bay Area. She has performed and spoken at the Obama White House and at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France. She was awarded Champion of Change Award in 2012 by President Obama for her activism as a spoken word poet/organizer in her Pacific Islander community.

With numerous viral poetry videos garnering over millions of views collectively, Siagatonu 's writing blends the personal, cultural, and political in a way that calls for healing, courage, justice, and truth. A Kundiman Fellow, her work has been published in Poetry Magazine and has been featured on Button Poetry, CNN, NBCNews, NPR, Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, The Guardian, BuzzFeed and Upworthy. 

Since getting involved in poetry slam in 2010, she has been a member of several award-winning slam teams, including the 2017 inaugural Root Slam Team, helping her team to place 5th in the nation at the National Poetry Slam competition in Denver, CO. When she's not competing, she is coaching college poetry slam teams and mentoring young writers in writing workshops throughout the country. She is one of the co-founders and organizers of The Root Slam, a free bi-weekly poetry venue based in Oakland, CA, voted the 2017 and 2018's Best Open Mic venue in the Bay Area. 

Siagatonu holds a B.A. degree in community studies and a minor in education from the University of California-Santa Cruz and a M.A. in marriage/family therapy from the University of Southern California. She strives to use her background as a mental health clinician and poet to bridge the gaps in the quest for collective healing and liberation. 

Ms. Siagatonu’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute at CMC.

Reyna Grande is the bestselling author of the memoirs The Distance Between Us and A Dream Called Home. Her other works include the novels Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies. She is the recipient of the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature, an American Book Award, and the El Premio Aztlan Literary Award, among others. She was also a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She holds a B.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing and teaches at writing conferences such as the Macondo Writer's Conference, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and VONA. Born in Mexico, Reyna walked across the US-Mexico border at nine years old to be reunited with her father. She writes about immigration, trauma, family separation, and displacement.

Ms. Grande’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Claremont Colleges’ Chicano Latino Student Affairs and CMC’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse.

Paul Hessburg, Ph.D., is a research ecologist with Pacific Northwest Research Station, U.S. Forest Service. He has studied historical and modern era forests of the Inland West for the last 32 years and has published extensively in leading national and international journals. His work documents large changes in forest conditions and how these changes, along with climate change, have set the stage for large and severe wildfires.

Hessburg was the recipient of the USFS 2017 R&D Deputy Chief's Distinguished Science Award for his significant contribution to fire and landscape ecology. His most recent book, Making Transparent Environmental Management Decisions, offers compelling new insights into using modern-day decision support systems to plan for forest restoration.

The first Deafblind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma advocates for equal opportunities for people with disabilities. President Obama named her a White House Champion of Change. She received the Helen Keller Achievement Award, and a spot on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list. Girma believes disability is an opportunity for innovation and travels the world teaching the benefits of choosing inclusion. In August, she published her first book, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law. She has since been featured on the Today Show. Her work has also been featured in the Financial Times, BBC, Washington Post, NPR, and more. 

Kathryn Matthews, Ph.D., is the chief scientist for Oceana, the largest international advocacy organization dedicated to protecting the world’s oceans. She is responsible for ensuring that Oceana’s advocacy is informed by the best and most current scientific understanding, as well as tracking emerging issues, advising on strategic direction, and supporting the nearly 50 staff scientists across the organization.

Her varied work environments have included Arctic ice caps, Capitol Hill, international treaty negotiations, and the waters of the eastern tropical Pacific.  After 10 years in research, she returned to Washington DC, her hometown, to work as a legislative fellow in the U.S. Congress and then for the Office of Marine Conservation in the U.S. State Department.  Katie continued her science-based policy work with the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation and then with The Pew Charitable Trusts, where she ran a marine conservation and sustainable fisheries grantmaking program. She also serves on the Society for Conservation Biology’s Board of Governors, heading its Marine Section’s board of directors as president (2017-2019).

Matthews has an M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in Earth and Environmental Science.

(Source: Oceana)

Vivek Maru founded Namati in 2011 to grow the movement for legal empowerment around the world. Namati and its partners have built cadres of community legal workers – sometimes known as “barefoot lawyers”– in ten countries. The advocates have worked with over 65,000 people to protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to healthcare and citizenship.

Namati convenes the Global Legal Empowerment Network, more than 1,000 groups from every region in the world who are learning from one another and collaborating on common challenges; this community successfully advocated for the inclusion of access to justice in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals.

From 2003 to 2007, Maru co-founded and co-directed the Sierra Leonean organization Timap for Justice, which has been recognized by the International Crisis Group, Transparency International, and President Jimmy Carter as a pioneering model for delivering justice services in the context of a weak state and a plural legal system.

From 2008 to 2011, he served as senior counsel in the Justice Reform Group of the World Bank. His work focused on rule of law reform and governance, primarily in West Africa and South Asia.

In 1997-1998 he lived in a hut of dung and sticks in a village in Kutch, his native place, working on watershed management and girls’ education with two grassroots development organizations.

Maru graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and Yale Law School. He writes regularly in academic journals and in the press and he also directs the Legal Empowerment Leadership Course at Central European University and New York University School of Law.

Maru received the Pioneer Award from the North American South Asian Bar Association in 2008. He was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2014 and a “legal rebel” by the American Bar Association in 2015. He, Namati, and the Global Legal Empowerment Network received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016. In 2017, the Schwab Foundation named him and Sonkita Conteh, director of Namati – Sierra Leone, two of its Social Entrepreneurs of the Year.

Maru also serves on the board of trustees of the global advocacy organization Avaaz, the international advisory council of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, the advisory board of the evaluation firm ID Insight, and the boards of the Constitutional Accountability Center and the International Senior Lawyers Project. He was an affiliate expert with the UN Commission on Legal Empowerment and is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Jeff Klein ’75 studied political science and psychology at CMC and has served on the CMC Board of Trustees since 2010. A long-time media executive, lawyer, writer, and communications professor, Klein was a senior executive at the LA times for 15 years and is the founder of a B2B multimedia company. He is also a columnist and a lecturer.

Kendyl Klein ’14, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of CMC, majored in media studies and is an expert in digital content strategy, audience development, social media, and client services. Since graduation, she has worked as a strategist at AT&T’s Fullscreen, a social-first, digital content company that provides creative, strategy, marketing, and even production services for digital creators and brand clients, including national brands such as Mattel, NBCUniversal and GE.

Kiese Laymon is a southern writer, born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon attended Millsaps College and Jackson State University before graduating from Oberlin College. He earned an MFA in Fiction from Indiana University. Laymon is currently the Ottilie Schillig Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. He served as the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Nonfiction at the University of Iowa in Fall 2017.  

Laymon is the author of the novel, Long Division and a collection of essays, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, and Heavy: An American Memoir. Heavy, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal, the LA Times Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose and Audible’s Audiobook of the Year, was named one of the Best Books of 2018 by The Undefeated, New York Times, Publishers Weekly, NPR, Broadly, Library Journal, The Washington Post, Southern Living, Entertainment Weekly, San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times Critics.

Laymon has written essays, stories and reviews for numerous publications including Esquire, McSweeneys, New York Times, Virginia Quarterly Review, ESPN the Magazine, Granta, Colorlines, NPR, LitHub, The Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, PEN Journal, Fader, Oxford American, Vanity Fair, The Best American Series, Ebony, Travel and Leisure, Paris Review, Guernica and more. 

Professor Laymon’s Athenaeum presentation is sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Marjorie H. Charlop, Ph.D., BCBA, has enjoyed a long career helping children with autism and their families. She is a professor of psychology at CMC and director of The Claremont Autism Center, her renowned research and treatment center for children with ASD and their families. As a licensed psychologist, she also maintains a private practice and consultation services.

Charlop has hundreds of professional conference presentations and publications in the field of autism and has done keynote addresses, workshops, and lectures around the globe. A dedicator contributor to the field, her most recent book is “Play and Social Skills for Children with ASD”. She is also the author of “Naturalistic and Incidental Teaching,” now in second addition.

Her research areas focus on communication, motivation, social skills, behavior problems and parent collaboration and education She has crafted several well used treatment protocols such as video modeling and used everyday technology to enhance learning. 

Professor Charlop is the recipient of the 2018-19 CMC Faculty Scholarship Award.

Matt Grossmann '01 is director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research and associate professor of political science at Michigan State University. He is also senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and contributor at FiveThirtyEight. He is the author of Red State Blues (2019), Asymmetric Politics (with David A. Hopkins, 2016), Artists of the Possible (2014), and The Not-So-Special Interests (2012). He has published research in eighteen scholarly journals and political analysis in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Politico. He hosts The Science of Politics podcast. 

Grossman received his Ph.D. and M.A., both in political science, from the University of California, Berkeley. He graduated magna cum laude from Claremont McKenna College in 2001 where he majored in government.

Professor Grossman’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

Jonathan Rosenberg ’83 P ’14 first met Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 2000 and finally accepted a job at their company the third time they offered it, more than two years later. He served as senior vice president at Google and ran the Google product team until April 2011. In that expansive role, he oversaw the design, development, and evolution of Google’s products for consumers, advertisers, and partners. He helped develop the company’s hiring processes and was influential in setting its communications and marketing practices. Rosenberg is now an advisor to Alphabet management. He is the author, along with Eric Schmidt, of the New York Times best-selling book “How Google Works” and the newly released “Trillion Dollar Coach.”

Prior to joining Google, Rosenberg ran products and services at Excite@Home, managed the eWorld product line for Apple Computer, and directed product marketing for Knight Ridder Information Services.

Rosenberg holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a bachelor’s degree with honors in economics from Claremont McKenna College, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa.

Micheline Ishay is a political scientist known for her work in political theory, international relations, human rights, foreign policy, and the Middle East. She is Distinguished Professor of International Studies and Human Rights at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver, where she serves as Director of the International Human Rights Program. She is an affiliate faculty member with the Center for Middle East Studies, was Executive Director of the Center on Rights Development, and in 2008 was named University of Denver Distinguished Scholar.​

Ishay received a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Studies from Rutgers University. She was a fellow at the Center for Critical Culture and Contemporary Analysis, Rutgers University; Assistant Professor at Hobart and William Smith College; Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy Collaborative, University of Maryland (2004); Lady Davis Visiting Professor, Hebrew University (2006); and Visiting Professor, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (2010-2013). She was Resident Fellow at the Bellagio Center, Rockefeller Foundation, Italy, Fall 2015. Often interviewed in the international press, Ishay frequently contributes to international forums in Europe and the Middle East and lectures on international issues in the U.S. Her books, The History of Human Rights and The Human Rights Reader have been translated into multiple languages. Her latest book, The Levant Express: The Arab Uprisings, Human Rights, and the Future of the Middle East, will be released in August 2019 by Yale University Press.From 2010 to 2013, Ishay worked in the Gulf region from a unique vantage point, as female American scholar in human rights including teaching the first human rights courses in the Arab world just before and throughout the tumultuous events starting in late 2010.

Professor Ishlay’s Athenaeum talk is sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College and the Siam Family Foundation.

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