Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Agus Sudjianto is an executive vice president, head of Model Risk and a member of Management Committee at Wells Fargo, where he is responsible for enterprise model risk management. 

Prior to his current position, Sudjianto was the modeling and analytics director and chief model risk officer at Lloyds Banking Group in the United Kingdom. Before joining Lloyds, he was an executive and head of Quantitative Risk at Bank of America. 

Prior to his career in banking, he was a product design manager in the Powertrain Division of Ford Motor Company. 

Sudjianto holds several U.S. patents in both finance and engineering. He has published numerous technical papers and is a co-author of Design and Modeling for Computer Experiments. His technical expertise and interests include quantitative risk, particularly credit risk modeling, machine learning and computational statistics. 

He holds masters and doctorate degrees in engineering and management from Wayne State University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Sudjianto’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute at CMC.

(This event was originally scheduled for April 11, 2022.)

Max Gokhman '06  heads MosaiQ investment strategy for Franklin Templeton Investment Solutions. In this role, he is responsible for defining the next generation of investment processes and driving their digitization. Previously, Gokhman was president and chief investment officer of AlphaTrAI, which harnessed artificial intelligence to build strategies that invested across equities and cryptocurrencies. Before AlphaTrAI, he was head of asset allocation for the investment arm of Pacific Life Insurance. Prior to that, he was a portfolio manager with Mellon Capital’s multi-asset group and a founding member of Coefficient Global, a quantitative macro hedge fund.

An amateur race car driver, Gokhman holds a BA in Economics and Psychology from Claremont McKenna College and is a member of the Milken Institute. 

Mr. Gokhman is the keynote speaker for CMC's Financial Economics Institute's (FEI) 2022-23 Claremont Finance Conference.

Noah Feldman is Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Chairman of the Society of Fellows, and founding director of the Julis-Rabinowitz Program on Jewish and Israeli Law, all at Harvard University. He specializes in constitutional studies, with particular emphasis on power and ethics, design of innovative governance solutions, law and religion, and the history of legal ideas.

A policy & public affairs columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, Feldman also writes for The New York Review of Books and was a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine for nearly a decade. He hosts the Deep Background podcast, an interview show that explores the historical, scientific, legal and cultural context behind the biggest stories in the news.

Through his consultancy, Ethical Compass, Feldman advises clients like Facebook & eBay on how to improve ethical decision-making by creating and implementing new governance solutions. In this capacity, he conceived and architected the Facebook Oversight Board, and continues to advise the company on ethics and governance issues.

Feldman is the author of 9 books, including his latest, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery & The Refounding of America (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2021).

Other works include: The Arab Winter: A Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2020), The Three Lives of James Madison: Genius, Partisan, President (Random House, 2017); Cool War: The Future of Global Competition (Random House, 2013); Scorpions: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR’s Great Supreme Court Justices (Twelve Publishing, 2010); The Fall and Rise of the Islamic State (Princeton University Press, 2008); Divided By God: America’s Church-State Problem and What We Should Do About It (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2005); What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation building (Princeton University Press 2004); and After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2003).

He is also the author of two casebooks with Kathleen Sullivan: Constitutional Law, Twentieth Edition (Foundation Press, Fall 2019) and First Amendment, Seventh Edition (Foundation Press, 2019).

In 2003, Feldman served as senior constitutional advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, and subsequently advised members of the Iraqi Governing Council on the drafting of Iraq’s interim constitution. 

Earning his A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard, Feldman finished first in his class. Selected as a Rhodes Scholar, he earned a D.Phil. from Oxford University, writing his dissertation on Aristotle’s Ethics and its Islamic reception. Feldman received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he served as a book reviews editor of the Yale Law Journal. He clerked for Justice David Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Judge Harry T. Edwards of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Source: Harvard Law School

Professor Feldman will deliver the Salvatori Center's Spring 2023 Lofgren Lecture in American Constitutionalism. 

Kevin Merida is the executive editor of the Los Angeles Times. He took the helm of the largest news gathering organization in the West in June 2021 and oversees the newsroom as well as Times Community News and Los Angeles Times en Español.

Previously, Merida was a senior vice president at ESPN and editor in chief of the Undefeated, a multimedia platform that explores the intersections of race, sports and culture. Merida arrived at ESPN in November 2015 and launched the Undefeated in May 2016. Under his leadership, the Undefeated gradually expanded across Walt Disney Co. with a content portfolio that ranged from award-winning journalism to documentaries and television specials, from albums and music videos to live events, digital talk shows and two bestselling children’s books.

Prior to that, Merida was at the Washington Post for 22 years, working as a reporter, columnist, and managing editor. His résumé also includes stints as a reporter and an editor at the Dallas Morning News and as a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal. Merida is a member of the Pulitzer Prize board and serves as a trustee of Boston University.

David Dreier ’75 was a government major at CMC and was one of the youngest members ever elected to the United States Congress having begun his first campaign when he lived in Philips Hall. He was the youngest and one of the longest-serving chairman of the House Rules Committee in U.S. history. He led major institutional reforms and played a key role in passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement and every other free trade agreement into which the U.S. has entered. After leaving Congress, Dreier served on the Foreign Affairs Policy Board in the Obama administration, became a Distinguished Fellow at the Brookings Institution and, having long championed press freedoms, served as chairman of the Tribune Publishing Company. He has served for more than 25 years on CMC’s Board of Trustees. Dreier is the founder and chair of the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation. He has led the revival of CMC’s Dreier Roundtable, whose mission is to “inspire public service“ which includes the field of journalism.

This program is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable whose mission it is to inspire public service.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Kevin Merida and David Dreier '75

Mukulika Banerjee is the inaugural director of the LSE South Asia Centre and an associate professor in social anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She has conducted ethnographic research in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan between 1990-1993 and in India since 1998. Her publications include Why India Votes?, The Pathan Unarmed and The Sari and, as editor, Muslim Portraits. Her recently published monograph entitled Cultivating Democracy is based on 15 years of research in rural India.

She holds a D.Phil. in Social Anthropology from University of Oxford, 1994; completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Wolfson College, University of Oxford, 1994-96, taught at University College London before joining LSE in 2009.

View Video: YouTube with Mukulika Banerjee

Food for Thought: Podcast with Mukulika Banerjee

Steven E. Koonin is a University Professor at New York University, with appointments in the Stern School of Business, the Tandon School of Engineering, and the Department of Physics. He founded NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress, which focuses research and education on the acquisition, integration, and analysis of big data for big cities. 

Koonin served as Undersecretary for Science in the US Department of Energy under President Obama from 2009 to 2011, where his portfolio included the climate research program and energy technology strategy. He was the lead author of the US Department of Energy’s Strategic Plan (2011) and the inaugural Department of Energy Quadrennial Technology Review (2011). Before joining the government, Koonin spent five years as Chief Scientist for BP, researching renewable energy options to move the company “beyond petroleum.” 

For almost thirty years, Koonin was a professor of theoretical physics at Caltech. He also served for nine years as Caltech’s Vice President and Provost, facilitating the research of more than 300 scientists and engineers and catalyzing the development of the world’s largest optical telescope, as well as research initiatives in computational science, bioengineering, and the biological sciences. 

Koonin is a Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. His other memberships include the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and JASON, the group of scientists who solve technical problems for the US government; he served as JASON’s chair for six years. He chaired the National Academies’ Divisional Committee for Engineering and Physical Sciences from 2014 to 2019, and since 2014 has been a trustee of the Institute for Defense Analyses. He is currently an independent governor of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and has served in similar roles for the Los Alamos, Sandia, Brookhaven, and Argonne National Laboratories. He was a member of Governor Cuomo’s Blue Ribbon Commission to Reimagine New York in the post-COVID-19 era. 

Koonin has a BS in physics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from MIT. He is an award-winning classroom teacher, and his public lectures are noted for their clarity in conveying complex subjects. He is the author of the classic 1985 textbook Computational Physics, which introduced methodology for building computer models of complex physical systems. He has published some 200 peer-reviewed papers in the fields of physics and astrophysics, scientific computation, energy technology and policy, and climate science, and has been the lead author on multiple book-length reports, including two National Academies studies. 

Through a series of articles and lectures that began in 2014, Koonin has advocated for a more accurate, complete, and transparent public representation of climate and energy matters. His bestselling book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters was published in 2021.

View Video: YouTube with Steven Koonin

Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar is the tenth president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. A former justice of the Supreme Court of California, he served two U.S. presidents at the White House and in federal agencies and was a faculty member at Stanford University for two decades. He is a member of the U.S. Department of State’s Foreign Affairs Policy Board.  

At Stanford he was the Stanley Morrison Professor of Law and (by courtesy) Political Science. He directed the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, and previously, co-directed its Center for International Security and Cooperation. During nearly seven years on California’s highest court while continuing to teach at Stanford, he wrote opinions addressing separation of powers and federalism, policing and criminal justice, democracy, technology and privacy, international agreements, and climate and environmental policy among other issues, and led the court system’s efforts to better meet the needs of millions of limited English speakers.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cuéllar has published widely on American institutions and public law, international affairs, political economy, and technology’s impact on law and government. In the first term of the Obama administration, he led the White House Domestic Policy Council’s teams working on civil and criminal justice, public health, immigration, and regulatory reform. He also co-chaired the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity and Excellence Commission, and earlier, co-chaired the Obama Biden Transition Immigration Working Group. He began his career at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the second term of the Clinton administration.

He chairs the board of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and serves on Harvard University’s primary governing board (the Harvard Corporation). Previously, he chaired the boards of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Institute for Innovation in Developing Economies. He served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Social and Ethical Implications of Computing Research and was a presidential appointee to the Council of the U.S. Administrative Conference. Born in Matamoros, Mexico, he grew up primarily in communities along the U.S.-Mexico border. He graduated from Harvard College and Yale Law School, and received a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.  

Mr. Cuéllar’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute for State and Local Government at CMC.

Source: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Food for Thought: Podcast with Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuellar

Andrew Busch is the Crown Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow. 

Nishant Dass is the Charles E. Stone Associate Professor of Finance and director of the Financial Economics Institute. 

Megan Davidson is the interim director of the Center for Writing and Public Discourse.

Sharda Umanath is associate professor of psychological sciences and director of the Umanath Memory and Aging Laboratory. 

Jamel Velji is associate professor of religious studies and author of Apocalyptic History of the Early Fatimid Empire

Justin Brooks is the director and co-founder of the California Innocence Project. Over the course of his career, he has served as counsel on many high-profile criminal cases and has exonerated more than 35 innocent people, including former NFL player Brian Banks. (He is portrayed by Academy Award nominated actor Greg Kinnear in the feature film, “Brian Banks.")

Brooks has been recognized several times by the Los Angeles Daily Journal as one of the Top 100 Lawyers in California, and in 2010 and 2012, California Lawyer Magazine honored him with the “Lawyer of the Year” award.

He has founded innocence organizations throughout Latin America and speaks around the world about innocence work.

He is the author of the only legal casebook devoted to the topic of wrongful convictions and the non-fiction book You Might Go to Prison, Even Though You’re Innocent which details what he has learned about wrongful convictions from his more than three decades as a criminal defense attorney and innocence organization director.

View Video: YouTube with Justin Brooks

Food for Thought: Podcast with Justin Brooks

Charles Kesler is Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Daniel Livesay is  associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Troy Mills is a post doctoral fellow and visiting instructor of religious studies at Claremont McKenna College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

Andy Busch, Crown Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, will moderate the converstion.

Davy Rothbart is a bestselling author, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, the creator of Found Magazine, a frequent contributor to public radio's This American Life, and the author of a book of personal essays, My Heart Is An Idiot, and a collection of stories, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. He writes regularly for GQ and his work has appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times.

Rothbart's documentary film, MEDORA, about a resilient high-school basketball team in a dwindling Indiana town, executive produced by Steve Buscemi and Stanley Tucci, aired on the acclaimed PBS series Independent Lens, and won a 2015 Emmy Award.

His latest documentary feature, 17 BLOCKS, called "unshakable!" (The New York Times) and "a singular achievement in documentary film" (Variety), was released in 2021 by MTV Films, executive produced by Sheila Nevins, and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award and two Cinema Eye Honors Awards. He also contributed writing to the 2020 Oscar-winning short The Neighbor's Window.

Rothbart is the founder of Washington To Washington, an annual hiking adventure for city kids, and lives between Los Angeles, California and his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Mr. Rothbart's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

View Video: YouTube with Davy Rothbart

Food for Thought: Podcast with Davy Rothbart

Daniel W. Drezner is professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a nonresident senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He is also the co-director of Fletcher’s Russia and Eurasia program. 

Prior to joining The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Colorado at Boulder. He has previously held positions with Civic Education Project, the RAND Corporation, and the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and received fellowships from the German Marshall Fund of the United States, Council on Foreign Relations, and Harvard University.

Drezner has written seven books, including The Ideas Industry and All Politics is Global, and edited three others, including The Uses and Abuses of Weaponized Interdependence. He has published articles in numerous scholarly journals as well as in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Foreign Affairs, and has been a regular contributor to Foreign Policy and the Washington Post.

He received his B.A. in political economy from Williams College and an M.A. in economics and Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.

Professor Drezner will deliver the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies' 2022-23 Arthur Adams Family Distinguished Lecture on International Affairs.

View Video: YouTube with Daniel Drezner

Food for Thought: Podcast with Daniel Drezner

Sam Quinones is a journalist, storyteller, former LA Times reporter, and author of four acclaimed books of narrative nonfiction.

His most recent book is The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, released in 2021. The book follows his 2015 release,  Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic.

Both books are critically acclaimed. In January 2022, The Least of Us was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) award for Best Nonfiction Book of 2021.

Quinones’ career as a journalist has spanned 35 years. He lived for 10 years as a freelance writer in Mexico, where he wrote his first two books. In 2004, he returned to the United States to work for the L.A. Times, covering immigration, drug trafficking, neighborhood stories, and gangs.

In 2014, he resigned from the paper to return to freelancing, working for National Geographic, Pacific Standard Magazine, the New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, and other publications. 

Columbia Journalism School selected him as a 2008 recipient of the Maria Moors Cabot prize, for a career of excellence in covering Latin America. He is also a 1998 recipient of an Alicia Patterson Fellowship, one of the most prestigious fellowships given to print journalists.

For several years, he taught Tell Your True Tale writing workshops at East LA Library, the stories of which he posted on his storytelling webpage of the same name.

A graduate of Claremont High School, he studied economics and history at UC Berkeley.

View Video: You Tube with Sam Quinones

Vincenzo Quadrini is a macroeconomist who focuses on international economics, international finance, and entrepreneurship. His research has addressed questions at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance and he is also interested in questions related to wealth distribution and mobility. His work has been published in many academic journals including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Review of Economic Studies. He has been an editor of Economic Inquiry, coordinating editor for the Review of Economic Dynamics, and he is a faculty research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research in London. Before joining USC, Quadrini was on the faculty at New York University, Duke University, and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain.

Vincenzo Quadrini is a macroeconomist who focuses on international economics, international finance, and entrepreneurship. His research has addressed questions at the intersection of macroeconomics and finance and he is also interested in questions related to wealth distribution and mobility. His work has been published in many academic journals including American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Review of Economic Studies. He has been an editor of Economic Inquiry, coordinating editor for the Review of Economic Dynamics, and he is a faculty research fellow at the Center for Economic Policy Research in London. Before joining USC, Quadrini was on the faculty at New York University, Duke University, and Pompeu Fabra University in Spain.

View Video: YouTube with Vincenzo Quadrini