Speakers
Donald Ainslie has 25 years experience in all aspects of security disciplines: information and industrial security, cyber-risk and vulnerability assessments, crisis management, business continuity planning, disaster recovery, executive protection, threat analysis, intelligence and counter terrorism. He is currently a principal with Deloitte & Touche LLP and global security officer for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. During his tenure with Deloitte, he has also served as a practice leader of the security services practice of Enterprise Risk Services. Prior to joining Deloitte, Ainslie worked for Ernst & Young, Aegis Research Corporation and Trident Data Systems. He served in the U.S.Army as counterintelligence analysis section chief and special security officer. During this time, he held top-secret security clearances and maintained positions requiring discreet protection of highly sensitive information.
Harro Albrecht (MD) is a 2007 Nieman Fellow and medical writer/editor at Die Zeit in Germany. Before becoming a journalist, he studied medicine and worked for two years as a doctor in a gastroenterological clinic. In the hospital, he realized how much patients' treatment was determined by nonmedical aspects that weren't always in the patient's interest. In 1992 Albrecht applied for his first journalistic position, as a fact-checker and researcher with the news magazine Der Spiegel (circulation 1,000,000). Over time he developed a desire to write, and in 1997 he became an editor with SonntagsZeitung in Switzerland. Two years later he returned to Germany, working as scientific editor for Spiegel where he covered medical news and translated expert knowledge into layman's language. He also put innovations in medical and social context and commented on them. Albrecht now works for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit (circulation 500,000) covering topics that range from national and international health policy to molecular biology, genetics, immunology, the theory of evolution, scientific policy and new treatment options within medicine.
Helen Branswell is the medical reporter for The Canadian Press, Canada's news agency. Based in Toronto, her work focuses heavily on infectious diseases, predominantly influenza and SARS. Prior to assuming the medical beat in June 2000, Branswell was the Press' London correspondent for five years. In her 25 years as a journalist, she has worked across Canada, covering a wide array of subjects, including federal and provincial politics. She received a 2004 Knight Public Health Journalism Fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, where she spent three months working with scientists in the hospital infections and influenza branches.
Christy Feig leads coverage of medical issues in the nation's capital as senior producer in the medical news department at CNN's Washington D.C. bureau. She also serves as medical correspondent for "CNN Headline News" and CNN's 800 local affiliates around the country. While with CNN, she has covered bioterrorism and the anthrax attacks, HIV/AIDS, attempts at healthcare reform and the tobacco trials. Her passion for international health has taken her to Russian prison cells with multidrug resistant TB, villages in Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, Jordan, India, Thailand, and the heart of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in many countries throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Feig joined CNN in 1993 after working in local news in Texas. She is currently working on her master's in public health at Johns Hopkins and has a bachelor of arts in journalism and political science from Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Stefanie Friedhoff is special projects manager at the Nieman Foundation and program director of this conference. She also works as a freelance journalist and science writer for U.S. and European media. Her articles have appeared in Time magazine, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sueddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Folio/Neue Zuercher Zeitung and Facts (Switzerland), among others. Friedhoff started a career as a freelance correspondent based in Cambridge, Mass., when she moved to Boston in 1998, leaving BZ, Berlin's largest daily newspaper, where she was news editor and editor of the Sunday magazine. In 2000-2001, she was a Nieman Fellow. She has organized a number of educational workshops and conferences for the Nieman Foundation on science-related topics and journalism before joining the Foundation part time this past summer.
Maggie Fox is the senior health and science editor at Reuters. She had been the Washington-based correspondent leading coverage of medical, health and science news for the past nine years and, before being named editor, had been coordinating bird flu coverage globally for the agency. Fox has also covered health and science at Reuters in London and has written about subjects ranging from AIDS, hepatitis, tuberculosis and nutrition to cancer and heart disease.
Prior to taking on the health and science beat, Fox covered general news, including conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland and the Middle East. She has lived in and reported from Lebanon and Hong Kong, covering first the Middle East and then the Far East for a number of radio and newspaper outlets including ABC, NBC, Mutual radio and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Fox has completed fellowships in infectious disease at Harvard Medical School, in genomics at the National Institutes of Health and in child and family health policy at the University of Maryland.
Sandro Galea (MD, DPH) is an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Before moving to Michigan in 2005, Galea was a medical epidemiologist and associate director at the Center for Urban Epidemiologic Studies at the New York Academy of Medicine. His work includes basic epidemiologic research, theoretic development and the application of innovative methods to epidemiologic problems.
Galea is an elected member of the American College of Epidemiology and a fellow of the Royal Institute of Public Health. He is Canadian board certified in family medicine and emergency medicine. He has worked as a clinician in remote rural communities in Northern Canada and in Mudug Region, Somalia. He is a licensed physician in Ontario, Canada, and New York State.
Bob Giles became the curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard in 2000 after nearly 40 years in newspapers. Previously, he had been the editor and publisher of The Detroit News. From 1977 to 1986, Giles was executive editor and then editor of the Democrat & Chronicle and the Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y. His career began in 1958 at the Akron Beacon Journal. As managing editor there in 1970, he directed coverage of the campus shootings at Kent State, for which the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize.
A graduate of DePauw University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Giles was a 1966 Nieman Fellow. He received an honorary doctorate in journalism from DePauw in 1996.
Betty Kirby (EdD) is an assistant professor in the Education Leadership Department at Central Michigan University. She teaches and advises educational administration students and is the program director for the Specialist in Education degree program in Atlanta, Ga. Prior to accepting her current position, Kirby spent nine years in public school administration and has served as an elementary and high school principal.
Her primary research interests include teen victimization and school violence. Kirby has developed a model called the Teen Summit and assists high schools and youth in Michigan to address victimization issues in their schools. This work is supported by her affiliation with the Michigan Victim Alliance and the National Center for Victims of Crime. Kirby currently serves as co-editor and author for the Legal Memorandum, a quarterly journal of law topics for school leaders published by the National Association for Secondary School Principals. She received a bachelor of fine arts from Drake University and doctorate in education from Central Michigan University.
Howard Koh (MD) is the Harvey V. Fineberg Professor of the Practice of Public Health, associate dean for public health practice and director of the Division of Public Health Practice at the Harvard School of Public Health. He serves as director of the school's Center for Public Health Preparedness, which promotes education about bioterrorism, pandemic influenza and other emerging health threats.
Koh served as commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health from 1997 to 2003. In this capacity, he emphasized the power of prevention and strengthened the state's commitment to eliminating health disparities. During this time, Massachusetts was recognized as one of the healthiest states in the country, with public health advances in many areas including AIDS treatment and prevention, coordination of emergency medical services and preservation of hospital essential services, bioterrorism response, and international public health partnerships.
Alfred S. Larkin Jr. has served as executive vice president of The Boston Globe since January of 2006 and serves on the newspaper's senior management team. He oversees human resource and communications functions as well as playing a key role in organizational development and change-management issues across the New England Media Group. His external responsibilities include oversight of the newspaper's public relations, public affairs and community relations efforts. He also serves as president of The Boston Globe Foundation, the newspaper's philanthropic arm.
Larkin has been with the Globe for 35 years, beginning as a reporter and serving in many editing positions including editor of the Sunday Globe Magazine, metropolitan editor, Sunday managing editor and managing editor for administration. He joined the business side of the Globe in 1998 as vice president and assistant to the publisher and later became vice president of human resources before assuming his current duties. In 1976-1977, he was a Nieman Fellow.
Marc Lipsitch is professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, with appointments in the Departments of Epidemiology and Immunology and Infectious Diseases. He is an author of more than 60 peer-reviewed publications on antimicrobial resistance, mathematical modeling of infectious disease transmission, bacterial and human population genetics and, most recently, immunology. He has also written popular science articles for The New York Times, The Jewish Daily Forward and other publications.
Part of Lipsitch's research involves a number of infectious diseases and focuses on mathematical modeling and the development of quantitative methods for studying disease transmission. Recently, his group made estimates of the transmissibility of the SARS virus and the 1918 pandemic influenza strain, analyzed mathematical models of pandemic emergence and antiviral resistance in an influenza pandemic, and developed new methods for evaluating epidemic malaria surveillance algorithms.
Michael Loehr is director of preparedness for public health, Seattle and King County, Washington. For the past four years, he has led Public Health's efforts to enhance preparedness throughout the health system in King County. His responsibilities include developing plans, procedures and training programs for all hazards, maintaining the Public Health Emergency Operations Center, and establishing linkages with regional partners such as hospitals, health centers, first responders and emergency managers.
Prior to working with Public Health, Loehr worked for two years with the King County Office of Emergency Management. He managed the county's Emergency Operations Center and developed operational procedures for all hazards facing King County. Prior to joining King County, Loehr spent six years with the Florida Division of Emergency Management serving as the Response Section Administrator and State Operations Section Chief. Responsibilities included overall management of the State Emergency Operations Center and State Warning Point; administration of the state's critical infrastructure and meteorology sections; development and maintenance of the State Emergency Management Plan; and development of operational procedures addressing state agency response to all hazards.
Christopher Logan is the Program Director for Homeland Security in the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices. His areas of concentration include biosecurity, pandemic influenza preparedness, critical infrastructure protection and emergency management. He is a member of the Emergency Management Accreditation Program Commission.
Prior to joining the National Governors Association in November 2004, Logan was a journalist, covering the U.S. nuclear weapons complex, bioterrorism and homeland security issues. From 2002 until 2004, he served as deputy editor of Congressional Quarterly Homeland Security, a daily online news service. He is the author of many articles and papers, including "A Governor's Guide to Energy Assurance," "Beyond EMAC: Legal Issues in Mutual Aid Agreements for Public Health Practice" and "Politics and Promises: Rhetoric Meets Reality in Homeland Security Funding." Logan has appeared as an analyst and commentator on National Public Radio, C-SPAN's "Washington Journal," C-SPAN Radio, WUSA-TV, WJLA/NewsChannel 8, ABC Radio and others.
Major General Timothy Lowenberg (JD) is the commanding general of the state of Washington National Guard and adjutant general of the Washington Military Department. As adjutant general, he is the commander of all Washington Army and Air National Guard forces and director of the state's Emergency Management and Enhanced 911 programs. He serves as Homeland Security advisor to the governor of the State of Washington and as chair of Homeland Defense and Homeland Security for the Adjutants General Association of the United States. In addition, he is a member of the executive board of the Governors Homeland Security Advisors Council (a component of the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices) and is co-chair of the National Homeland Security Consortium, a coalition of more than two-dozen public and private sector national associations.
Lowenberg received his Air Force commission in 1968 concurrent with a bachelor of arts degree in political science from the University of Iowa. He also earned a doctor of jurisprudence degree from the University of Iowa College of Law in 1971.
Alfonso Martinez-Fonts Jr. is assistant secretary for the Private Sector Office at the Department of Homeland Security, charged with providing America's public sector with a direct line of communication to the department. In April 2002, Martinez-Fonts retired as chairman and chief executive officer of JP Morgan Chase Bank in El Paso, Texas. Before moving to El Paso, he was president of the Bank in San Antonio. He began his 30-year career with Chemical Bank as a management trainee and worked his way through the organization as a lending officer in the Metropolitan Division and the International Division. He has lived and traveled extensively overseas, including managing Chemical Bank's offices in Manila, Philippines (1976-1979) and Mexico City, Mexico (1982-1988). He was Regional Manager based in New York of Chemical's business in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia (1980-1982).
Margie Mason is a medical writer for The Associated Press covering the Asia-Pacific region. She is based in Hanoi, Vietnam, and was at ground zero during the emergence of SARS in 2003. She also has reported on bird flu since it began spreading across Asia in late 2003. Mason began her career with the AP in 1997 and has worked in Charleston, W.Va., San Francisco and as a correspondent in Vietnam. She was awarded a journalism fellowship for Asian studies in 1999-2000 at The University of Hawaii.
Maryn McKenna is an independent journalist specializing in domestic and global public health and health policy. She is currently a Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation Media Fellow and a contributing writer at the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. From 1995 to 2006, she worked at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where she was the only U.S. journalist assigned to full-time coverage of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Previously, she worked for the Boston Herald and Cincinnati Enquirer.
McKenna has held short fellowships at Harvard Medical School and the University of Maryland and in 1998-1999 was the Knight-Wallace Fellow in Medicine at University of Michigan's schools of medicine and public health. In 2006, she was an inaugural Health Journalism Fellow of the East-West Center in Honolulu and is now an associate of the center. She has won many journalism awards and is the author of Beating Back the Devil: On the Front Lines with the Disease Detectives of the Epidemic Intelligence Service.
David Meeks was the sports editor of The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune when Hurricane Katrina devastated the city. He assembled a team of reporters and photographers to cover the story, and for six weeks, directed the Times-Picayune's Katrina coverage on the ground, running what came to be known as the "New Orleans Bureau." When the paper returned to New Orleans in October 2005, he was named city editor. In April 2006, the Times-Picayune was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes, for public service and breaking news.
Meeks began his journalism career as a reporter at small Alabama dailies and then The Birmingham News. In 1991, he joined the Times-Picayune as a bureau chief and rose to suburban editor before leaving in 1999 to become a columnist at the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. He returned to the Times-Picayune in 2001 to edit the sports section, leading a remaking of the paper's coverage of Super Bowls and NCAA Final Fours. Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home, but he still lives in New Orleans.
Barbara Monseu currently serves as the president of the National Center for Critical Incident Analysis. Her professional career includes 29 years in public education. As an assistant superintendent with the Jefferson County Public Schools in Colorado, she was the immediate supervisor of Columbine High School and dealt with all aspects of the aftermath of the shootings that occurred at the school in 1999. Following her career in education, she joined an investment banking firm where she worked in public finance. She is currently a consultant to school districts in crises management and planning. She also serves on several nonprofit boards and community task forces.
David Nabarro (MD) was appointed United Nations System senior coordinator for avian and human influenza in September 2005. Previously, he had served for six years at the WHO headquarters in Geneva, starting in 1999 as head of the Roll Back Malaria Program. He also served as executive director in the Office of then Director-General, led the WHO cluster on Sustainable Development and Healthy Environments, was head of the newly-created Health Action in Crisis group and a special representative of Director General Dr. Lee Jong-Wook.
Nabarro qualified as a physician in 1973 and in public health from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He served on the staff of the London School's Department of Human Nutrition and was the regional manager of Save the Children Fund in South Asia. He was a strategic adviser for health and population in East Africa for the British Government's Overseas Development Administration and was chief health and population adviser at the administration's headquarters in London. From this post, he was promoted to director of human development and chief health adviser in the United Kingdom Department for International Development.
Angus Nicoll is the project leader for influenza at the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. As a senior expert in the Scientific Advice Unit since September 2005, he has played a central role in starting up and coordinating the centre's activities on influenza. These activities have included producing scientific advice on the threat to public health posed by avian influenza, as well as work to help European Union countries strengthen their preparedness against a pandemic. He has also participated in the January 2006 World Health Organization-led mission to investigate human cases of H5N1 in Turkey and in other international assignments. Nicoll is on secondment to the ECDC from the Health Protection Agency, UK, where he was the director and consultant epidemiologist at the Communicable Disease Surveillance Centre in London.
Glen Nowak (PhD) is the chief of media relations for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Previously he served five years as the associate director for communications for the CDC's National Immuni-zation Program. Prior to joining the program in January 1999, he was an associate professor of advertising and communication at the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia. He has authored or co-authored a number of journal articles on advertising and communications practices, social marketing, and health communications.
Frank Ochberg (MD) is editor of the first text on treatment of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), consultant to the FBI and former consultant to the U.S. Secret Service and National Security Council. A founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, he served as associate director of the National Institute of Mental Health and as director of the Michigan Mental Health Department. At Michigan State University, he is clinical professor of psychiatry, adjunct professor of criminal justice, and adjunct professor of journalism.
Ochberg developed, with colleagues, the Critical Incident Analysis Group, the International Victims and the Media Programs, the Dart Award for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence, Global Youth Connect (a young persons' human-rights organization), Gift From Within (a charity for persons with PTSD), the Michigan Victims Alliance, and the Committee for Community Awareness and Protection (responding to serial-killer threats). For the latter activity, he is the first physician to receive the Law Enforcement Medal of the Sons of the American Revolution. As a Red Cross volunteer, Ochberg has helped families at sites of earthquakes, floods, fires and aircraft disasters. He represents the Dart Foundation and directs their support of victimization programs around the world.
Michael Osterholm (MD, PhD) is director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, associate director of the Department of Homeland Security's National Center for Food Protection and Defense, and a professor in the University of Minnesota's School of Public Health. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. In June 2005, he was appointed to the newly established National Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity. From 2001 through early 2005, he served as a special advisor to then-HHS Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on issues related to bioterrorism and public health preparedness. He was also appointed to the Secretary's Advisory Council on Public Health Preparedness. Previously, Osterholm served for 24 years (1975-1999) in various roles at the Minnesota Department of Health, the last 15 as state epidemiologist and chief of the Acute Disease Epidemiology Section. He is the author of "Living Terrors: What America needs to know to survive the coming bioterrorist catastrophe."
John Pope has been The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune's medical/health reporter since fall 1986, covering local medical schools and hospitals, medical conventions human-interest stories and local, state and national public-health developments. He was a member of the team that won two Pulitzer Prizes, one George Polk Award and one National Headliner Award for the paper's coverage of hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Pope began his journalism career as a copy editor and general-assignment reporter for The States-Item, New Orleans' afternoon paper. When the States-Item merged with The Times-Picayune, the morning paper, in 1980, Pope continued on general assignment until he moved to the medical beat.
He has held fellowships in public health at the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism at the University of Maryland and at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. His stories have won four first prizes from the Press Club of New Orleans, two first prizes from the Louisiana State Medical Society and one from the Louisiana-Mississippi Associated Press Associations. The Louisiana Public Health Association has given him its Louise McFarland Award for Excellence in Public Health Communication.
Stephen Prior (PhD) is the president of Quantum Leap Health Sciences and the executive director of the National Center For Critical Incident Analysis. He is a distinguished research fellow at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense University. Prior has worked with several U.S. government agencies and was the program manager for the Department of Defense Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program. In the five years after founding the National Security Health Policy Center, his work has included development of innovative approaches to modeling biological systems and analysis of complex adaptive systems based on biological principles.
Dori B. Reissman (MD) has provided leadership and vision for the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health focused on the psychological and social determinants of behaviors associated with large-scale public health threats and emergencies. Reissman developed a comprehensive Responder Resilience Program at the Centers for Disease Control and supported a number of public health missions in response to natural disasters and terrorist attacks. Reissman was chief of the emergency psychiatric services at St. Vincent's Hospital and Medical Center of New York when the 1993 World Trade Center bombing incident occurred.
Ford Rowan (PhD) is a former journalist and a consultant who has advised on crises that include September 11, chemical safety and mad cow disease. He chairs the National Center for Critical Incident Analysis, an independent civilian research entity. He is the author of a study on lessons from the 2001 anthrax attacks and co-author of "What Is To Be Done? Emerging perspectives on public responses to bioterrorism" (2002) and "Crisis Prevention, Management and Communication" (1991). He is co-author of the forthcoming "Weathering the Storm: A guide for preparing for a pandemic." He is a former national security correspondent for NBC News who covered the war in Lebanon, the Watergate trials and Three Mile Island. He was the host of the weekly PBS program "International Edition" in the mid 1980's.
Peter M. Sandman (PhD) is a risk-communication consultant who has worked on issues ranging from oil spills to E. coli contamination. In the terms first popularized by Sandman, these are situations where the "hazard" is low, the "outrage" is high and the core task is outrage management Ð Sandman's "Risk = Hazard + Outrage" formula for risk communication. A Rutgers University professor since 1977, Sandman founded the Environmental Communication Research Program at Rutgers in 1986 and was its director until 1992. During this time, the program published more than 80 articles and books on risk communication. Now a full-time consultant, Sandman retains his academic affiliations as professor of human ecology at Rutgers and as professor of environmental and community medicine at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Bruce Shapiro is executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, a contributing editor for The Nation and national correspondent for Salon.com. He also teaches investigative journalism at Yale University. He is co-author of Legal Lynching: The Death Penalty and America's Future (with Rev. Jesse Jackson and congressman Jesse Jackson Jr.) and author of Shaking the Foundations, a history of investigative reporting.
Alan Sipress is a staff writer and former Southeast Asia correspondent for The Washington Post. Until this summer, he was based in the Post's regional bureau in Jakarta, Indonesia, responsible for covering more than a dozen countries from Burma to the Philippines and the South Pacific. After avian flu was first confirmed in Southeast Asia early 2004, he covered the political, cultural and economic dimensions of the disease, as well as issues related more directly to public health and epidemiology. Sipress joined the Post in 1998 and covered diplomacy, national security and transportation before shifting to the paper's foreign staff in 2002. Since returning to Washington in August, he has covered technology on the Post's business staff. He previously worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer, where he served as Middle East correspondent in the mid-1990's. He has also been a reporter at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot and the (now-defunct) Daily Register in Red Bank, New Jersey.
Tim Stephens leads Rescobie Associates Inc., a public health consulting organization. He also is a partner in Kop Associates LLC, a Washington, D.C., real estate development company. Prior to establishing these businesses in 2005, Stephens led the preparedness programs for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
Patricia Thomas is the first Knight Chair in Health and Medical Journalism at Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia. She has written about medicine, public health and life science research for many years, and from 1991 to early 1997 was editor of the Harvard Health Letter. Her book Big Shot: Passion, politics and the struggle for an AIDS vaccine (PublicAffairs, September 2001), won the 1998 Leonard Silk Journalism Fellowship and the 2002 Ralph A. Deterling Award of Distinction from the American Medical Writers Association New England Chapter. Thomas was also one of the first healthy volunteers injected with an experimental HIV vaccine.
Thomas has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 2002-2003 was the Visiting Scholar at the Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University. Thomas's work appears regularly in Harvard Magazine, where she is a contributing editor.
Dick Thompson is the World Health Organization's team leader for pandemic and outbreak communication. He has advised the governments of Angola, Indonesia, Egypt, Iraq and Thailand about communicating during outbreaks in those countries. He directed communications for WHO during the SARS outbreak and is credited with naming the disease. Following the containment of SARS, he directed the global project which led to WHO's Outbreak Communication Guidelines, the "best practices" governments are encouraged to use when communicating with the public during an outbreak. He is no leading workshops in all WHO regions training representatives from Ministries of Health and of Agriculture in outbreak communication practices. Mr. Thompson joined WHO in 2001 after 23 years with Time Magazine, where he served primarily as Time's chief science, medicine and environment correspondent in Washington, DC. He is the author of "Volcano Cowboys."
John Thompson currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director for the National Sheriffs' Association. He has 31 years of extensive law enforcement experience, working 20 years as a law enforcement executive. John served as Assistant Sheriff for Prince George's County, Maryland and Chief of Police for the City of Mount Rainier. While serving as Chief of Police he developed innovative community based programs resulting in a reduced crime rate and improved quality of life which won Three, Maryland Municipal League's "Award of Excellence." Thompson has a degree in Criminal Justice and is a graduate of the FBI Law Enforcement Executive School and the Northwestern University, School of Police Staff and Command.
Stan Tiner is executive editor and vice president of The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss., where he has worked since May 2000. In 2006, the newspaper received the Pulitzer Prize gold medal for public service for its coverage of Hurricane Katrina. Tiner and colleagues Marie Harris and Tony Biffle were also finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Tiner is the 2006 winner of the American Society of Newspaper Editor Leadership Award, the top recognition given by the society. He previously served as the top editor at the Mobile Register, the Shreveport Journal and the Daily Oklahoman. In 1985-1986, Tiner was a Nieman Fellow.
Brian Toolan was named national editor of The Associated Press in August 2006. As national editor, he is responsible for overseeing all U.S. news coverage outside Washington, D.C., with ultimate oversight of teams of reporters covering such areas as health and science, religion and higher education. Prior to AP, Toolan was editor and senior vice president of The Hartford Courant. He had been editor of the Courant since 1998, responsible for the news, business, sports and feature sections and the supervision of 270 reporters, editors, photographers and designers. Under his leadership, the Courant staff won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news reporting for coverage of a shooting rampage in which a state lottery worker killed four supervisors before committing suicide. Courant journalists also were finalists in the investigative reporting category in 2001 and feature photography in 2003.
Toolan also worked at the Philadelphia Daily News, where he was managing editor, assistant managing editor-news and sports editor; and at the Baltimore News American, Dayton Journal Herald and Scranton Tribune.
Lu Yi is a senior editor and reporter for Sanlian Life Weekly, the largest news weekly in China. She has written features on panda preserves, avian flu, fossil excavation and organ transplants. She often contributes to the magazine's "Good News & Bad News" science column. She earned a law degree from Peking University before deciding to switch to a career in journalism.