Lawrence Cohen, Ph.D. (Child Development Specialist) is a psychologist, author, and consultant living in Brookline, MA. He is the author of Playful Parenting, an award-winning book about nurturing close connections, solving behavior problems, and encouraging children's confidence. In addition to his work with children and parents, he consults with schools, after school programs, and corporations, and has a general psychotherapy practice. Along with Michael Thompson and Catherine O'Neill Grace, Dr. Cohen is the author of two books on children's friendships, popularity, and social cruelty: Best Friends, Worst Enemies and Mom, They're Teasing Me. He is also the author of numerous articles, including a series in Nick Jr. Family Magazine that won the Golden Lamp Award from Education Press. He and co-author Anthony DeBenedet recently released The Art of Roughhousing. For more information, please click here to view the AOR Facebook page.
Lawrence D. Levien is a partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP. (Bio coming soon.)
Jennifer McCrea is a senior research fellow at the Harvard University Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations where she founded and leads the Course on Exponential Fundraising, a yearlong engagement with nonprofit leaders and development professionals. She previously held leadership positions in two multi-billion dollar capital campaigns--at Case Western Reserve University and Washington University in St. Louis--and served as vice president for development at Dickinson College.
Through her workshops and consulting, she has worked with organizations including Millennium Promise, Grameen America, Teach for America, Mercy Corps, and Population Services International. She is a co-founder of the Quincy Jones Music Consortium, an organization making music an ongoing part of the lives of children across the United States, and is a board member of the Berklee College City Music Program.
She has a BA from Allegheny College, a master’s degree in nonprofit management from Case Western Reserve University, and is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute.
Sir Ken Robinson, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized leader in the development of creativity, innovation and human resources. He works with governments in Europe, Asia and the USA, with international agencies, Fortune 500 companies, and some of the world’s leading cultural organizations. In 1998, he led a national commission on creativity, education and the economy for the UK Government. ‘All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education’ (The Robinson Report) was published to wide acclaim in 1999. He was the central figure in developing a strategy for creative and economic development as part of the Peace Process in Northern Ireland, working with the ministers for training, education enterprise and culture. The resulting blueprint for change, ‘Unlocking Creativity’, was adopted by politicians of all parties and by business, education and cultural leaders across the Province. He was one of four international advisors to the Singapore Government for its strategy to become the creative hub of South East Asia.
For twelve years, he was Professor of Education at the University of Warwick in the UK and is now Professor Emeritus. He has received honorary degrees from the Open University and the Central School of Speech and Drama; Birmingham City University and the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. He was been honored with the Athena Award of the Rhode Island School of Design for services to the arts and education; the Peabody Medal for contributions to the arts and culture in the United States, and the Benjamin Franklin Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for outstanding contributions to cultural relations between the United Kingdom and the United States. In 2005 he was named as one of Time/Fortune/CNN’s ‘Principal Voices’. In 2003, he received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for his services to the arts. He speaks to audiences throughout the world on the creative challenges facing business and education in the new global economies.
His new book, currently a New York Times Best Seller, ‘The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything’ (Penguin/Viking 2009) is being translated into eight different languages.
For more information go to www.sirkenrobinson.com.
David Rockwell is the Founder and CEO of Rockwell Group, an award-winning, cross-disciplinary architecture and design practice. Based in New York City with a satellite office in Madrid, Rockwell and his 140-person firm focus on a diverse array of projects that range from hotels to hospitals, restaurants to airport terminals and Broadway set designs to consumer products.
Long before turning his attention to architecture, Mr. Rockwell harbored a fascination with immersive environments. The flagship Imagination Playground park, a public-private partnership with the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation, opened in July 2010 at Burling Slip in the South Street Seaport area of Lower Manhattan. Imagination Playground is a rich environment of diverse materials that encourages unstructured child-directed free play. Through a partnership with KaBOOM!, Rockwell Group is offering fixed-site and other scalable models of Imagination Playground to communities nationwide.
Rockwell's monograph, Pleasure: The Architecture and Design of Rockwell Group, was published by Universe, a division of Rizzoli Books in 2002. Spectacle by David Rockwell with Bruce Mau - a book examining the history and public fascination with larger-than-life manmade events - was published by Phaidon Press in October 2006.
In May 2010 Rockwell was inducted into the James Beard Foundation Who's Who of Food & Beverage in America. He was also honored with the 2009 Pratt Legends Award, the 2008 National Design Award by Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt for outstanding achievement in Interior Design, a lifetime achievement award from Interiors magazine, an induction to Interior Design magazine's Hall of Fame and the Presidential Design Award for his work for the Grand Central Terminal renovation. Rockwell serves as Initial Alliance and Board member of Gehry Technologies, Chairman of the Board of the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS (DIFFA), and as a board member of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Citymeals-on-Wheels. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University and studied at the Architectural Association of London.
Dan Siegel, M.D. received his medical degree from Harvard University and completed his postgraduate medical education at UCLA with training in pediatrics and child, adolescent and adult psychiatry. He served as a National Institute of Mental Health Research Fellow at UCLA, studying family interactions with an emphasis on how attachment experiences influence emotions, behavior, autobiographical memory and narrative.
Dr. Siegel formerly directed the training program in child psychiatry and is the recipient of teaching awards and honorary fellowships and professorships. He is currently a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine where he is on the faculty of the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute, an educational organization that focuses on how the development of insight and empathy within individuals, families and communities can be enhanced by examining the interface of human relationships and basic biological processes.
Dr. Siegel is the author of the internationally acclaimed text, The Developing Mind: Toward a Neurobiology of Interpersonal Experience (1999) which introduces the idea of “interpersonal neurobiology” as a way of defining the mind and mental well-being. This approach is further explored in the Norton Professional Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology of which Dan is the Founding Editor. His book with Mary Hartzell, M.Ed., Parenting from the Inside Out: How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive (2003) explores the application of this newly emerging view of the mind, the brain, and human relationships to families. His professional book, The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being (2007), expands these applications into the arenas of everyday life and psychotherapy. His book Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation (2010) offers the general reader an in-depth exploration of the power of the mind to integrate the brain and promote well-being. His latest professional text, The Mindful Therapist (2010), explores the application of these ideas for the clinician’s own development of mindsight and neural integration. Dan’s new parenting book, The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind, Survive Everyday Parenting Struggles, and Help Your Family Thrive with Tina Bryson, Ph.D., was released on October 4, 2011.
Current programs and appearances can be viewed at www.DrDanSiegel.com.
Anne Veneman is the former Executive Director of UNICEF. (Bio coming soon.)
Jeffrey C. Walker is the Ex-Chairman of Millennium Promise, an incubator to eliminate extreme poverty with the United Nations and
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