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John Abele
Co-founder, retired founding chairman, and director emeritus, Boston Scientific.
David Agus
Professor of medicine and engineering at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and Viterbi School of Engineering, and founding director of USC’s Lawrence J. Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine; best-selling author of The End of Illness, A Short Guide to a Long Life, and The Lucky Years.
Alph Bingham
President/founder of Cascade Consulting; co-founder and president and chairman of the board of InnoCentive; advisory board member, the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT.
David Bolinksky
Founder, e.mersion studios and Emersionist; medical director for The Inner Life of the Cell for Harvard University’s Molecular and Cellular Biology Department; founder, Advanced Imaging; founder, XVIVO Scientific Animation; former senior medical illustrator at the Yale School of Medicine.
David Brooks
Op-Ed columnist or The New York Times; commentator for PBS NewsHour, NPR’s All Things Considered, and NBC’s Meet the Press; author of multiple books including, most recently, The Second Mountain.
John Seeley Brown
Independent co-chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge; visiting scholar to the provost at the University of Southern California; retired chief scientist of Xerox Corporation and director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); co-founder, Institute for Research on Learning; member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, a fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and of AAAS, and a trustee of the MacArthur Foundation.
Calvin Butts
Pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City; president of the State University of New York (SUNY) College at Old Westbury; chairman of the board of Abyssinian Development Corporation; member of the leadership boards of The Long Island Association, New Visions for Public Schools, and the Long Island Regional Advisory Council on Higher Education; member of the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS; chairman emeritus of the Board of the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS (NBLCA); founding member of the organization’s Board of Commissioners.
Ram Charan
World-renowned business advisor, author and speaker who has spent the past 35 years working with top companies, CEOs, and boards including GE, MeadWestvaco, Bank of America, DuPont, Novartis, EMC, 3M, Verizon, Aditya Birla Group, Tata Group, GMR, Max Group, Yildiz Holdings, and Grupo RBS; author of over 25 books that have sold over 2 million copies in more than a dozen languages.
Joe Coughlin
Director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology AgeLab; professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies & Planning and the Sloan School’s Advanced Management Program; contributor to Forbes, MarketWatch, and the Wall Street Journal; author, The Longevity Economy: Inside the World’s Fastest Growing, Most Misunderstood Market.
James Cuno
President and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust; art historian by training; served as professor and director at other arts institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Harvard University Art Museums, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at UCLA, and Vassar College.
Carmen Agra Deedy
Award-winning author of children’s books; invited speaker at venues including The American Library Association, Refugees International, The International Reading Association, Columbia University, The Smithsonian Institute, TED, The National Book Festival, and the Kennedy Center.
Horace Deets
Retired executive director, AARP.
John Doerr
Chairman, Kleiner Perkins venture capital; previously: Intel, Silicon Compilers, @Home, Advisor to NewSchools.org, TechNet.org, the Climate Reality Project, ONE.org.
Robert Full
Professor of integrative biology, UC Berkeley, and director of the Poly-P.E.D.A.L. Laboratory, studying the science of motion; expert in the study of comparative biomechanics and physiology.
Laurie Garrett
Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer; former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations; author The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and other books; member, World Economic Forum Global Health Security Advisory Board.
Matt Groenig
Creator of the television series The Simpsons, Futurama, Disenchantment, and the comic strip Life in Hell; recipient of 11 Primetime Emmy Awards, ten for The Simpsons.
William Haseltine
Chair and president of ACCESS Health International, Inc., and chairman of the Haseltine Foundation for Science and the Arts; former professor at Harvard Medical School and Harvard School of Public Health, known for his pioneering work on cancer, HIV/AIDS, and genomics; founded more than a dozen biotechnology companies, including Human Genome Sciences; serves on advisory boards for numerous international entities, from the Brookings Institution to the Council on Foreign Relations.
Michael Hawley
Educator, computer scientist, musician and photographer; director of the EG thought leader conference; held industrial positions at Bell Labs, IRCAM in Paris, Lucasfilm in San Rafael, and NeXT in Palo Alto; former Alex Dreyfoos Professor of Media Technology at MIT; won the Van Cliburn amateur piano competition in 2002.
Danny Hillis
Inventor, scientist, author and engineer; pioneered work on parallel computing while completing his doctorate at MIT; holds more than 300 U.S. patents.
Chris Johns
Executive Director of the Centers of Excellence for the National Geographic Society; former editor in chief of National Geographic magazine from January 2005 to April 2014.
Steve Jurvetson
Early-stage venture capitalist with a focus on founder-led, mission-driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology and new industry formation; co-founder of Future Ventures and DFJ; currently serves on the boards of Tesla, SpaceX and D-Wave (the quantum computing company).
Robert Kegan
The William and Miriam Meehan Research Professor in Adult Learning and Professional Development for the Harvard University Graduate School of Education; additionally serves as educational chair of the Institute for Management and Leadership in Education, as co-director of a joint program with the Harvard Medical School to bring principles of adult learning to the reform of medical education, and as co-director of the Change Leadership Group, a program for the training of change leadership coaches for school and district leaders
Wendy Kopp
CEO and co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations that are developing collective leadership to ensure all children have the opportunity to fulfill their potential; founded Teach For America in 1989.
John Kotter
Best-selling author, award winning business and management thought leader, business entrepreneur and Harvard professor, regarded by many as the authority on leadership and change; his 1996 book, Leading Change, was selected by Time magazine in 2011 as one of the 25 most influential business management books ever written.
Imagine Solutions and the 501(c)(3) Searching for Solutions Institute were founded in 2008 with the mission to bring leading-edge speakers and thinkers to engaged audiences of change-makers, addressing matters of societal importance related to science, medicine and healthcare, business, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit, social sciences, the arts, conservation and the environment, exploration and discovery, and more, and the vision of generating real conversations and the space for impact, influence, and connection.