Coontz has been a frequent guest columnist for the New York Times and also written numerous articles for CNN.com, the Observer/Guardian, The Times of London, and the Washington Post, as well as for academic journals.
She has testified about her research before the House Select Committee on Children, Youth and Families in Washington, DC, and appeared on The Colbert Report, MSNBC’s “The Cycle,” The Today Show, PBS News Hour, Oprah Winfrey, Crossfire, 20/20, CBS This Morning, CSPAN, and the O-Reilly Factor, along with numerous NPR shows. Selected articles and tv appearances can be found at www.stephaniecoontz.com. She lectures on topics connected to family, gender, marriage, and social inequality throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia and often conducts media training workshops for researchers at universities around the country.
A former Woodrow Wilson Fellow, Coontz has also taught at Kobe University in Japan and the University of Hawaii at Hilo. In 2013 she received the Work-Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute. She has also been awarded the Council on Contemporary Families first-ever (and only) “Visionary Leadership” Award and the Dale Richmond Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics for her “outstanding contributions to the field of child development.”
She served as a marriage consultant to The Ladies Home Journal from 2006-2009 and consulted with the Pew Research Center in developing their questionnaire for their 2010 report on the state of marriage and family life in America. She currently serves as an advisor to MTV for its anti-bias campaign.
Coontz lives just south of Olympia, Washington, where her husband raises grass-fed beef and lamb and she forages for wild mushrooms or digs clams when she is not traveling or working on her research.
Several episodes she’s penned – Little Bo Bleep (“Modern Family”) and Evolution, Attack of the 5’10” Woman, Just Say Yes, Plus One is the Loneliest Number, I Love a Charade, and Splat! (“Sex and the City”) – were individually nominated for Writer’s Guild and Emmy awards.
She is the author of two comic memoirs: the New York Times bestseller The Between Boyfriends Book: A Collection of Cautiously Hopeful Essays, and The Longest Date: Life as a Wife. She has had two essays published in the celebrated New York Times Modern Love column, has guested on NPR’s “Wait, Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” and has had her own column in two publications: Glamour and O, The Oprah Magazine.
Her first screenplay (the adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel, How to Be Good, with the late, great Laura Ziskin producing for Miramax) made the Black List for Hottest Unproduced Screenplays of 2008. And Cindy is hoping to increase the number of female directors in Hollywood by directing her first feature this spring for Netflix, OTHERHOOD (a comedy about mothers and their adult sons).
She lives in Marina del Rey, California, with her husband, their 6-year-old daughter, and a very old St. Bernard. For more information visit www.cindychupack.com
She joined The Times in 2014. Her series of articles, “Underwriting Jihad,” showing how ransoms paid by European governments had become one of the main sources of financing for Al Qaeda, won the George Polk Award in International Reporting.
Before joining The Times, Ms. Callimachi spent 10 years at The Associated Press. From 2006 to 2014 she was based in Dakar, Senegal, covering 20 countries as the correspondent and the West Africa Bureau chief for The A.P. In 2013 on an assignment for The A.P. in northern Mali, locals led her to a complex of buildings which had served as the headquarters of Al Qaeda’s North African branch. On the floor and in upturned filing cabinets, she found thousands of pages of internal Al Qaeda documents including letters from the man considered to be the general manager of the terror network.
Her series “The Al Qaeda Papers” illuminated the inner workings of the extremist organization, revealing that terrorists camping out in the dunes of the Sahara are expected to keep receipts and file monthly expense reports.
Ms. Callimachi was born in Romania and along with her mother and grandmother, she fled the country when she was 5, settling first in Switzerland, before immigrating to the United States when she was 10. Her stepfather, Mihai Botez, was a Romanian mathematician, university professor and dissident who spent a decade under house arrest after criticizing the regime of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
She began her reporting career as a freelancer for Time Magazine covering the Gujarat earthquake in 2001, before covering city hall at The Daily Herald in Arlington Heights, Ill. from 2001 to 2003. She joined The A.P. in the news agency’s Portland, Ore., bureau, and moved to New Orleans in 2006 to cover the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
He is currently the CEO of Power Play and also the chairman of the influential industry organization Games for Change (G4C), which produces the largest gaming event in NYC, the annual Games for Change Festival.
He has served as a strategic advisor to organizations like EON Productions (producer of the James Bond films), Tribeca Enterprises, Newsweek, and McCann Erickson, helping guide the strategic use of games and digital experiences to further brand engagement.
He has been invited to speak at conferences and institutions including TED Talks, Harvard Kennedy School, the Clinton Global Initiative, Sundance, the Skoll World Forum, CES, SXSW, and the US Army War College. He is also a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts MFA in Design for Social Innovation and holds a Master of Entertainment Technology from Carnegie Mellon University.
Prior to launching Family Story, Mia was the Vice President of the Family Independence Initiative where she worked to illuminate the ways in which marginalized people build and leverage family and community to move their lives forward.
Mia, whose 2015 TED talk “The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True” has been viewed over 1.5 million times already, has been published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Slate, Salon, and On Being, and she speaks at universities and conferences across the country.
Mia is also modern Renaissance woman. She has spent time organizing to abolish prisons, teaching teenagers about sex and drugs, interviewing literary luminaries like Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, and John Irving, and attending births as a midwifery apprentice. Mia is a graduate of Oberlin College, an inaugural Ascend Fellow of The Aspen Institute, a New America California Fellow, and sits on the Board of Directors of Forward Together. She lives, dreams, and practices beekeeping in Oakland, CA.
He has a BA in psychology from Tel Aviv University, an MA and PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina, and a PhD in business administration from Duke University.
After graduating from Duke in 1998, he took a position at MIT, where he was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics (with a two year break when he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton). He returned to Duke in 2008.
Over the years, he has published research in psychology, economics, medical, and business academic journals, and has attempted to reach beyond the boundaries of academia by writing four general audience books about his research (Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, and Payoff).
In general, his goal is to study how people actually act in the marketplace, as opposed to how they should or would perform if they were completely rational. His interests span a wide range of daily behaviors such as saving (or not), buying (or not), medical decision-making, pain management, procrastination, dishonesty, and decision making under different emotional states. In all of these areas, he is interested in gaining a better understanding of our ability to make decisions, and identifying the places where we fall short, in order to better design products, interventions and policies.
While initially gaining recognition in the acclaimed Grammy-winning Montreal-based band Arcade Fire, Marika also saw an opportunity to harness and direct the energy of a passionate fan base and founded Plus 1 – a platform that empowers artists to partner with their fans to drive awareness, advocacy, and resources for organizations doing proven, measurable work for the world’s most marginalized populations.
Through this initiative, upwards of $4M million has been raised for leading social justice organizations by more than 57 artists including Arcade Fire, The National, The XX, CHVRCHES, Flume, Grizzly Bear, and Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. Marika was raised in B.C. by her mother – a linguist and academic who works with First Nation communities in language revitalization – who taught Marika the value of identity and the power of language.
Marika has two degrees from McGill University. She sits on the Board of Directors of Partners in Health Canada, and on the PIH Board of Trustees in Boston. She frequently speaks about the power of collective impact and philanthropy in the arts, including appearances at C2 Montreal, the Forbes Under 30 Summit, and universities and engagements around the world. She lives in Montreal with her husband, record producer Marcus Paquin, and their young daughter.
A renowned computer security researcher, he is a thought-leader on cybersecurity policies and state tradecraft and has served as special advisor to Department of Defense. In 2016, Alperovitch revealed Russian intelligence agencies’ hacking of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), events which unveiled the full scope of cyber influence operations being launched against the US 2016 Election.
Politico Magazine featured Alperovitch as one of “Politico 50” influential thinkers, doers and visionaries transforming American politics in 2016. In 2013, Alperovitch received the prestigious recognition of being selected as MIT Technology Review’s “Young Innovators under 35,” and was named Foreign Policy Magazine’s Leading Global Thinker for 2013, an award shared with Secretary of State John Kerry, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
Jon specializes in applying the latest scientific research on human behavior (neuroscience, psychology, economics, biology, etc.), to transform the ways companies approach marketing, sales, consumer engagement, product design, and Influencer program development. To prove his research, Jon founded The Influencers, a secret dining experience and private community, whose membership includes over 1200 industry leaders, ranging from Nobel laureates, Olympians, and celebrities, to executives, editors-in-chief, and even royalty.
In 2016, Jon Published his first book The 2 AM Principle: Discover The Science of Adventure, where Jon shares stories of his adventures (e.g. getting crushed by a bull in Pamplona’s Running of The Bulls, battling Kiefer Sutherland in drunken Jenga for an invite to Thanksgiving dinner, convincing a the duty-free sales clerk to quit her job and travel with him within 10 seconds of meeting) combined with scientific research on living a fun, exciting and remarkable life.
Mooke is Founder and Artistic Director of the Scorchio Quartet featured on Bowie’s Heathen CD. She received the prestigious ASCAP Concert Music Award for creating ASCAP’s new music showcase THRU THE WALLS featuring composer/performers whose work defies categorization.