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Times Journeys #3 — Speakers

E. Caribbean  • December 22, 2013 – January 3, 2014

 

DIANA B. HENRIQUES

Diana B. Henriques, an award-winning financial journalist, is the author of The Wizard of Lies, the New York Times bestseller about the Bernie Madoff scandal, and three other books on business history. A writer for The New York Times since 1989, she has largely specialized in investigative reporting on white-collar crime, market regulation and corporate governance. Since January 2012, she has been a contributing writer at the paper and has written for a variety of other outlets, including Forbes magazine.

Ms. Henriques was a member of The New York Times reporting teams that were Pulitzer finalists for their coverage of the 2008 financial crisis and the aftermath of the Enron scandals. She was also a member of a team that won a 1999 Gerald Loeb Award for covering the near-collapse of Long Term Capital Management, a hedge fund whose troubles rocked the financial markets in September 1998. And she was one of four reporters honored in 1996 by the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Sigma Delta Chi professional journalism society, for a series on how wealthy Americans legally sidestep taxes.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Henriques widened her focus to work with her colleague at The Times, David Barstow, in covering the management of billions of dollars in charity and victim assistance as part of the paper’s award-winning section, A Nation Challenged. She also chronicled the fate of Cantor Fitzgerald, the Wall Street firm that suffered the largest death toll in the World Trade Center attacks.

But she is proudest of her 2004 series exposing the exploitation of American military personnel by financial service companies. Her work prompted legislative reform and cash reimbursements for tens of thousands of defrauded service members, drawing recognition and thanks from military lawyers and families across the country. For that series, she was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005 and received a George Polk Award, Harvard’s Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize.

Born in Texas but raised mostly in Roanoke, VA, Ms. Henriques is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of what is now the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University in Washington. Besides her book on the Madoff scandal, Ms. Henriques is also the author of Fidelity’s World and The White Sharks of Wall Street, both published by Scribner’s, and The Machinery of Greed, published by Lexington Books.

Ms. Henriques has been awarded a Ferris visiting professorship in writing at Princeton University for the 2012–2013 academic year and is a frequent guest lecturer for business journalism classes and workshops elsewhere. In 2003, she was elected to the board of governors of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW), and in 2011, she was elected to the board of trustees of The George Washington University in Washington, DC.

She and her husband live in Hoboken, N.J.

CHARLES A. KUPCHAN, PH.D.

Dr. Kupchan is Whitney Shepardson senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is also professor of international affairs in the Walsh School of Foreign Service and Government Department at Georgetown University.

Dr. Kupchan was director for European affairs at the National Security Council (NSC) during the first Clinton administration. Before joining the NSC, he worked in the U.S. Department of State on the policy planning staff. Prior to government service, he was an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University.

He is the author of No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (2012), How Enemies Become Friends: The Sources of Stable Peace (2010), The End of the American Era: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics of the Twenty-first Century (2002), Power in Transition: The Peaceful Change of International Order (2001), Civic Engagement in the Atlantic Community (1999), Atlantic Security: Contending Visions (1998), Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe (1995), The Vulnerability of Empire (1994), The Persian Gulf and the West (1987) and numerous articles on international and strategic affairs.

Dr. Kupchan received a B.A. from Harvard University and M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees from Oxford University. He has served as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs, Columbia University’s Institute for War and Peace Studies, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Centre d’Étude et de Recherches Internationales in Paris, and the Institute for International Policy Studies in Tokyo. During 2006–2007, he was the Henry A. Kissinger Scholar at the Library of Congress and was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

FLOYD NORRIS

Floyd Norris has been with The New York Times for 25 years, all but one of them as a financial columnist. He is the recipient of all three lifetime achievement awards in business journalism — the Elliott V. Bell award from the New York Financial Writers’ Association in 1998, the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award administered by UCLA in 2003, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in 2008.

Before joining The Times in 1988, Norris was the stock market columnist for Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly. He previously worked at both the Associated Press and United Press International and as press secretary to then-Senator John A. Durkin, Democrat of New Hampshire. At The Times, he has been chief financial correspondent since 1999, when he finished a one-year stint as a member of The Times’ editorial board, writing editorials on economic issues.

Norris holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University, where he was a Walter Bagehot Fellow in Economics and Business Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

DAVID SADAVA, PH.D.

David Sadava is the Pritzker Family Foundation Professor of Biology, Emeritus, at Claremont McKenna, Pitzer and Scripps, three of the Claremont Colleges. In addition, he is Adjunct Professor in the Department of Cancer Cell Biology at the City of Hope Medical Center.

Dr. Sadava graduated from Carleton University in 1967 as science medalist, with a B.S. with first class honors in biology and chemistry. While an undergraduate, he worked in biological control at the Canada Department of Agriculture and as a science policy officer to the government of Canada. A Woodrow Wilson Fellow, he received a Ph.D. in biology from the University of California at San Diego in 1971. Following postdoctoral research at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, he joined the faculty at Claremont in 1972 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor in 1977 and full professor in 1984. In 1996, he became the inaugural Pritzker Foundation Chair of Biology. He has taught a wide range of courses in the biological sciences, ranging from genetics, to biology for non-majors, to cancer biology and has mentored hundreds of undergraduates in research. He served as Chair of the science program at Claremont for two terms. He repeatedly won awards for superior teaching as well as other faculty honors. In 2009, he left teaching to devote full time to laboratory research and writing.

Dr. Sadava has been a visiting professor at the University of Colorado and at the California Institute of Technology. He currently serves as an Advisory Board member at the Keck Graduate Institute and at the UCLA Center for Society and Genetics and is a trustee of Western University of Health Sciences. A bench scientist throughout his career, he has held numerous research grants and written over 55 peer-reviewed scientific research papers, many with undergraduate student co-authors. His published research has been wide-ranging, from the biochemistry of plant growth, to the genetics of racehorses, to human genetic diseases, to the mechanisms of drug addiction. For the past 20 years, his research has focused on resistance to chemotherapy in human lung cancer, with a view to developing new, plant-based medicines to treat this disease. He is the author or co-author of five books, including Plants, Genes and Crop Biotechnology and the recently published tenth edition of a leading biology textbook, Life: The Science of Biology. Committed to educating the general public, he has presented innumerable public talks on biological topics and has given free public courses on cancer. The success of his video course for The Great Courses series, Understanding Genetics: DNA, Genes and Their Real-World Applications has been followed by a recently developed course entitled What Science Knows About Cancer. He lives in Los Angeles.

ANTHONY TOMMASINI

Anthony Tommasini is the chief classical music critic of the New York Times and the author of three books. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in Long Island, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University, and later earned a Master of Music degree form the Yale School of Music and a Doctor of Musical Arts Degree from Boston University.

He taught music at Emerson College in Boston, and gave non-fiction writing workshops at Wesleyan University and Brandeis University. His interest in the work of the composer and critic Virgil Thomson culminated with his book Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle, published in 1997 by W. W. Norton & Company. Among the reviews the book received was Jack Sullivan’s in the Washington Post: “... a thoroughly original biography, detached yet intimate, learned yet entertaining, one that does full justice to its feisty, iconoclastic subject.” Robert Craft, in the New York Review of Books, deemed the biography “indispensable to anyone concerned with American cultural history of the period.”

His most recent book, released in November of 2004 and published by Times Books/Henry Holt, part of the New York Times Essential Library series, is Opera: a Critic’s Guide to the 100 Important Most Important Works and the Best Recordings. It beings with a primer for newcomers to opera and includes 100 original essays on the chosen works.

As a pianist, he recorded two Northeastern Records compact discs of Thomson’s music, titled Portraits and Self-Portraits, and Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works. Both were funded through grants Anthony Tommasini was awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Prior to joining the Times he covered music and theater for the Boston Globe. Over the years as a journalist he has also written about dance, jazz, rap, books and AIDS. He lives in Manhattan with his partner, Dr. Benjamin McCommon, a psychiatrist.

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