Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Neha Dixit is an independent journalist and author based in New Delhi. For over two decades, she has reported on politics, gender, labour, and social justice in South Asia, producing investigative, narrative, and long-form journalism for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Caravan, The Wire, and others. 

Her work has exposed extrajudicial killings, hate crimes, human trafficking, unethical clinical trials, and sectarian majoritarian violence. She has won over a dozen national and international awards, including the International Press Freedom Award (2019) from Committee to Protect Journalists, the Chameli Devi Jain Award (2017), and the Lorenzo Natali Prize for Journalism (2011).

Her book, "The Many Lives of Syeda X" (Juggernaut), traces 30 years in the life of a migrant Muslim woman navigating Delhi’s informal labour economy, holding over 50 jobs without minimum wage. The book, a vivid portrait of urban India’s invisible workforce, was named Book of the Year 2024 by The Hindu and the Deccan Herald among others. It won the Ramnath Goenka Sahitya Samman and Kalinga Best Debut Award and a Special Jury Mention by the CG Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing.

Ms. Dixit's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by President's Leadership Fund. 

Rob is a researcher on AI consciousness and welfare, working at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and the ethics of AI. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from NYU and currently serves as Executive Director of Eleos AI, a research organization dedicated to understanding and addressing the potential wellbeing and moral patienthood of AI systems. Previously, he was a researcher at the Center for AI Safety and the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

Professor Long will deliver the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies' 2025-26 Golo Mann Lecture.

Jeff Kukucka is a professor of psychology at Towson University and a decision scientist whose work aims to optimize the human element of forensic and medicolegal decision-making. He previously held a leadership position on NIST's OSAC for Forensic Science—a federal organization that develops and promotes best practice standards for all areas of forensic science—and he recently oversaw the nation's first-ever independent audit of restraint-related deaths in police custody, the findings of which raised concerns over bias and error in autopsy decisions. He also frequently trains forensic examiners and attorneys on these issues, and he has testified as an expert witness in nine U.S. states.

Louis Tay is the William C. Byham Professor of Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Purdue University and Co-Founder of ExpiWell. A leading expert in psychological measurement, well-being, and artificial intelligence applications in psychology, Tay has pioneered frameworks for understanding how AI systems can be rigorously evaluated for bias using principles from psychometric theory.

Tay's scholarship has shaped multiple fields through his editorial leadership of major reference works. He has co-edited five handbooks: Big Data in Psychological Research (APA Books), Handbook of Well-Being (DEF Publishers), Handbook of Positive Psychology Assessment (Hogrefe), Oxford Handbook of the Positive Humanities (Oxford), and Technology and Measurement around the Globe (Cambridge). His research has appeared in journals including American Psychologist, Nature Human Behavior, Psychological Bulletin, and Journal of Applied Psychology.

Tay has contributed to United Nations research reports on well-being and consults for top tech companies and Fortune 500 organizations on topics including AI and measurement bias. He currently leads research funded by the John Templeton Foundation examining whether and how AI conversational agents can cultivate character virtues. As co-founder of the tech company ExpiWell, he developed a platform used by researchers worldwide for ecological momentary assessments.

Dr. Tay's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President’s Office and Open Academy.

Jonathan Mahler P’26 is a longtime staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and the author of the bestselling Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, which was adapted as an ESPN miniseries; The Challenge; and The Gods of New York, which was named a best book of the year by the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Economist, and Amazon. At the Times magazine, he covers a wide range of topics including politics, entertainment, education, media, the law, sports. His journalism has received numerous awards and been featured in The Best American Sports Writing.

(Photo credit: David Jacobs)

G. John Ikenberry is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University in the Department of Politics and the School of Public and International Affairs. Ikenberry is also a Global Eminence Scholar at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea. In 2018-2019, Ikenberry was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford University. In 2013-2014, Ikenberry was the 72nd Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College, Oxford, and a Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Ikenberry is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

Ikenberry is the author of eight books, most recently, A World Safe for Democracy:  Liberal Internationalism in the Making of Modern World Order (Yale, 2020), and Debating Worlds: Contested Narratives of Global Modernity and World Order (Oxford, 2023). He is also author of After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars (Princeton, 2001), and Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton, 2011).

Professor Ikenberry will deliver the 2025-26 Lecture in Diplomacy and International Security in Honor of George F. Kennan.

Over the span of approximately 100 days in the spring of 1994, members of the Tutsi ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were systematically killed by Hutu militias. While the Rwandan Constitution states that over 1 million people were killed, scholarly estimates suggest between 500,000 and 662,000 Tutsi died.  The genocide was marked by extreme violence, with victims often murdered by neighbors, and widespread sexual violence.  By the time the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front gained control of the country through a military offensive in early July, hundreds of thousands of Rwandans were dead and 2 million refugees (mainly Hutus) fled Rwanda, exacerbating what had already become a full-blown humanitarian crisis.

April 7^th is honored annually as the Day of Remembrance, or Genocide Against the Tutsi Memorial Day – this year marking the 32^nd annual commemoration which honors of all those whose lives were lost or forever changed by the genocide in Rwanda. In his remarks, Professor Peter Uvin will provide historical context and discuss lessons learned from this tragic era of Rwanda’s history and give insights into the country’s post-conflict recovery and healing.  Professor Uvin is a Belgian-born American political scientist and Professor of government and international relations at CMC where he has also held positions as the Vice President for academic affairs and the Dean of Faculty. He is the author of four books, including Aiding Violence: The Development Enterprise in Rwanda, which won the Herskovits Prize of the African Studies Association in 1999.

In addition to his focus on Rwanda, Professor Uvin’s other areas of expertise include Burundi, conflict resolution, international development, food policy, human rights, and NGO scaling up.  Uvin earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies at the University of Geneva, Switzerland.  He was the Henry Leir Professor in Humanitarian Studies at Tufts University (2000), and academic dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts (2007-2013) and a Guggenheim Fellow in 2006.  In 2013 he was hired by Amherst College as its first provost before joining the CMC faculty in 2015.

Professor Uvin’s talk is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

Ruth Marcus is a contributing writer at The New Yorker who focusses on law, the courts, and the rule of law under President Trump. She joined The New Yorker after a 40-year career at the Washington Post, where, most recently, she was an associate editor and an opinion columnist. During her time at the Post, from where she resigned in protest in spring 2025, she covered the White House, the Supreme Court, and the Justice Department; served as deputy national editor; and was a deputy editor overseeing the op-ed section. She was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. 

Marcus holds a B.A. from Yale College, where she wrote for the Yale Daily News, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

(Excerpted from the New Yorker Magazine)

Jane Naomi Iwamura is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of the West. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on Asian American religions, race, and popular culture in the United States, with a specialized emphasis on visual culture and Japanese American lived religions. She is the author of Virtual Orientalism: Religion and Popular Culture in the U.S. (Oxford, 2011) and co-editor of Revealing the Sacred in Asian and Pacific America (Routledge, 2003). Her scholarship has appeared in journals, including American Quarterly and Amerasia Journal.

Iwamura co-founded the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI), where she serves as a Co-PI and Project Director. She also sits on the National Editorial Board of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. 

Iwamura holds a Ph.D. in Rhetoric from UC Berkeley and an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, bringing a rich background in philosophy, cultural studies, and religious history to her work.

Dr. Iwamura's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Kutten Lectureship in Religious Studies at CMC.

David Armitage is a prize-winning writer and teacher who has a worldwide reputation for his historical work. He is currently the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. 

Armitage has written extensively about the histories of Britain, the British Empire, and the United States, with a particular focus on the international and global trajectory of political ideas. His nineteen books as author or editor include The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Foundations of Modern International Thought (2014), Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (2017) and, most relevant to the Athenaeum lecture, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007). He is currently working on a study of opera and international law.

Professor Armitage is the inaugural speaker for the Class of 1974 Speaker Series.

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Jess Adkins is the Smits Family Professor of Geochemistry and Global Environmental Science at Caltech. He is a chemical oceanographer focused on using trace metals as tracers of environmental processes. His research centers on the geochemical investigation of past climates, particularly across the last few glacial–interglacial cycles spanning several hundred thousand years. This interval is especially valuable because it combines relatively accurate and precise age models—though continually improving—with large climatic shifts that require mechanistic explanation. Prof. Adkins draws on high-resolution climate records, especially from polar ice cores, which reveal both the rapidity and magnitude of past climate change. For instance, oxygen isotope variations from the Greenland Summit over the past 110,000 years serve as a proxy for air temperature. Within this record, the last 10,000 years—the Holocene—stand out for their relative climatic stability compared to the preceding glacial period, which was marked by large and abrupt transitions between cold and warm conditions. As an oceanographer, Adkins aims to understand the coupled ocean–atmosphere system during these shifts, with a particular focus on deep ocean behavior. Much of his work has involved developing deep-sea corals as a novel climate archive, with the potential to significantly expand the types of information available about oceanographic climate change. Adkins currently leads several projects in his lab that are aimed at uncovering the mechanisms behind rapid climate change and long-term climate evolution.

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Silvia Del Castillo is a sustainability professional with over 10 years of experience and a Master's degree in Sustainability Management from the University of Toronto. She serves as Sustainability Manager at Nefab, a global industrial packaging and logistics services company supporting industries such as Telecom, Datacom, Semicon, Energy, Healthcare Equipment, Mining & Construction, and LiB & E-mobility. In her role, Del Castillo leads corporate sustainability initiatives across the Americas, overseeing carbon reduction, circularity, and sustainability reporting to drive environmental impact. She acts as the primary point of contact for customers on sustainability topics and conducts internal corporate training on Nefab’s Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tool and climate change. Aligned with Nefab’s purpose to save resources in supply chains, she supports customers in achieving their sustainability targets and is committed to developing and implementing strategies that create measurable impact.

Her talk is titled "Decarbonizing Supply Chains Through Packaging Innovation."

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Jeff Simonetti '05 is the CEO & Founder of the Aqua Exchange, a firm that specializes in water transaction consulting and execution. His firm assists clients in buying and selling water including master planned communities, large agricultural operators, and groundwater sustainability agencies. Simonetti has more than two decades of experience developing public policy and governments affairs strategies, particularly in the land-use, environmental, and water arenas. Prior to founding the Aqua Exchange, Simonetti was the Director of Government Affairs for the Building Industry Association Baldy View Chapter, a residential real estate trade association in Southern California, where he provided advocacy and consulting on a variety of issues including water, greenhouse gas emissions regulations, and state and local regulatory fees associated with homebuilding. He is currently a senior vice president at the Capitol Core Group, an advocacy firm that provides clients advocacy services at the federal, state and local levels. Capitol Core’s areas of expertise include water, infrastructure, renewable energy, and land use. Simonetti earned a bachelor’s degree in PPE from Claremont McKenna College and a master’s degree in finance and entrepreneurship from Boston University.

His talk is titled "From Lettuce to AI: How the Water Crisis is Affecting Everything in the Western US."
 

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Daniel G. Weiss is Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Angeleno Group LLC (“AG”), a Los Angeles-based venture capital and growth equity firm focused on global investments in next-generation clean energy and climate solutions companies. In addition to his firm management responsibilities, Weiss leads investments and serves on boards of multiple AG portfolio companies. Before the formation of AG in 2001, Weiss was an attorney at O’Melveny & Myers in Los Angeles, working in the firm’s mergers and acquisitions and international and high technology practice groups. He represented multiple Global 1000 clients, including utilities and energy-related companies, in a wide array of private equity and corporate finance transactions. Currently, he serves on boards for several non-profit and educational institutions, including the California Community Foundation, World Resources Institute (where he serves as Vice Chair), Smithsonian National Museum of American History, and UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability Advisory Board (where he serves as co-chair). Previously, Weiss served on the Federal Reserve Bank’s 12th District Economic Advisory Council, Stanford Law School Board of Visitors, and City of Los Angeles Redistricting Commission (appointed by the Honorable Eric Garcetti). Weiss was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2015 to serve as a member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council in Washington, DC. He is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy and the Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, he has taught, lectured, and published articles on topics of climate finance, sustainability, and the low carbon economy. Weiss holds a JD from Stanford Law School, an MA from Stanford University, and a BA with High Honors from UC Berkeley.

His talk is titled "Peril or Promise: Climate Finance and CleanTech Investment in a New Era of Change."

Please note a SPECIAL SCHEDULE for this program, which is co-organized by the Financial Economics Institute (FEI) and Roberts Environmental Center (REC):

10:30-10:40 AM | Opening Remarks
10:40-11:20 AM | Keynote: Daniel Weiss, "Peril or Promise: Climate Finance and CleanTech Investment in a New Era of Change," followed by Q & A 
11:20-11:30 AM | Short Break
11:30-12:00 PM | Presentation: Silvia del Castillo on "Decarbonizing Supply Chains"
12:00-12:30 PM | Presentation: Jeff Simonetti '05 on "Water Rights"
12:30-1:20 PM | Lunch
1:20-2:00 PM | Keynote: Jess Adkins on Climate Innovation, followed by Q & A