Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

This evening’s recital will also feature the 5Cs’ own a cappella group Midnight Echo, as well as a special performance by Mariachi Serrano of The Claremont Colleges.

Midnight Echo is an all-gender a cappella group at the Claremont Colleges that's been performing since the '90s. Co-led by Jordan Yates ‘27 and Carolina de Salvo SC ‘27, you'll find them performing around campus at Snack Concerts, SCAMFest, and hosting the yearly a cappella musicfest, Human Symphony! Their typical genres span a broad range, and their repertoire includes Sam Smith, Daniel Caesar, Jon Bellion, Shawn Mendes, Queen, Fleet Foxes, and much more. For videos from performances and more information, visit Midnight Echo on YouTube or @midnightechoacappella on Instagram and TikTok!

Mariachi Serrano of The Claremont Colleges is a vibrant student ensemble spearheaded by Robert Gama ‘28 and Lina Lasden PZ ‘29. Dedicated to sharing the rich tradition of Mexican folk music, the group performs classics across campus and throughout the wider Claremont community. Gama and Lasden are excited to join Music Mania for this evening’s performance.
 

Bernard Haykel is a scholar of the Arabian Peninsula, focusing on the politics, economics and history of the Gulf Cooperation Council states (GCC) and Yemen. He is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University where he teaches courses on energy, history and politics. He is the author of Revival and Reform in Islam and editor of Saudi Arabia in Transition, both published by Cambridge University Press. His next book titled The Realm: MBS and the Transformation of Saudi Arabia will be published shortly by Penguin Press. Haykel has received several prominent awards, such as the Prize Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, the Carnegie Corporation and Guggenheim fellowships and the Old Dominion Professorship at Princeton. In 2024 he was elected member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters. Haykel appears frequently in print and broadcast media. These include interviews and articles in the Wall Street Journal, PBS, NPR, the New York Times, The New Yorker, Project Syndicate, Al Arabia, Al Jazeera, The Caravan, the Indian Express and the BBC among others. He earned his doctorate in Oriental Studies from the University of Oxford.

Antar A. Tichavakunda, Ph.D. is a theorist, social scientist, and storyteller. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of California Santa Barbara. 

Tichavakunda has published over thirty peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters. His first book, Black Campus Life: The Lives Black Students Make at an Historically White Institution, is published with SUNY Press and is one of the few ethnographies about Black student life. His second book, Thinking with Critical Race Theory: An Invitation, will be available with the University of California Press in April 2027. An expert on race and higher education, his research has been featured in CNN, the Los Angels Times, Newsweek, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Outside of work, Tichavakunda enjoys watching anime, eating soul food, going to boxing classes, and writing in cafes.

Professor Tichavakunda's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

Jennifer Hunt is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at Rutgers University. From 2013-2015, she served first as Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Microeconomic Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Prior to joining Rutgers in 2011, she held positions at McGill University, the University of Montreal and Yale University. Hunt is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London. Her current research focus is the impact of the fluctuating levels of US immigration, while past research has also encompassed wage inequality, unemployment, the science and engineering workforce, technological diffusion, the transition from communism, crime and corruption. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard and her Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Professor Hunt's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

He is co-editor of The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit (Orison Books 2020) and Afterlives: An AGNI Portfolio of Asian Adoptee Diaspora Writing. His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets; Poetry Goes to the Movies; Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Herrick serves on the advisory board of Terra in.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He co-founded LitHop in Fresno. He has taught in Qingdao, China; at Kundiman in New York City, and for twelve years in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe.

Herrick was born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant. He currently lives with his family in Fresno, California and served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017. He teaches at Fresno City College. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role. In April 2025, he became the first California Poet Laureate to be officially reappointed to a second two-year term.

Lee Herrick's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.

Dr. Miemie Winn Byrd is a professor at the Daniel K. Inouye Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, where she has served since 2007. Her work focuses on security dynamics in Southeast Asia, economics and security, civil-military and interagency cooperation, leadership, women, peace and security, and organizational development.

Dr. Byrd retired from the U.S. Army after 28 years of distinguished service, including assignments at U.S. Pacific Command supporting Operations Enduring Freedom and serving as a linguist and cultural advisor for U.S. delegations throughout the Indo-Pacific. She also brings 16 years of private-sector experience and holds degrees from Claremont McKenna College, the University of Hawaiʻi, and the University of Southern California, where she earned her Doctorate in Education Leadership.

Read more about Javier’s work at the following: https://www.prhspeakers.com/speaker/javier-zamora. 

Javier Zamora's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Center for Writing and Public Discourse at CMC.

During her 32-year diplomatic career, Ambassador (ret.) Kate Marie Byrnes served in senior leadership positions across Europe, including as U.S. Ambassador to North Macedonia (2019-2022). Her diplomatic assignments included U.S. European Command, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Greece, Spain, Afghanistan, Hungary, Bolivia, Türkiye, and the U.S. Department of State. Fellowships with the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the International Women's Forum Leadership Foundation reinforced her commitment to cultivating effective leadership and public service.

Ambassador Byrnes holds a Bachelor of Science in International Relations and a Master's Degree in Policy Management from Georgetown University. As Founder and Principal of KMB Strategies and as Distinguished Fellow at the University of Tennessee Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs, she continues to advance international cooperation, develop future leaders, and help organizations translate global challenges into opportunities for meaningful action.

She is a nationally respected physician leader and public health innovator who transformed the College of Medicine at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science (CDU). Since 2016, she has served as Dean of the College of Medicine, leading the creation of CDU’s independent medical school and securing LCME accreditation for the university to award the MD degree for the first time. The new school—only the fourth at a historically Black university—welcomed its inaugural class of 60 diverse students in 2023.

As founding dean, she expanded the College of Medicine faculty from 100 to more than 600 and reestablished residency programs in South Los Angeles, including Family Medicine, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Internal Medicine, and Psychiatry. She also helped attract unprecedented philanthropic support from MacKenzie Scott, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and Sutter Health.

A former Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Health and longtime Harvard faculty member, Dr. Prothrow Stith is widely known for pioneering the framing of youth violence as a public health issue. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a graduate of Spelman College and Harvard Medical School.
 

Manjari has held fellowships at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology at Halle, Germany, and the Social Science Research Council in the United States. Her papers have received prizes from the Society for Social Studies for Science and the American Anthropological Association. She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University, her MSc in Science and Technology Policy from SPRU Sussex University, and her BA from Harvard University.

Zachary Horvitz is a PhD candidate in computer science at Columbia University, where he studies rare behaviors in AI systems and methods for controlling them at inference time. His research has appeared at leading machine learning and natural language processing conferences, and his work on humor and language models received an ACL Outstanding Paper Award. He is supported by a Google PhD Fellowship. Previously, he was a research lead at Rad AI, whose products are now used by more than 40% of U.S. health systems. He earned his A.B. and Sc.M. from Brown University, where he studied computer science and anthropology.

Jeffrey Rosen is the CEO Emeritus of the National Constitution Center, a professor of law at the George Washington University Law School, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and a contributing editor of The Atlantic. He was previously the legal affairs editor of The New Republic and a staff writer for the New Yorker. 

Rosen is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Pursuit of Happiness and Conversations with RBG. His new book is The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America. 

Rosen is a graduate of Harvard College; Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar; and Yale Law School. He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Law Institute. In 2024, the French government recognized him as a Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Jeffrey Rosen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Open Academy and The Kravis Lab for Civic Leadership, both at CMC.

Shawn Skelly, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, was nominated by President Biden and confirmed by the Senate as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness in July 2021, making her only the second out transgender person to be confirmed and the highest ranking in the history of the executive branch. 

She served in the Obama Administration as a Special Assistant in DoD and as the Executive Secretary of the Department of Transportation. In 2017 President Obama appointed Skelly to serve as a Commissioner on the National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service, which considered methods to increase national participation in in all forms of service to address national security and other public service needs of the Nation.

Skelly served in the U.S. Navy for twenty years on active duty as a Naval Flight Officer. She helped co-found the advocacy organization Out in National Security and currently serves as a member of the board of directors of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest civil rights organization working to achieve LGBTQ+ equality.

Shawn Skelly's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by The Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC. 

Amy Berg ’08 is associate professor of philosophy at Rice University. She works on ethics and political philosophy, including the philosophy of well-being. Her book The Well-Rounded Life is forthcoming in November with Princeton University Press.

Before going to Rice, she taught at Oberlin College, Rhode Island College, and UNC Chapel Hill. She received a PhD in philosophy from UC San Diego and a BA in philosophy and government from Claremont McKenna College.

Steven Zhou (Moderator) is an Assistant Professor of Psychological Science at Claremont McKenna College. His research is in the application of multivariate statistics and data science (including natural language processing and generative AI) to questions of leadership, career development, and personality at work. 

Tom Le (PRO side) is an Associate Professor of Politics at Pomona College. His research focuses on demographics and security, how violence is legitimized in international relations, and developing a cradle-to-grave theory of how states utilize their populations for national security. 

C. Monica Capra (PRO side) is a Professor of Economic Sciences at Claremont Graduate University. Her research investigates the complexities of human decision-making, involves interdisciplinary collaboration with data scientists and neuroscientists, and explores how advanced AI technologies can enhance behavioral and experimental research methodologies.

Sarah Marzen (PRO side) is an Associate Professor of Physics at the Department of Natural Sciences. Her research uses machine learning to better understand biological data, interprets biological organisms as machine learners, and uses science to produce societally positive results in scattered ways.

Joseph Osborn (CON side) is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Pomona College. He is an AI researcher exploring representations of interactivity for computational systems, drawing from his fine arts game design background and computer science training.

Avaneesh Narla (CON side) is an Assistant Professor of Integrated Sciences at Claremont McKenna College. His interdisciplinary research in physics, biology, and mathematics focuses on how individual elements interact to create complex collective behaviors.

Yuval Avnur (CON side) is a Professor of Philosophy at Scripps College. His research focuses on doubt, skepticism, and its history as it applies to everything from whether this is reality to how we get our news online these days.