Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

But this isn't just a career story. Shaun believes the West is in the fight of its life — culturally, geopolitically, and technologically — and that the decisions being made right now in boardrooms, dorm rooms, and on college campuses will determine whether Western civilization thrives or retreats. This is a conversation about optimism with teeth: the idea that building the future requires not just great technology, but moral clarity, intellectual courage, and the willingness to say hard things out loud.

Jason Rosenthal is an Operating Partner at a16z crypto. Jason has spent more than 25 years as an internet entrepreneur and executive, including more than 10 years as a startup CEO, and his career has been dedicated to the development of transformational new platforms. Jason works closely with the CEOs and founders in our crypto portfolio to provide leadership guidance, help them plan for and react to the aspects of running companies in rapidly-changing markets, and generally help them become the best version of their professional selves.

Whether you're thinking about starting a company, joining one, you aspire to become a world class investor, or are simply trying to figure out what you stand for — this is the conversation you don't want to miss.

This event is sponsored by the Open Academy at CMC.

Zach Ingrasci '12 is a film director and the co-founder of the twice Emmy-Nominated film studio Optimist, a production company committed to making documentaries that nurture optimism and create impact. Best known for directing the feature documentaries Living On One Dollar, Salam Neighbor, This Is Not Financial Advice and Five Years North, Zach’s films have been released by Netflix, Amazon Prime, National Geographic, PBS and HBO. Every Optimist film is accompanied by an impact campaign to create measurable outcomes. His projects have raised over $119 million for the films’ causes and have changed over 606,869 lives.

Rachel Fenning, Professor of Psychological Science and Director of The Claremont Autism Center at CMC, is a licensed clinical psychologist with particular expertise in assessment and intervention for individuals with neurodevelopmental differences, including autism. Her research examines child and family contributions to social emotional development, biobehavioral regulation, and clinical outcomes in children with autism and related intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD). She also develops and tests interventions designed to promote physical health, adaptive behavior, and well-being in underserved autistic children and their families. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Health Resources and Services Administration. She is a former President of Division 33 (IDD/ASD) of the American Psychological Association, and she serves on the Editorial Board of Psychological Assessment and Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology.

Chloe Martinez, Associate Director for Programming at the Center for Writing & Public Discourse and Lecturer in Religious Studies at CMC, is the coeditor, with Lisa Van Orman Hadley, of Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD (University of Chicago Press, 2026); translator of Blue Like My Beloved: Poems of Mirabai (New Directions, October 2026); and author of the poetry collection Ten Thousand Selves and the chapbook Corner Shrine. Her research on religion has appeared in journals including The Medieval History Journal and South Asia​, and has been funded by organizations including the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, AIIS, and SSRC-Mellon Mays. A 2026 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow in Translation, she is assistant editor at Beloit Poetry Journal and poetry editor at the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion.

J.D. Rackey is the associate director of the Structural Democracy project at the Bipartisan Policy Center where he leads their work on governing institutions and electoral systems reform. His research focuses on the politics and procedures of the U.S. Congress with an emphasis on congressional capacity and modernization. Rackey’s work has appeared in scholarly journals such as Political Science Today and Social Science Quarterly and has been published or cited in popular press outlets such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and CQ Roll Call. He also currently serves as president of the National Capital Area Political Science Association.

Rackey previously served as professional staff with the U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. He has also been an adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University. He earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Oklahoma and is a former American Political Science Association Public Service Fellow.

Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind is an international figure in architecture and urban design. Informed by a deep commitment to music, philosophy, and literature, Libeskind aims to create architecture that is resonant, original, and sustainable.

Libeskind established his architectural studio, Studio Libeskind, in Berlin, Germany, in 1989 after winning the competition to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin. In February 2003, Studio Libeskind moved its headquarters from Berlin to New York City to oversee the master plan for the World Trade Center redevelopment, which is being realized in Lower Manhattan.

Libeskind’s practice is involved in designing and realizing a diverse array of urban, cultural, and commercial projects around the globe. The Studio has completed buildings that range from museums and concert halls to convention centers, university buildings, hotels, shopping centers, and residential towers. As Principal Design Architect for Studio Libeskind, Libeskind speaks widely on the art of architecture in universities and professional summits. His architecture and ideas have been the subject of many articles and exhibitions, influencing the field of architecture and the development of cities and culture.

Libeskind has won dozens of awards for his work including the Goethe Medal, the Hiroshima Peace Prize, the Dresden Peace Prize, and the European Union Prize for Civil Rights.

Mr. Libeskind's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President's Office and the President's Leadership Fund.

Photo credit: Stefan Ruiz

(Special Note: This event had originally been scheduled for Wednesday, November 5, 2025. We are honoring the head table sign-ups from that original date. Students who had secured a head table spot (or were waitlisted for the head table) will have the right of first refusal for the head table. If you had a confirmed spot at the head table, we are aware of who you are and we will contact you directly in early April.)

For more information on this film, please visit: https://www.specialrussiantruth.com/

Glenn C. Loury, Merton P. Stoltz Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences, Professor Emeritus of Economics, and Professor Emeritus of International and Public Affairs, joined Brown University in 2005. He is an academic economist who has made scholarly contributions to the fields of welfare economics, income distribution, game theory, industrial organization, and natural resource economics. He is also a prominent social critic and public intellectual, having published over 200 articles in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad on the issues of racial inequality and social policy.

Loury is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a past Vice President of the American Economics Association. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and was for many years a contributing editor at The New Republic magazine.

Among the issues Loury studies are racial affirmative action; dysfunctional social identity; status transmission across generations; and cognitive theories of racial stigma. He also writes popular essays on social and political themes as a public intellectual.

Michael J. Fortner, Pamela B. Gann Associate Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College, will moderate the conversation.

(Special Note: This event had originally been scheduled for Tuesday, February 24, 2026. We are honoring the head table sign-ups from that original date. Students who had secured a head table spot (or were waitlisted for the head table) will have the right of first refusal for the head table. If you had a confirmed spot at the head table, we are aware of who you are and we will contact you directly in early April.)

Vinod (Vinnie) Aggarwal P'12 is Distinguished Professor and holds the Alann P. Bedford Endowed Chair in in the Travers Department of Political Science; Affiliated Professor at the Haas School of Business; Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC); and Fellow in the Public Law and Policy Center at Berkeley Law School, all at the University of California at Berkeley. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Business and Politics. He is the former Chair of the U.S. Consortium of APEC Study Centers. From 1991-1994, he was Chair of the Political Economy of Industrial Societies Program at UC Berkeley.

He has held fellowships from the Brookings Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, Council on Foreign Relations, East-West Center, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and was a Japan Foundation Abe Fellow. He has been a Visiting Professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, the University of Geneva’s IOMBA program, INSEAD, Yonsei University, NTU Singapore, Bocconi University, Chung-Ang University, and the University of Hawaii. He is also an elected lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Aggarwal consults regularly with multinational corporations on strategy, trade policy, and international negotiations, and he has been a consultant to the Mexican government, Malaysian government, the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Defense Department, U.S. State Department, World Trade Organization, OECD, the Group of Thirty, FAO, IFAD, the International Labor Organization, ASEAN, and the World Bank. In 1990, he was Special Adviser on Trade Negotiations to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and has worked with the APEC Eminent Persons Group. In 1997, he won the Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at the Haas School of Business for PhD teaching; in 2003 he was first runner up for the Cheit Award for MBA teaching and won first place for the MBA program in 2005.

His authored books include Liberal Protectionism, International Debt Threat, Debt Games, Le Renseignement Stratégique d'Entreprise, Une Nouvelle Approche des Phénomènes Sociaux, and he has edited or co-edited Institutional Designs for a Complex World, Asia-Pacific Crossroads, Winning in Asia: European Style, Winning in Asia: Japanese Style, Winning in Asia: U.S. Style, Sovereign Debt Management, European Union Trade Strategies, The Strategic Dynamics of Latin American Trade, Bilateral Trade Agreements in the Asia Pacific, Asia’s New Institutional Architecture, Northeast Asia: Ripe for Integration?, Trade Policy in the Asia-Pacific, Responding to a Resurgent Russia, Linking Trade and Security, Responding to China's Rise, and Great Power Competition and Middle Power Strategies. His most recent books are the Oxford Handbook of Geoeconomics and Economic Statecraft, eds., Oxford 2025 (with Tai Ming Cheung); and Governing Growth: Industrial Policy from Hamilton to Trump, Oxford, in press (with Marco Di Tommaso). He has also published eight special journal issues and 140 articles and book chapters. His current research examines industrial policy and the political economy of high technology new economic statecraft. 

Aggarwal received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University. Born in Seattle, Washington, he speaks five languages.

Professor Aggarwal’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Sona Tatoyan is a Syrian-Armenian-American actor, writer, producer, fifth-generation storyteller, and the founder of Hakawati, a cultural organization exploring how narrative can transform trauma, perception, and civic imagination. Born to Syrian-Armenian immigrants and raised between the U.S. and Aleppo, her life changed in 2019 when she discovered a trunk of 180 hand-painted Karagöz shadow puppets created and carried through genocide by her great-great-grandfather, a hakawati (oral storyteller). The puppets—survivor objects and cross-cultural witnesses—collapsed lineage, history, and purpose, revealing a central insight that guides her work: that how we meet a story determines whether it calcifies into trauma or becomes a source of understanding and repair.

Tatoyan’s career spans theater, film, immersive media, and thought leadership. She has originated roles at Yale Repertory Theatre, The Goodman Theatre, and A.C.T., and her screenwriting work has been supported by the Sundance Institute and the Dubai Film Connection. Her signature theatrical work, AZAD (the rabbit & the wolf) premiered in 2025 to extraordinary acclaim and hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as “wondrous” and “shattering.”

A 2024–26 Georgetown Global Politics and Performance Lab Fellow, Tatoyan draws on a decade-long Vipassana meditation practice and a reframing of The 1001 Nights as a universal healing blueprint. Her work has been presented at Harvard, MIT, UCLA, the Brandenburg Gate Foundation, and beyond. Operating between Aleppo, Yerevan, and Los Angeles, she leads Hakawati as a lineage-rooted, globally resonant inquiry into how narrative can counter polarization and restore our capacity to see one another clearly.

Ms. Tatoyan’s Athenaeum program is the 2025-26 Mgrublian Annual Lecture on Armenian Studies and is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College. 

A historian of modern Jewish history, the Holocaust, and genocide, Barry Trachtenberg is the author of The Holocaust & the Exile of Yiddish (Rutgers, 2022), The United States and the Nazi Holocaust: Race, Refuge, and Remembrance (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Revolutionary Roots of Modern Yiddish, 1903-1917 (Syracuse, 2008). He has published on issues related to American support for Israel, Zionism, anti-Zionism, and antisemitism in venues such as Jewish Currents, the Guardian, Jacobin, and the Forward. He is a member of the Academic Advisory Boards of Jewish Voice for Peace and the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and is Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Security, Race and Rights at Rutgers Law School.

He holds the Michael H. and Deborah Rubin Presidential Chair in Jewish History at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC.

Professor Trachtenberg’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at CMC.

David Dreier ’75 was first elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1980, where he served until January 2013. During his tenure, he became the youngest—and the first Californian—chairman of the House Rules Committee, playing a central role in shaping the legislative process. A longtime advocate for press freedom, Dreier founded the Fallen Journalists Memorial Foundation to establish a national memorial honoring journalists who have lost their lives in pursuit of the truth. He earned his B.A. from Claremont McKenna College and an M.A. in American government from Claremont Graduate University, and he currently serves as a trustee of the College.

Scott Woolley ’92 is the founding editor of L.A. Reported, a nonprofit local newsmagazine based in Los Angeles. He has had a distinguished career in journalism, including serving as West Coast Bureau Chief for Forbes and contributing editor for Fortune.com. He is also the author of The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves & the Birth of the Communications Age. Woolley holds a B.A. in Economics from Claremont McKenna College and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University.

Terril Jones P'26 is a visiting lecturer in the Government Department at Claremont McKenna College, specializing in international journalism. He brings more than four decades of experience as a business and foreign correspondent and editor for Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, Forbes, and The Associated Press. Over the course of his career, he was based in Beijing, Paris, Tokyo, and across the U.S., covering politics, international relations, business, sports, technology and other topics. He has also worked as a technology correspondent in Silicon Valley and an automotive correspondent in Detroit. He is fluent in Japanese, Mandarin, and French, and holds a B.A. from Pomona College.

This event is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable at Claremont McKenna College.

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor, and in 2025 he was named the 25th Poet Laureate of the United States. 

He is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Into the Hush (2025) and The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems (2025); The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (2021); Sight Lines (2019), for which he won the National Book Award; Compass Rose (2014); The Ginkgo Light (2009); Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998 (1998); and Archipelago (1995). He also authored Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, 2026), The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry (2024), and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010). 

His poetry has been translated into fifteen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Sze received the 2025 Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in American poetry, the 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, 2024 National Book Foundation Science + Literature award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among others. A chancellor emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he was the 2023–2024 Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University. 

Professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), Sze was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, where he lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.

Mr. Sze's Athenaeum reading is co-sponsored by the department of literature, the Salvatori Center, and the President's Leadership Funds.  

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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 

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.