Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Reyna Grande is the bestselling author of the memoirs The Distance Between Us and A Dream Called Home. Her other works include the novels Across a Hundred Mountains and Dancing with Butterflies. She is the recipient of the Luis Leal Award for Distinction in Chicano/Latino Literature, an American Book Award, and the El Premio Aztlan Literary Award, among others. She was also a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She holds a B.A. and M.F.A. in creative writing and teaches at writing conferences such as the Macondo Writer's Conference, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and VONA. Born in Mexico, Reyna walked across the US-Mexico border at nine years old to be reunited with her father. She writes about immigration, trauma, family separation, and displacement.

Ms. Grande’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Claremont Colleges’ Chicano Latino Student Affairs and CMC’s Center for Writing and Public Discourse.

View Video: YouTube with Reyna Grande

Gerald F. Kominski, Ph.D., is a professor of health policy and management, and senior fellow and former director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research in the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. He is also professor of public policy in the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs.

Kominski’s current research focuses primarily on evaluating the effects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Throughout his career, he has focused more generally on evaluating the cost and policy impacts of health care reforms, with a special emphasis on public insurance programs, including Medicare, Medicaid, and Workers’ Compensation.

Kominski joined the UCLA faculty in 1989, after spending over three years at the Congressional agency responsible for monitoring Medicare hospital payment policies, now known as the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission (MedPAC).

He received his Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in 1985, and his A.B. in chemistry from the University of Chicago in 1978. He is editor and co-author of the best-selling textbook, Changing the U.S. Health Care System: Key Issues in Health Services Policy and Management, which was published in its 4th edition in 2014.


View Video: YouTube with Gerald Kominski

Jasmine Shirey ’18, who studied literature and neuroscience at CMC, began her work with the Forum for African Women Educationalists - Zimbabwe Chapter (FAWEZI) as an intern in the summer of 2016. Upon graduation in 2018, she was awarded the Napier Fellowship award, the Davis Project for Peace award, and the Mgrublian Center’s Elbaz Family Post-Graduate Fellowship in Human Rights to continue her work with FAWEZI. In her talk, Shirey will explore the various ways narratives in the United States about working in Africa advance conceptions of western excellence and post-colonial generosity, and how her own experiences complicate these narratives. 

Shirey is the first recipient of the Elbaz Post-Graduate Fellowship in Human Rights, a program open to all CMC graduating seniors.

Ms. Shirey’s Athenaeum presentation is sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.

Terisa Siagatonu is an award-winning poet, teaching artist, mental health educator, and community leader born and rooted in the Bay Area. She has performed and spoken at the Obama White House and at the UN Conference on Climate Change in Paris, France. She was awarded Champion of Change Award in 2012 by President Obama for her activism as a spoken word poet/organizer in her Pacific Islander community.

With numerous viral poetry videos garnering over millions of views collectively, Siagatonu's writing blends the personal, cultural, and political in a way that calls for healing, courage, justice, and truth. A Kundiman Fellow, her work has been published in Poetry Magazine and has been featured on Button Poetry, CNN, NBCNews, NPR, Huffington Post, Everyday Feminism, The Guardian, BuzzFeed and Upworthy. 

Since getting involved in poetry slam in 2010, she has been a member of several award-winning slam teams, including the 2017 inaugural Root Slam Team, helping her team to place 5th in the nation at the National Poetry Slam competition in Denver, CO. When she's not competing, she is coaching college poetry slam teams and mentoring young writers in writing workshops throughout the country. She is one of the co-founders and organizers of The Root Slam, a free bi-weekly poetry venue based in Oakland, CA, voted the 2017 and 2018's Best Open Mic venue in the Bay Area. 

Siagatonu holds a B.A. degree in community studies and a minor in education from the University of California-Santa Cruz and a M.A. in marriage/family therapy from the University of Southern California. She strives to use her background as a mental health clinician and poet to bridge the gaps in the quest for collective healing and liberation. 

Ms. Siagatonu’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Berger Institute at CMC.

Susan A. Thornton is a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Senior Fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center. In 2018, she retired from the State Department after a 28-year diplomatic career focused primarily on East and Central Asia. In leadership roles in Washington, Thornton worked on China and Korea policy, including stabilizing relations with Taiwan, the U.S.-China Cyber Agreement, the Paris Climate Accord and led a successful negotiation in Pyongyang for monitoring of the Agreed Framework on denuclearization.

In her 18 years of overseas postings in Central Asia, Russia, the Caucasus and China, Thornton’s leadership furthered U.S. interests and influence and maintained programs and mission morale in a host of difficult operating environments. Prior to joining the Foreign Service, she was among the first State Department Fascell Fellows and served from 1989–90 at the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad. She was also a researcher at the Foreign Policy Institute from 1987–91. Thornton holds degrees from the National Defense University’s Eisenhower School, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and Bowdoin College. She speaks Russian, Mandarin Chinese and French, is a member of numerous professional associations and is on the board of trustees for the Eurasia Foundation.

Professor Thornton will deliver the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies' 2019 Arthur Adams Distinguished Lecture. 

Michele Moody-Adams is Joseph Straus Professor of Political Philosophy and Legal Theory at Columbia University, where she has also served as dean of Columbia College and vice president for undergraduate education. She holds degrees from Wellesley College, the University of Oxford (where she was a Marshall Scholar), and Harvard University, where she earned her Ph.D. under the direction of John Rawls. She has been a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and she is a lifetime Honorary Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford. She is the author of Fieldwork in Familiar Places: Morality, Culture and Philosophy and is currently at work on a book entitled Renewing Democracy. She has also published numerous articles on moral psychology, justice, gender and race, academic freedom, and democratic disagreement.

Professor Moody-Adams' Athenaeum presentation is one of two keynote addresses for the Imagination and Social Change Conference organized and sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies.

David Andrews is a professor in politics and international relations at Scripps College, where he holds the Jungels-Winkler Chair of Contemporary European Studies. His areas of expertise include Atlantic political, security, and economic relations; the European Union and European integration; international relations, diplomacy and statecraft. 

Andrews received his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has held appointments at Georgetown University, the London School of Economics, the University of Southern California, the Naval Postgraduate School, and the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. His books include The Future of Transatlantic Economic Relations: Continuity Amid Discord  (Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, 2005), The Atlantic Alliance Under Stress: U.S.-European Relations After Iraq (Cambridge University Press, 2005), and Orderly Change: International Monetary Relations Since Bretton Woods (Cornell University Press, 2008). In 1998 he became the founding director of the European Union Center of California.  In 2009 the European Commission appointed him as a Jean Monnet Professor of European Union Studies.  

Professor Andrews' Athenaeum talk is sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, is the author of seven books and many articles on public policy, culture, and government. He is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and recipient of the 2005 National Magazine Award, the magazine industry’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. His latest book is The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50.

In 2013, he published Denial: My 25 Years Without a Soul, a memoir of his struggle with his sexuality, brought out as an ebook from The Atlantic Books. His previous book was Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America, published in 2004 by Times Books (Henry Holt). His most recent ebook is Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy (Brookings, 2015). Although much of his writing has been on public policy, he has also written on topics as widely varied as adultery, agriculture, economics, gay marriage, height discrimination, biological rhythms, number inflation, and animal rights.

A graduate of Yale University, Rauch become a reporter for the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina before moving to Washington in 1984. From 1984-89 he covered fiscal and economic policy for National Journal. In 1990 he spent six months in Japan as a fellow of the Japan Society Leadership Program.

In addition to the National Magazine Award, his honors include the 2010 National Headliner Award, one of the industry’s most venerable prizes. In 1996 he was awarded the Premio Napoli alla Stampa Estera for his coverage, in The Economist, of the European Parliament. In 2011 he won the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association prize for excellence in opinion writing. He has also won two second-place prizes (2000 and 2001) in the National Headliner Awards. His articles appear in The Best Magazine Writing 2005 and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and 2007. He has appeared as a guest on many television and radio programs. 

Mr. Rauch’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Salvatori Center at CMC.
 

View Video: YouTube with Jonathan Rauch

Anna Lau is a child clinical psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research spans the areas of disparities in children’s mental health services, cultural variation in risk and protective factors for child psychopathology, and community implementation of evidence-based practices. Lau’s work on risk and protective factors for youth in immigrant families has guided her treatment research with Asian American and Latinx children. Another major research effort involves understanding factors that promote the use of evidence-based practices by therapists in community mental health clinics in Los Angeles County.

View Video: YouTube with Anna Lau

Food for Thought: Podcast with Anna Lau

Samantha Power, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations for President Obama, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, war correspondent, and the Anna Lindh Professor of Practice at Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Law School, spent half of her career explaining complex geopolitical events and eight years at the UN helping to shape them.

As the 28th U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., Power became the public face of U.S. opposition to Russian aggression in Ukraine and Syria, negotiated the toughest sanctions in a generation against North Korea, lobbied to secure the release of political prisoners, and helped mobilize global action against ISIL. From 2009 to 2013, she served on the National Security Council as special assistant to the President and senior director for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights.

Called “a powerful crusader for U.S foreign policy as well as human rights and democracy” by Forbes, Power was named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top 100 Global Thinkers.” The American Academy in Berlin awarded her the 2016 Henry A. Kissinger Prize. “She has an excellent and analytical mind,” said Kissinger, “I admire the way she has faced our challenges.”

Her book, A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2003. 

Before joining the U.S. government, Power was the founding executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a columnist for Time, and a National Magazine Award-winning contributor to the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.

At the age of nine, she immigrated to the United States from Ireland. Power earned a B.A. from Yale University and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. Beginning her career as a journalist, Power reported from places such as Bosnia, East Timor, Kosovo, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe.

Ambassador Power’s Athenaeum presentation is jointly sponsored by the Athenaeum, the Lecture in Diplomacy and International Security in Honor of George F. Kennan, Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and the President’s Leadership Fund, all at CMC.


Food for Thought: Podcast with Samantha Power

Paul Beninger ’73 P’09 is an associate professor of Public Health & Community Medicine at Tufts University where he also directs the MD/MBA and MBS/MBA programs. He has more than three decades of experience as a regulator and member of the Senior Executive Service in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), as a manager and executive in the pharmaceutical industry, including pharmacovigilance, and as a member of the academic community. 

Beninger began his career in drug development in 1987 at the FDA, first as a reviewer and manager for drugs to combat HIV/AIDS and opportunistic infection and then as a division director for medical devices. He joined Merck & Company in 1995 and developed experience in regulatory affairs, medical affairs and drug safety in the areas of anti-infective drug and biological products, vaccines, anti-diabetic drug products and oncology drug products, before joining Genzyme as vice-president of pharmacovigilance in 2006 where he worked until 2017.

Beninger has published and spoken extensively on regulatory science, drug and vaccine safety, and pharmacovigilance. He is a topics editor (pharmacovigilance and pharmacoepidemiology) for Clinical Therapeutics, and a fellow of the American College of Physicians and the Infectious Disease Society of America.

A 1973 graduate of Claremont McKenna College where he studied mathematics, biology, and psychology, Beninger received his M.D. from the University of California, Davis and subsequently trained in internal medicine and infectious diseases. He also holds an MBA from St Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and a graduate certificate in epidemiology from Tufts.

View Video: YouTube with Paul Beninger '73 P'09

Nolan Williams, M.D., is an assistant professor within the departments of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and the director of the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab at Stanford University.

Williams has a broad background in neuropsychiatry, completing residencies in both neurology and psychiatry. In addition, he has specific training and clinical expertise in the development of brain stimulation methodologies. Themes of his work include (a) examining the use of spaced learning theory in the application of neurostimulation techniques, (b) development and mechanistic understanding of rapid-acting antidepressants, and (c) identifying objective biomarkers that predict neuromodulation responses in treatment-resistant neuropsychiatric conditions.

He has published papers in many journals including Brain, American Journal of Psychiatry, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. He has also contributed to two reviews related to novel therapeutics for neuropsychiatric conditions that have been published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation and Current Opinion in Neurobiology.

Results from his studies have gained widespread attention in journals such as Science and New England Journal of Medicine Journal Watch as well as in the popular press and have been featured in various news sources including Time, Smithsonian, and Newsweek.

Williams received an NIH R-series grant within two years of completing his residencies as well as two NARSAD Young Investigator Awards in 2016 and 2018 along with the 2019 Gerald R. Klerman Award. He started the Stanford Brain Stimulation Lab in 2015. He has received several merit-based travel awards to attend and present at the annual meetings for American College of Neuropharmacology, Society of Biological Psychiatry, the American Academy of Neurology and the American Neuropsychiatric Association.
 

View Video: YouTube with Nolan Williams

Tara Westover spent her childhood and teen years preparing for the end of the world by stockpiling home-canned peaches, stewing herbs during the summer for her mother—a midwife and healer— and in the winter, salvaging in her father’s junkyard.

Self-motivated and driven, she then taught herself enough mathematics, grammar, and science to take the ACT and was admitted to Brigham Young University. Without a primary education—without even a birth certificate or exact birth date—she was seventeen the first time she set foot in a classroom. After that first encounter with education—which was both uplifting and devastating—she pursued learning for a decade, graduating magna cum laude from Brigham Young University in 2008 and subsequently winning a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. She earned an M.Phil. from Trinity College, Cambridge in 2009, and in 2010 was a visiting fellow at Harvard University. She returned to Cambridge, where she was awarded a Ph.D. in history in 2014.

Educated was long listed for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and had spent 32 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. Former President Barack Obama named Educated as one of the books on his summer reading list of 2018.

Ms. Westover’s Athenaeum presentation is jointly sponsored by the Athenaeum, the Center for Writing and Public Discourse, the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, and the President's Leadership Fund, all at CMC.

Photo credit: Lorentz Gullachsen

Symone D. Sanders is a strategist, communications consultant, CNN political commentator, and served as a spring 2018 Resident Fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School. Sanders rose to prominence during her tenure as the national press secretary for U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Only 25 at the time, Sanders demonstrated a command of the issues earning her a place in history as the youngest presidential press secretary on record and a spot on Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of 16 young Americans shaping the 2016 election.

However, Sanders was not new to presidential politics. When she was 16, she introduced former President Bill Clinton at a luncheon in Omaha, Nebraska. Following her remarks, President Clinton said, “Symone spoke so well I really hate to follow her.” President Clinton went on to write about Sanders in his book, “Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World.”

Sanders has been featured on NPR, Fox News, MSNBC, NBC, BET, TV One and CNN. She has been profiled in the Washington Post, the New Yorker, ESSENCE Magazine, and ELLE.

Sanders is currently principal of the 360 Group, LLC. where she provides strategic communications guidance to organizations, businesses, individuals, campaigns and candidates and helps clients find sound solutions to difficult political and social problems. Sanders has also been selected to serve as one of USC Dornsife's 2019 Fellows.

Food for Thought: Podcast with Symone Sanders

Sheena Hui '19 is a CMC senior studying music (piano performance) and physics. At the Claremont Colleges, she has studied piano under Professors Gayle Blankenburg, Hao Huang, and Tatiana Thibodeaux. During her time at CMC, she has been actively involved in music through her solo piano performances, engagement in chamber music activities, composition studies, and more. Sheena hopes to pursue piano performance and music academia in the future. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, ping pong and studying philosophy.