Ted Mitchell is an experienced educator, innovator and policy maker. His long career in education has included roles in academia, federal education policy and organizational leadership, with a special focus on access to high-quality outcomes for all students. He is currently President of the American Council on Education (ACE).

Bruce Hoffman is a leading authority on terrorism, insurgency, and political violence, with a career that spans more than four decades of groundbreaking research, scholarship, and advice to governments and international organizations.

He is currently a tenured professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and has been the director of the university’s undergraduate Center for Jewish Civilization and also of its graduate-level Center for Security Studies and the Security Studies Master of Arts Program.

In addition, he is Senior Fellow for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security at the Council on Foreign Relations; Senior Fellow at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, NY; professor emeritus of terrorism studies at St Andrews University, Scotland; and an adjunct professor at the International Institute of Counterterrorism, Herzliya, Israel, and at Charles Stuart University, Canberra, Australia. He previously held the Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency at the RAND Corporation.

Ivo Daalder is a prominent global affairs expert with a career spanning academia, public service and policy analysis. He is retiring this year after 12 years as president and chief executive officer of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, an influential organization that convenes leaders and experts for discussions about the world’s most pressing issues. He also hosts the weekly podcast World Review with Ivo Daalder, featuring leading journalists from around the world discussing the week’s biggest news stories, and writes a bimonthly column From Across the Pond for Politico Europe and the Substack newsletter America Abroad.

Before leading the Chicago Council, he served as U.S. Ambassador to NATO under President Barack Obama from 2009 to 2013. In this capacity, he played a critical role in strengthening the transatlantic alliance, overseeing NATO’s response to crises, including the conflict in Afghanistan, and promoting strategic defense initiatives that shaped European security. His tenure was marked by efforts to adapt NATO to a rapidly changing global environment – changes that are even more rapid and far-reaching today.

Ambassador Daalder has also been a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, focusing on U.S. foreign policy, European affairs and international security, and on the staff of the National Security Council under President Bill Clinton, where he worked on key policy issues including European security and the Balkans.

In addition to his extensive policy experience, Daalder is a respected academic. He was educated at the Universities of Kent, Oxford, and Georgetown University, and received his Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an honorary Doctor of Civil Law from the University of Kent. For his service as US Ambassador to NATO, Daalder was honored by the governments of Germany, Latvia, and Estonia, and received the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service.

Nancy Reid Gibbs is an author, speaker, presidential historian and commentator on politics and values in the United States. She joined TIME magazine as a part-time fact checker in 1983 and rose to become its Editor-in-Chief in 2013, the first woman to hold the position. She was one of the most published writers in the history of the magazine and wrote more cover stories than anyone else at TIME. Under her leadership, TIME’s digital audience expanded from 25 to 55 million and its video streams to more than one billion a year.

She remained at TIME as Editor-in-Chief and Editorial Director until September 2017, directing its news and feature coverage for more than 65 million readers worldwide. She was also a consultant to CBS News and an essayist for the News Hour on PBS, and co-authored with Michael Duffy two best-selling presidential histories: The President’s Club: Inside the World’s Most Exclusive Fraternity (2012) and The Preacher and the Presidents: Billy Graham in the White House (2007).

She has interviewed five U.S. presidents and multiple other world leaders, and lectures often on the American presidency, including at the Bush, Reagan, Carter, Johnson and Truman libraries.

In September 2017, while remaining an Editor at Large at TIME, she stepped down from her post as Editor in Chief and became Visiting Edward R. Murrow Professor of Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. In 2019, she was additionally named Lombard Director of the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center in Media, Politics and Public Policy.

The press release welcoming her to Harvard described her as “an extremely thoughtful and respected voice on issues of politics, values, and society” and noted that “her extensive knowledge and insights will help illuminate research and discussions at the school about the role of journalism in democracies and in the digital age.” She is still an Editor at Large at Time.

She graduated from Yale summa cum laude with honors in history and has a degree in politics and philosophy from Oxford, where she was a Marshall scholar.

When Andrew Selee became president of the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) in 2018, his predecessor noted that Selee “has a distinguished track record not only as a serious policy scholar but a leader who has thought deeply about think tank strategy and administration.”

Those qualities are especially apt for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan body working with a wide range of stakeholders on immigration and integration policies, with a focus on fact-based research, dialogue, and the development of new ideas in response to complex policy questions.

MPI has published more than 500 research reports and books, provided testimony before the U.S. Congress and parliamentary bodies in more than a dozen countries, advised numerous governments and civil-society organizations, and organized countless public and private conferences.

Dr. Selee’s own research focuses on migration globally and especially on immigration policies in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean. He has written extensively on U.S.-Mexico relations, Mexican politics, U.S. immigration policy, organized crime, and democracy in Latin America. His most recent book is Vanishing Frontiers: The Forces Driving Mexico and the United States Together (PublicAffairs, 2018).

Before joining MPI, Dr. Selee spent 17 years at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., where he founded the Center’s Mexico Institute and served for three years as executive vice-president, managing the Center’s day-to-day operations and global research agenda for its 135-member staff. Previously, he was a professional staffer at the U.S. Congress and worked on YMCA programs for migrant youth in Tijuana, Mexico.

His public opinion articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Dallas Morning News, Houston Chronicle, Americas Quarterly, and other media, and he writes a biweekly column for the Mexican newspaper El Universal. He is often interviewed in the press, including PBS, NBC, CBS, Fox News, NPR, BBC, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist.

He holds a PhD in policy studies from the University of Maryland; an MA in Latin American studies from the University of California, San Diego; a BA, Phi Beta Kappa, from Washington University in St. Louis; and a certificate in strategic perspectives on nonprofit management from Harvard Business School. He was an Andrew Carnegie Fellow in 2017-2018, is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, and has previously taught at Johns Hopkins and George Washington universities and El Colegio de México.

Nathaniel Keohane has been called “one of the most original thinkers and inspirational leaders in the climate community.” He is president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES), an independent, non-partisan, nonprofit organization known nationally and internationally for its effectiveness in bringing stakeholders together to develop innovative, effective and durable climate policies. Keohane himself is known for his optimism about the role markets can play in resolving global warming.

Before becoming president of C2ES, Keohane was Senior Vice President for Climate at the Environmental Defense Fund. He served in the Obama administration as special assistant to the president for energy and environment in the National Economic Council and the Domestic Policy Council, developing and coordinating policy on a wide range of energy and environmental matters. He has also been an associate professor in the Yale School of Management and an adjunct professor at New York University.

He holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale and a Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University. He was an accomplished rower at Yale and held the Club Singles course record at the Head of the Charles for 20 years after it was set in 1997.

Craig Fugate is the former administrator for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), during which time he organized recovery efforts for a record eighty-seven disasters in 2011 alone. Before that, as director of the Florida Emergency Management Division, he coordinated the state’s response to Hurricanes Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne (the “Big 4 of ’04”), and Hurricanes Dennis, Katrina and Wilma in 2005.

At FEMA, Fugate emphasized a “whole community” approach to emergency management; spearheaded the effort to build capacity to stabilize catastrophic events within 72 hours; incorporated “Thunderbolt exercises” using fake disasters and lightning inspections to train emergency operations centers and helped develop smart phone apps for citizens to use to report problems to FEMA.

On a somewhat lighter side, he is also known for the unofficial “Waffle House Index” that FEMA still uses to help determine how much attention a specific disaster area requires. He explains: “The Waffle House has a very simple operation philosophy: get open.” So if the local Waffle House is up and running in the wake of a disaster, that’s probably not the most hard-hit area. If it’s open but with a limited menu, power outages have probably knocked out freezers. If it’s still closed, the situation there is really bad and needs immediate attention.

Fugate’s interest in combatting disasters goes back a very long way. He trained as a volunteer firefighter while still in high school, attended fire college and paramedic school at Santa Fe College, and gradually rose through the ranks of Florida fire and rescue organizations until tapped by Florida Republican governor Jeb Bush in 2001 to become director of the Florida Emergency Management Division. He was then appointed FEMA Administrator by President Obama, with bipartisan support in Congress, and served in that post throughout the Obama administration.

After leaving FEMA, Fugate founded Craig Fugate Consulting LLC. He also founded disastersrus.org, a website with disaster planning advice and resources, and is a licensed amateur radio operator. In November 2020, he was a volunteer member of the Biden presidential transition team for the Department of Homeland Security.

Heather Tanana is highly trained in environmental law and public health, and as a member of the Navajo Nation is dedicated to promoting indigenous rights. She has been asked to contribute to the water chapter for the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5), which will analyze the effects of global change on the world’s natural environment, resources and social systems. The assessment, due in 2023, will be submitted to the President and Congress.

She is a visiting Professor at the University of California – Irvine School of Law and has become a nationally recognized researcher and educator specializing in the vexing questions at the junction of law, health and water policies. In 2021 she received an award from the American Bar Association for “distinguished achievement in environmental law and policy” for her work including the 2021 report Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribes in the Colorado River Basin, for which she served as lead author.

She is also an associate faculty member focusing on health policy at the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health. She holds a B.A. in Biology from Dartmouth College, a J.D. from the University of Utah’s S.J. Quinney College of Law with a Certificate in Environmental and Natural Resources Law, and a Master’s of Public Health from Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health with a Certificate in American Indian Health.

Introductory remarks will be provided by Luke Runyon, KUNC Managing Editor and Reporter on the Colorado River Basin.

Also featured during this Seminar is “Dividing the Waters: How the Colorado River Compact Transformed the Southwestern Frontier”: https://youtu.be/CDHUbyDqgOk

Researched, written and produced by Steamboat Springs High School Senior Wren Capra, this ten-minute film features experts on the Compact, a legislative frontier, that recently crossed its centennial and continues to create controversy today.

Winner of numerous state & national awards including National Park Service Outstanding Entry; National Honorable Mention–June 2023 at National History Day (NHD) National Competition at the University of Maryland, College Park campus; Best Senior Project on Western History from Brigham Young University Charles Redd Center for the Humanities–April 2023 at University of Colorado at Denver NHD Colorado State Competition; 1st Place in Colorado State for Individual Senior Documentary–April 2023 at University of Colorado at Denver NHD Colorado State Competition; 1st Place in Mountain Region for Individual Senior Documentary–April 2023 in Summit County, CO