RFF 50th Anniversary Bios

Sergey Brin

Co-Founder & President, Technology, Google Inc.

Sergey Brin is Co-Founder and President, Technology, of Google, Inc., where he shares responsibility for the company’s day-to-day operations. Mr. Brin is currently on leave from Stanford University’s Ph.D. program in computer science.

Mr. Brin’s research interests include search engines, information extraction from unstructured sources, and data mining of large text collections and scientific data. Mr. Brin has been a featured speaker at several national and international academic, business and technology forums, and has shared his views on the technology industry and the future of searching on the Charlie Rose Show, ABC Nightly News, CNBC, and CNN, as well as in numerous newspaper articles. Brin was named a “Young Innovator Who Will Create the Future” by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Technology Review magazine in 2002. He is a recipient of a National Science Foundation graduate fellowship.

Rita R. Colwell

Director, National Science Foundation

Rita R. Colwell became the 11th director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1998. In her capacity as NSF director, she serves as co-chair of the Committee on Science of the National Science and Technology Council.

Dr. Colwell was president of the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute from 1991-1998; she remains a professor of microbiology and biotechnology. She also was a member of the National Science Board from 1984 to 1990.

Dr. Colwell has held many advisory positions in the U.S. government, nonprofit science policy organizations, and private foundations, as well as in the international scientific research community. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Medal of Distinction from Columbia University; the Gold Medal of Charles University, Prague, and the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Alumna Summa Laude Dignata from the University of Washington, Seattle. Dr. Colwell has been awarded 25 honorary degrees from institutions of higher education, including her alma mater, Purdue University.

William Cronon

University of Wisconsin - Madison

William Cronon holds a M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University, and a D.Phil. from Oxford University. In 1992, Mr. Cronon became the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin­Madison. Previously, he served for more than a decade as a member of the Yale History Department. He has been president of the American Society for Environmental History, and currently serves as general editor of the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books Series for the University of Washington Press. Mr. Cronon has been a Rhodes Scholar, Danforth Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, and MacArthur Fellow. Among the many prizes his books have won are the Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians, the Bancroft Prize, the George Perkins Marsh Prize, and the Charles A. Weyerhauser Award from the Forest History Society. In 1992, he was one of three nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in History.

William Emmott

Editor, The Economist

Bill Emmott joined The Economist in 1980 after receiving a degree from Magdalene College, Oxford, and his first assignment was covering European Economic Community affairs and the Benelux countries. In 1982, he became the economics correspondent in London and the following year, moved to Tokyo to cover Japan and South Korea. In 1986, he returned to London as financial editor; in January 1989, he became business affairs editor, responsible for the paper’s coverage of business, finance and science. He was appointed to his present post, editor in chief, in March 1993.

Mr. Emmott has written three books on Japan. His forthcoming book, 20:21 Vision – 20th Century Lessons for the 21st Century, will draw in part on his recent essays in The Economist, including his article on America’s role after 9/11, “Present at the Creation.”

Thomas L. Friedman

Foreign Affairs Columnist, New York Times

Thomas L. Friedman graduated summa cum laude from Brandeis University in 1975, with a degree in Mediterranean Studies. In 1978, he received a Master's degree in Modern Middle East Studies from Oxford, and immediately thereafter joined the London bureau of United Press International (UPI). One year later, he was dispatched to Beirut, beginning an extensive career in the Middle East, during which he won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. In June 1989, Mr. Friedman published From Beirut to Jerusalem, which was on the New York Times’ best-seller list for nearly 12 months and won the 1989 National Book award for nonfiction.

In 1989, Mr. Friedman took up a new assignment in Washington as the New York Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent. In 1992, Mr. Friedman shifted to domestic politics and was appointed chief White House correspondent. In January 1994, he became the New York Times’ international economic correspondent, covering the nexus between foreign policy and trade policy. In 1995, Mr. Friedman became the New York Times’ foreign affairs columnist, a position he continues to hold today.

The Honorable Michael O. Leavitt

Governor of Utah

Michael O. Leavitt is the 14th governor of the state of Utah. He was first elected in 1992, re-elected in 1996, and in 2000, he became only the second governor in Utah history to be re-elected to a third term. Throughout this period, Utah has sustained the longest economic expansion in the state’s history, and has been called the “best-managed state” in America.

Governor Leavitt is past chairman of the National Governors Association and Western Governors Association, and a leading national voice on issues such as welfare reform, federal/state relations, e-commerce, and balanced environmental management.

The governor has received numerous awards and honors and has been called on regularly by the White House and congressional leaders to resolve federal issues that directly affect states.

Bill McKibben

Author, The End of Nature

Bill McKibben is the author of The End of Nature and numerous other books about the environment and the culture. A former staff writer at the New Yorker, Mr. McKibben's first book was The End of Nature, the first book for a general audience about global warming. It has been translated into 20 languages, and was recently released in a 10th anniversary edition. His other books include The Age of Missing Information: Hope, Human and Wild; Maybe One; and Long Distance. His next book, an examination of human genetic engineering and other emerging technologies, titled Enough, will be published by Times Books in spring 2003. His work regularly appears in the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers, the New York Review of Books, Natural History, Outside, the New York Times, and a wide range of other publications. The recipient of Lyndhurst and Guggenheim fellowships, he won the 2000 Lannan Prize for Nonfiction Writing. Mr. McKibben currently is a visiting scholar at Middlebury College.

Paul M. Romer

Stanford University Graduate School of Business

Paul M. Romer, lead developer of “new growth theory,” is the STANCO 25 Professor of Economics in the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He is also a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, and was named one of America's 25 most influential people by Time magazine in 1997. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. Mr. Romer was a member of the National Research Council Panel on Criteria for Federal Support of Research and Development, a member of the Executive Council of the American Economics Association, and a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. Before coming to Stanford, he was a professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Chicago. Mr. Romer is the author of several papers, as well as popular articles describing the role of technology and growth.

John W. Rowe

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Exelon Corporation

John W. Rowe is chairman, president, and CEO of Exelon Corporation. Prior to the formation of Exelon, Mr. Rowe served as chairman, president, and CEO of Unicom Corporation and Commonwealth Edison. Mr. Rowe was president and CEO of New England Electric System from 1989 to 1998, and he served as president and CEO of Central Maine Power Company from 1984 to 1989. Previously, Mr. Rowe was senior vice president of law for Consolidated Rail Corporation (Conrail) in Philadelphia. He also worked with Isham, Lincoln & Beale from 1970 to 1980 as counsel to the trustees of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul & Pacific Railroad Company.

Mr. Rowe is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and its law school. He has an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree from Bryant College and an honorary Doctor of Business Administration degree from the University of Massachusetts. He is past chairman of the Edison Electric Institute, a trustee of Northwestern University and a member of the Economic Club of Chicago, the Chicago Urban League, and the Commercial Club of Chicago.

Robert M. Solow

1987 Nobel Laureate in Economics and the Institute Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Robert M. Solow is the 1987 Nobel Laureate in Economics and the Institute Professor of Economics Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a trustee of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been a senior fellow with the Society of Fellows, Harvard University, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, American Philosophical Society, and the British Academy. Dr. Solow received his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Lawrence H. Summers

President, Harvard University

Lawrence H. Summers was awarded a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982. He then went to Washington as a domestic policy economist for the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He returned to Harvard in 1983 as a professor of economics and subsequently was named Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy. He served as an editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, became the first social scientist to receive the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award, and was given the John Bates Clark Medal.

Mr. Summers took leave from Harvard in 1991 to return to Washington as vice president of development economics and chief economist of the World Bank. In 1993, Mr. Summers was named undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs. In 1995, then-Secretary of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin promoted Mr. Summers to deputy secretary of the treasury. In July 1999, Mr. Summers was confirmed by the Senate as secretary of the treasury.

After leaving the Treasury Department, Mr. Summers served as the Arthur Okun Distinguished Fellow in Economics, Globalization, and Governance at the Brookings Institution in Washington. He returned to Harvard in 2001 as president of the university.

The Honorable Christie Todd Whitman

Administrator, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Christie Whitman was sworn in as EPA Administrator on January 31, 2001. Prior to that, Whitman served as the 50th Governor of New Jersey.

In testimony before the U.S. Senate on January 17, Whitman said she believed environmental and economic goals go hand in hand and that she would continue her record of working to forge strong partnerships among citizens, government and business to produce measurable environmental results of cleaner air, water and land.

As governor of New Jersey, Whitman developed a strong environmental record, providing cleaner air, water and land than when she was first elected in November 1993. Under her environmental leadership, New Jersey's air became significantly cleaner. The number of days New Jersey violated the federal one-hour air quality standard for ground level ozone dropped from 45 in 1988 to four in 2000. The state is on target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels.

New Jersey's waterways, coasts and ocean waters also became significantly cleaner. Beach closings reached a record low and the state earned recognition by the Natural Resources Defense Council for instituting the most comprehensive beach monitoring system in the nation. The Governor won voter approval for a plan to break a longstanding impasse over dredging the state's ports that is both environmentally acceptable and economical. She established a new watershed management program. New Jersey now leads the nation in opening shellfish beds for harvesting.

As a preservationist, Governor Whitman won voter approval for the state's first stable funding source to preserve one million more acres of open space and farmland in ten years. By 2010, New Jersey will have permanently preserved 40 percent of its total landmass, with more than half preserved during her tenure. She is an advocate for "smart growth" and in New Jersey she encouraged new growth in cities and other areas where roads, sewers and schools are already in place. She encouraged redevelopment of cities through programs to streamline cleanups of abandoned industrial "brownfield" sites.

Whitman was New Jersey's first female governor. She appointed New Jersey's first African American State Supreme Court Justice, its first female State Supreme Court Chief Justice and its first female Attorney General.

Prior to becoming governor, Whitman headed the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and the Somerset County Board of Freeholders. She grew up in Hunterdon County, N.J. and earned a bachelor's degree in government from Wheaton College in Massachusetts in 1968. She is married to John R. Whitman and has two children.