On September 4, 2013, James Comey was sworn in as the seventh Director of the FBI. A Yonkers, New York native, Jim Comey attended the College of William and Mary and the University of Chicago Law School. After law school, Comey returned to New York and joined the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York as an Assistant U.S. Attorney. There, he took on numerous crimes, most notably Organized Crime in the case of the United States v. John Gambino et al. Afterwards, Comey became an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, where he prosecuted the high-profile case that followed the 1996 terrorist attack on the U.S. military’s Khobar Towers in Khobar, Saudi Arabia.

Comey returned to New York after 9/11 to become the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. At the end of 2003, he was tapped to be the Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice (DOJ) under then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and moved to the Washington, D.C. area.

Comey left DOJ in 2005 to serve as General Counsel and Senior Vice President at Defense contractor Lockheed Martin. Five years later, he joined Bridgewater Associates, a Connecticut-based investment fund, as its General Counsel. In early 2013, Comey became a Lecturer in Law, a Senior Research Scholar, and Hertog Fellow in National Security Law at Columbia Law School.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, author, and teacher. In 25 years at the Los Angeles Times, Newton worked as a reporter, editor, bureau chief, columnist, and, from 2007 through 2010, editor of the editorial pages. Newton currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Blueprint, a new UCLA magazine addressing the policy challenges facing California and Los Angeles in particular. He also teaches in the Communication Studies and Public Policy department at UCLA. Newton is currently at work on this fourth book entitled Jerry Brown and the Creation of Modern California.

First-generation Iraqi immigrant and Detroit-raised pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha is the whistleblower who exposed the dangerous levels of lead in Flint, Michigan’s drinking water after testing blood lead levels in its children. Dr. Hanna-Attisha announced her research findings to the national press and then took further action, including founding the Flint Child Health and Development Fund, which has raised millions of dollars to date. Dr. Hanna-Attisha, MD, MPH, is director of the pediatrics residency at the Hurley Medical Center in Flint, Michigan and an assistant professor at Michigan State University College of Human Medicine, where she leads Hurley Children’s Hospital Public Health Initiative, an innovative program and model public health program to research, monitor, and mitigate the impact of the Flint Water Crisis and help all Flint children grow up healthy and strong. In 2016, TIME Magazine named Dr. Hanna-Attisha one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Geoffrey Mohan joined the Los Angeles Times in 2001 from Newsday, where he was the Latin America bureau chief in Mexico City. He started off here as a state wide roamer, detoured to cover the Afghanistan and Iraq wars and was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the California wildfires in 2003. He served as an editor on the metro and foreign desks before returning to reporting on science in 2013. Now he’s coming full circle, roaming the state in search of stories about farming and food.

Howard Bryant is the author of Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston, which was a finalist for the Society for American Baseball Research’s 2003 Seymour Medal, and Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball. He is a senior writer for ESPN.com and ESPN the Magazine; appears regularly on ESPN’s The Sports Reporters, ESPN First Take, and Outside the Lines; and serves as a sports correspondent for NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday. He lives in western Massachusetts.

Dr. John Carlos is a medaled USA Track and Field Hall of Fame athlete and Olympian. Competing in the 200 meters, Carlos earned the Gold in the 1967 Pan American Games and the Bronze in the 1968 Olympics. He also led San Jose State to its first NCAA championship in 1969 with victories in the 100 and 330 and as a member of the 4×110 –yard relay. Dr. Carlos made world history during the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City when he took to the international stage during the medal ceremony to accept the Bronze medal at the Olympic podium wearing black socks without shoes to represent impoverished people and raising a black-gloved fist to reflect the strength of the human spirit. This historical symbol of the fight for human rights was condemned by the International Olympic Committee, which suspended Carlos and his teammate Tommie Smith from the U.S. team. Since then, Carlos went on to play in the NFL and has been a counselor, supervisor, and track and field coach at Palm Springs High School. Together with author Dave Zirin, he authored the book The John Carlos Story: The Sports Moment That Changed the World.

Dr. Todd Boyd, a.k.a. Notorious Ph.D., is the Katherine & Frank Price Endowed Chair for the Study of Race and Popular Culture and Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts. A media commentator, author, producer, consultant, and scholar, Dr. Boyd is an intellectual and creative force who transcends boundaries and defies conventional categorization. In the immediate aftermath of the 1992 L.A. riots, Dr. Boyd arrived at USC and began developing a new field of study centered around hip-hop culture. His pioneering work would make connections across film, music, television, sports, fashion, art, and politics, establishing him as a preeminent expert and distinctly authoritative voice on the role of culture in American society.

Yanis Varoufakis served as Minister of Finance of Greece in 2015, and taught economics and econometrics at the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia. From 2013-14 he taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin as a visiting professor. Varoufakis studied economics in the UK, first at the University of Essex and secondly mathematical statistics at the University of Birmingham. He has a PhD in economics, and has written several books on game theory, microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Yanis Varoufakis served as Minister of Finance of Greece in 2015, and taught economics and econometrics at the University of Essex and the University of East Anglia. From 2013-14 he taught at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin as a visiting professor. Varoufakis studied economics in the UK, first at the University of Essex and secondly mathematical statistics at the University of Birmingham. He has a PhD in economics, and has written several books on game theory, microeconomics and macroeconomics.

Alex Cohen is co-host of KPCC’s Take Two show. Prior to that, she was host of KPCC’s All Things Considered. She has also hosted and reported for NPR programs including Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Day to Day as well as American Public Media’s Marketplace and Weekend America.  Prior to that, she was the L.A. Bureau Chief for KQED FM in San Francisco. She has won various journalistic awards including the LA Press Club’s Best Radio Anchor prize. Alex is also the author of Down and Derby: The Insider’s Guide to Roller Derby.

Dr. Robert King is a prison reform activist and the first of the Angola 3 to win his freedom after serving twenty-nine years in solitary confinement of a 31-year sentence. He was a member of the Black Panther Party in Angola, Louisiana, the only official chapter of the BPP in the country. In the seventeen years since his release in 2001, King’s life’s focus has been to campaign against abuses in the US criminal justice system, the cruel and unusual use of solitary confinement, and for the freedom of the then-remaining imprisoned, Angola 2, who are now all free. In 2012, King received an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK, for his achievements as a civil rights campaigner and has traveled the world sharing his testimony with parliaments in Europe, Africa, and South America. He is the author of his autobiography, From the Bottom of the Heap.

Albert Woodfox is the last of the Angola 3 to be released. He was released on his birthday, February 19th, 2016, after his conviction had been overturned a total of three times, spanning the years between 1992-2015. Motivated by the many years it took to be heard, Albert has made a life-long commitment to continuing his activism and advocacy on behalf of all those wrongfully imprisoned due to the multiple abuses of the criminal justice system, prosecutorial misconduct, missing or false evidence, bad science, and racism. As a former member of the Black Panther Party, he hopes to be a voice for the voiceless who suffer under brutal prison conditions. He is currently writing a book slated to publish in late 2018.

Bryonn Bain is a hip-hop theater innovator, spoken word poetry champion, prison activist, actor, and educator who currently serves as Director of the UCLA Prison Education Program. Bain was wrongfully imprisoned while studying at Harvard Law, sued the NYPD, and wrote about his experiences in his book The Ugly Side of Beautiful: Rethinking Race and Prison in America. Bain has organized prison workshops in 25 states and has toured nationally and internationally with his one-man multimedia production, Lyrics From Lockdown, executive produced by Harry Belafonte. Bain’s latest Emmy-nominated film, BaaaddD Sonia, traces the life and work of Black Studies pioneer and poet Sonia Sanchez. Bain founded the prison education program offering college degrees from NYU to men incarcerated in New York. In 2016, Bain began co-supervising UCLA’s International Human Rights Law Clinic and facilitated an initiative with incarcerated women to develop a 92-page needs/resources assessment for the LA Mayor’s Office of Re-Entry. Bryonn serves proudly as a faculty advisor for Underground Scholars and the Justice Work Group at UCLA.

Bassem Youssef, dubbed the “Jon Stewart of the Arab World,” was the host of the popular TV show AlBernameg – which was the first of its kind political satire show in the Middle East. Originally a 5-minute show on YouTube, AlBernameg became the most-watched show across the region, with 30 million viewers every week. Throughout its three seasons, AlBernameg remained controversial through its humorous yet bold criticism of the ruling powers, which led to tens of lawsuits being filed against the show and its host. In June 2014, Youssef announced the termination of the show due to overwhelming pressures on both the show and the airing channel. Youssef’s most recent projects include Democracy Handbook, a ten-part series exploring topics of democracy on fusion.net, and the launch of a new book, Revolution for Dummies: Laughing Through the Arab Spring. Youssef majored in cardiothoracic surgery at Cairo University. During the Egyptian Revolution (2011), he assisted the wounded in Tahrir Square. He has passed the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination and is a member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

Kelly McEvers is a host of NPR’s All Things Considered and of the NPR podcast, Embedded. She was previously a Middle East correspondent for NPR, where she earned multiple awards for her coverage of the Syrian conflict. She has covered the Arab Spring, the war in Iraq, and the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, and Slate. Her radio work has also aired on This American Life and the BBC. She lives in Los Angeles.

Khizr Khan was born in 1950, the eldest of ten children, to poultry farming parents in Gujranwala, a city in rural Pakistan. He moved to the United States with his wife Ghazala in 1980. The couple became American citizens in 1986, and raised their three sons in Silver Lake, Maryland. His middle son, Captain Humayun Khan, was killed in 2004 in a suicide attack near Baqubah, Iraq, and was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. Khizr works as a legal consultant, and is involved with the University of Virginia’s ROTC program.

Jeffrey Fleishman is a culture and film writer for the Los Angeles Times. A long time foreign and war correspondent he has had postings in Rome, Berlin and Cairo. He covered the Iraq war, the Arab Spring uprisings and the fall of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for a series of stories, including a magazine piece about his accompanying 15 Buddhist monks and nuns as they eluded Chinese soldiers on a harrowing escape trek out of Tibet and over the Himalayas and into Nepal. He is a former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and the author of two novels, Shadow Man and Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad.

Ali Noorani is the Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy organization promoting the value of immigrants and immigration. Growing up in California as the son of Pakistani immigrants, Ali learned how to forge alliances among people of wide-ranging backgrounds, a skill that has served him well as one of the nation’s most innovative coalition builders. In 2015, Ali was named a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He holds a Master’s in Public Health from Boston University and is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Ali lives in Washington, D.C.

Pilar Marrero is a journalist and author with long experience in covering social and political issues of the Latino community in the US. She is the author of Killing the American Dream, which chronicles the last 25 years of US immigration policy mishaps and was published in Spanish with the title El Despertar del Sueño Americano. Marrero is currently covering the impact of President Donald Trump’s policies on the immigrant community for Impremedia, a company with media outlets in 15 markets across the US, including the flagship La Opinion Newspaper in Los Angeles.