Martin Feldstein

Martin Feldstein is the George F. Baker Professor of Economics at Harvard University and President Emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he served as President and CEO 1977–1982 and 1984–2008.

From 1982 through 1984, Martin Feldstein was Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers and President Reagan’s chief economic adviser. He served as President of the American Economic Association in 2004. In 2006, President Bush appointed him to be a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. In 2009, President Obama appointed him to be a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Feldstein is a member of the American Philosophical Society, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a Fellow of the National Association of Business Economics. He is a Trustee of the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the Trilateral Commission, the Group of 30, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council of Academic Advisors of the American Enterprise Institute.

He has received honorary doctorates from several universities and is an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford. In 1977, he received the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association, a prize awarded every two years to the economist under the age of 40 who is judged to have made the greatest contribution to economic science. He is the author of more than 300 research articles in economics and is an economic adviser to several businesses and government organizations in the United States and abroad. In addition, he is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal and other publications. Martin Feldstein is a graduate of Harvard College and Oxford University.

William G. Gale

William Gale is the Arjay and Frances Miller Chair in Federal Economic Policy in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution. His research focuses on tax policy, fiscal policy, pensions and saving behavior. He is co-director of the Tax Policy Center, a joint venture of the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute. He is also director of the Retirement Security Project. From 2006 to 2009, he served as vice president of Brookings and director of the Economic Studies Program.

Prior to joining Brookings in 1992, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

He is the co-editor of several books, including Automatic: Changing the Way America Saves (Brookings 2009); Aging Gracefully: Ideas to Improve Retirement Security in America (Century Foundation, 2006); The Evolving Pension System: Trends, Effects, and Proposals for Reform (Brookings, 2005); Private Pensions and Public Policy (Brookings, 2004); Rethinking Estate and Gift Taxation (Brookings, 2001), and Economic Effects of Fundamental Tax Reform (Brookings, 1996).

Gale’s research has been published in several scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. In 2007, a paper he co-authored was awarded the TIAA-CREF Paul A. Samuelson Award Certificate of Excellence. He has also written extensively in policy-related publications and newspapers, including op-eds in CNN, the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

He serves on the editorial board of several academic journals, and has served on advisory boards for the Government Accountability Office, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Joint Committee on Taxation, and on the Board of the Center on Federal Financial Institutions.

He attended Duke University and the London School of Economics and received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1987.

Stephen Klineberg

Stephen Klineberg is a professor of sociology at Rice University and founder and co-director of its Kinder Institute for Urban Research. His areas of interest include contemporary social change, survey research methodologies and urban and environmental sociology. In March 1982, he and his students initiated the annual Houston Area Survey to track the changes in demographic patterns, life experiences, attitudes and beliefs of Harris County residents. No other city in America has been the focus of a long-term longitudinal research program of this scope, and none more clearly exemplifies the transformations that are refashioning the social and political landscape of urban America. The survey covers Houston’s Anglo, African-American, Asian and Latino Asian communities.

Co-author of “The Present of Things Future: Explorations of Time in Human Experience”, Klineberg has written numerous journal articles and research reports, and appears frequently on radio and television. He is the recipient of ten major teaching awards, including the George R. Brown Lifetime Award for Excellence in Teaching.

A graduate of Haverford College near Philadelphia, he received an M.A. in Psychopathology from the University of Paris and a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Harvard.

Robert O’Harrow

Robert O’Harrow is a reporter on the Investigative Unit of the Washington Post. In more than two decades at the Post, he has written about privacy, domestic intelligence, national security and fraud, waste and abuse in federal contracting. His seven-part series “Zero Day: The Threat in Cyberspace” has been published as an e-book.

O’Harrow has won multiple journalism awards including the top prize from Investigative Reporters and Editors for his examination of federal contracting. He is a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist: in 2000 for a series of Post articles on privacy and technology, and in 2009 for a series of explanatory stories about the global financial crises. In 2003, he won the Carnegie Mellon Cyber Security Award. He is the author of “No Place to Hide,” a book that revealed the links between private data aggregators and government surveillance and homeland security programs, and has co-produced an NPT documentary by the same name.

Robin Raphel

Robin Raphel is a career diplomat who is currently the U.S. Coordinator for Non-Military Assistance to Pakistan with the rank of ambassador. Previously, she was the U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia. She also served as Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs, managing U.S. relations with the then newly formed Taliban government in Afghanistan. Prior to that assignment, she was a member of the Iraq Reconstruction Team.

Other State Department assignments including working in the U.S. Embassy in London where she covered the Middle East, South and East Asia and Africa; in Pretoria where she was Counselor for Political Affairs; and in New Delhi. In Washington she held several positions in the department including first Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian Affairs.

Prior to joining the State Department, Raphel taught history at Damavand College in Tehran and worked as an economic analyst for the CIA and the U.S, Agency for International Development in Pakistan.

Raphel received a B.A. in history from the University of Washington and an M.A. in economics from the University of Maryland. She speaks French and Urdu.