Prior to relocating to Baltimore, she was Managing Editor at the Los Angeles Times, where she worked for 21 years. At The Times, she held numerous roles — as a reporter, editor, and strategic leader, with oversight that crossed almost every area of coverage.

In 2011, she helped guide the paper’s investigation into corruption in the city of Bell, which was awarded the Pulitzer Gold Medal for Public Service.

Prior to joining The Times, she was a reporter at The Fresno Bee and The Stockton Record. A California native, Yoshino attended the University of California at Davis.

Melissa Block, longtime NPR host and correspondent, is celebrated for her decades of warm yet incisive reporting. Her work over the decades earned her journalism’s highest honors, and made her one of NPR’s most familiar and beloved voices.

As host of All Things Considered from 2003-2015, her reporting took her from the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to the heart of Rio de Janeiro; from rural Mozambique to the farthest reaches of Alaska. Her riveting reports from Sichuan, China, during and after the massive earthquake in 2008 brought the tragedy home to millions of listeners around the world. Her long-form story about a desperate couple searching in the rubble for their toddler son was singled out by judges who awarded NPR’s earthquake coverage the top honors in broadcast journalism, among them the George Foster Peabody Award and duPont-Columbia Award.

As an NPR special correspondent from 2015-23, Block reported on issues ranging from LGBTQ rights to the Big Lie; from guns and suicide to opioid addiction. A favorite assignment: covering the 2016 summer Olympics in Rio and the 2018 winter Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

Block is the recipient of the 2019 Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award in Journalism, awarded by the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University, as well as the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Fulbright Association.

Block began her career at NPR in 1985 as an editorial assistant for All Things Considered, and rose through the ranks to become the program’s senior producer. She was a New York correspondent from 1994 to 2002, a period punctuated by the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Her reporting after those attacks helped earn NPR a George Foster Peabody Award. Block’s reporting on rape as a weapon of war in Kosovo was cited by the Overseas Press Club of America in awarding NPR the Lowell Thomas Award in 1999.

Block is a 1983 graduate of Harvard University and spent the following year on a Fulbright fellowship in Geneva, Switzerland. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, writer Stefan Fatsis. In good weather, you’ll likely find her out looking for songbirds or sweet-talking the native plants in her perennial gardens.

Joe Saunders works on ethics and agency in Kant and the post-Kantian tradition, as well as media ethics and the philosophy of love. With Carl Fox he edited the recent Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Media Ethics, and a 2019 collection: Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy.

more coming soon

Professor Carolyn Forestiere has been a member of the Department of Political Science at UMBC since 2004. She is the author of Beginning Research in Political Science with Oxford University Press (second edition released in 2021) and was co-editor of the 2018 publication of Politica in Italia (Il Mulino). Her work in comparative politics has been published in outlets such as the International Political Science Review, Politics and Policy, Party Politics, and the Journal of Legislative Studies. Forestiere teaches courses in undergraduate research methods and comparative politics at UMBC; she has won her Department’s Teacher of the Year award seven times and in 2019 was named UMBC’s Presidential Teaching Professor. In 2022, she was selected by UMBC’s Alumni Association for the Outstanding Faculty Award. She has also led several summer study abroad programs in Italy and the U.K. and has been Faculty Chair of the UMBC Undergraduate Research Award committee since 2018.

Adina Roskies received a Ph.D from the University of California, San Diego in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science in 1995, a Ph.D. from MIT in philosophy in 2004, and an M.S.L. from Yale Law School in 2014. Prior to her work in philosophy she held a postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroimaging at Washington University with Steven Petersen and Marcus Raichle, and from 1997-1999 was Senior Editor of the neuroscience journal Neuron. She taught at Dartmouth College from 2004-2023 and headed the Cognitive Science program there. Dr. Roskies has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, The Neuroethics Prize from the Italian Society of Neuroethics, a Mellon New Directions fellowship, and fellowships from the Princeton Center for Human Values and the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Philosophy of Science. Recent grants include awards from the NIH BRAIN Initiative and the Templeton Foundation. Dr. Roskies’ research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, and include philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics. She has coauthored a book with Stephen Morse, A Primer on Criminal Law and Neuroscience.

Aaron Schurger completed his undergraduate studies in computer science at Indiana University and then worked as a software consultant before going on to earn his PhD in psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University under the guidance of Jonathan D. Cohen and Anne Treisman. After that he joined the research team of Stanislas Dehaene at the Neurospin research center as a post-doc, and then as a senior researcher working with Olaf Blanke and José del R Millán at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He went on to join the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research (INSERM), as principal investigator based at the Neurospin research center near Paris. He is currently assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and the Brain Institute at Chapman University.

Schurger’s research focuses on the neural signatures of subjective experience and the neural antecedents of self-initiated movement. In 2013 Schurger was awarded the William James Prize from the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) and in 2015 was awarded the BMI-Kaloy prize from the Kaloy Foundation for his work on the influence of spontaneous fluctuations in brain activity on self-initiated movement. In 2014 Schurger was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to investigate spontaneous voluntary movement : how decisions-to-act emerge in the brain in the absence of an external imperative. Schurger’s work on conscious perception has focused on how the formation of stable patterns of brain activity might play a role in consolidating and transmitting neural information and might serve as a signature of conscious perception. Schurger uses a variety of techniques in his research including behavioral psychophysics, neuroimaging, computational modeling, machine learning, and brain-computer interfaces.

As principal architect of ethical AI practice at Salesforce, Kathy develops research-informed best practice to educate Salesforce employees, customers, and the industry on the development of responsible AI. She collaborates and partners with external AI and ethics experts to continuously evolve Salesforce policies, practices, and products. Prior to Salesforce, she worked at Google, eBay, and Oracle in User Experience Research. She received her MS in Engineering Psychology and BS in Applied Psychology from the Georgia Institute of Technology. The second edition of her book, “Understanding your users,” was published in May 2015. You can read about her current research at einstein.ai/ethics.

One part of David Danks’ research examines the ethical, psychological, and policy issues around AI and robotics across multiple sectors. He also develops novel AI systems and computational cognitive models. Danks currently serves on multiple advisory boards, including the National AI Advisory Committee.

Gabriella Waters is an artificial intelligence and machine learning researcher. She’s the Director of Operations and the Director of the Cognitive and Neurodiversity AI Lab (CoNA) at the Center for Equitable AI & Machine Learning Systems at Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD. She is a research associate at NIST in the AI Innovation Lab, where she leads AI testing and evaluation across three teams, and also serves as the Principal AI Scientist at the Propel Center, where she is also a professor of Culturally Relevant AI/ML Systems.

She is passionate about increasing the diversity of thought around technology and focuses on interdisciplinary collaborations to drive innovation, equity, explainability, transparency, and ethics in the development and application of AI tools. In her research, Gabriella is interested in studying the intersections between human neurobiology & learning, quantifying ethics & equity in AI/ML systems, neuro-symbolic architectures, and intelligent systems that make use of those foundations for improved human-computer synergy. She develops technology innovations, with an emphasis on support for neurodiverse populations.

Samuel Scheffler works primarily in the areas of moral and political philosophy and the theory of value. His writings have addressed central questions in ethical theory, and he has also written on topics as diverse as equality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, toleration, terrorism, immigration, tradition, and the moral significance of personal relationships. He is the author of seven books: The Rejection of Consequentialism, Human Morality, Boundaries and Allegiances, Equality and Tradition, Death and the Afterlife (Niko Kolodny ed.), Why Worry about Future Generations?, and, most recently, One Life to Lead: The Mysteries of Time and the Goods of Attachment.