Julie Buehrle Luyster is an educator who enjoys using sensory teaching to help children explore and experience our beautiful world. Originally from Akron, Ohio, Julie attended Hillsdale College and has a Masters Degree in Science Teaching from Loyola University, New Orleans. She and her husband Mark, raised their four children in New Orleans and Houston where they now reside.
Peter M. Wolf is an award winning author. His recent memoir, My New Orleans Gone Away, reached the New York Times e-book Best Seller list. Previous books such as Land in America, Hot Towns and The Future of the City have been honored by The National Endowment for the Arts, The Ford Foundation and The Graham Foundation.
Jay Wellons MD, MSPH holds the Cal Turner Chair of Pediatric Neurosurgery and is Chief of the Division of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. He is a Professor in the Departments of Neurological Surgery, Pediatrics, Plastic Surgery, and Radiology and Radiological Sciences.
Jacob Weisberg is co-founder and Executive Chair of Pushkin Industries, an audio publishing company he founded with Malcolm Gladwell in 2018. Pushkin produces audiobooks and podcasts, including Revisionist History, Against the Rules with Michael Lewis and The Happiness Lab with Laurie Santos.
Darren Walker is president of the Ford Foundation, a $16 billion international social justice philanthropy. Under his leadership, the Ford Foundation became the first non-profit in US history to issue a $1 billion designated social bond to stabilize non-profit organizations in the wake of COVID-19.
Before joining Ford, Darren was vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation, overseeing global and domestic programs. In the 1990s, he was COO of the Abyssinian Development Corporation, Harlem’s largest community development organization.
Ali Vitali is a Capitol Hill Correspondent for NBC News. She covered the 2016 and 2020 presidential contests from primary to inauguration—on the ground and with the candidates—as well as the 2018 and 2022 midterms, from across the country and in the nation’s capital. Her first book, Electable: Why America Hasn’t Put A Woman In The White House…Yet, was released on August 23, 2022.
Follow Ali Vitali on Twitter and Instagram @alivitali.
Robert Verchick is a leading climate law scholar who designed and implemented climate-resilience policies in the Obama administration. He holds the Gauthier-St. Martin Chair in Environmental Law at Loyola University New Orleans, is a senior fellow in Disaster Resilience at Tulane University, and serves as president of the Center for Progressive Reform. Verchick is the author of four books and host of the podcast Connect the Dots.
The Baby Doll tradition had been a fairly underground tradition in New Orleans for decades but recently become much more visible due to the research of women's studies scholar, Kim Vaz-Deville, a professor at Xavier University of Louisiana. Vaz-Deville authored the groundbreaking book The “Baby Dolls”: Breaking the Race and Gender Barriers of the New Orleans Mardi Gras Tradition (2013) and edited the anthology Walking Raddy: The Baby Dolls of New Orleans (2018).
Katy Tur is an NBC News Correspondent and anchor of the 2 p.m. ET hour of “MSNBC Live.” A dogged journalist, Tur emerged as a breakout broadcaster in 2016 while covering the entirety of the Trump campaign across all platforms for NBC News and MSNBC.
Tur released “Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History” in September 2017, which debuted on the New York Times best seller list.
Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of The Simon Abundance Index. He specializes in globalization and global well‐being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa.
Tupy is the coauthor of Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet (2022) and Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting (2020).
