Alison Fragale is a professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School. Her academic research on negotiation, and the determinants and consequences of power, status, and hierarchy, have been published in her field’s top academic journals. She is also the author of Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve, published by Penguin Random House in September 2024. Prior to her academic career, Alison worked as a consultant for McKinsey and Company, Inc.

Dr. Anthony Fauci served as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health from 1984 to 2022. He also served as the Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden. He is currently a Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University with a joint appointment in the School of Medicine and the McCourt School of Public Policy.

Alison Espach is the author of the novels The Adults, a New York Times Editors' Choice and a Barnes & Noble Discover pick, and Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance, which was named a best book of 2022 by the Chicago Tribune and NPR. Her short stories and essays have appeared in McSweeney’s, Vogue, Outside, Joyland, and other places. She is a professor of creative writing at Providence College in Rhode Island.

CHARLES DUHIGG is a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist and the author of The Power of Habit, which spent over three years on bestseller lists and has been translated into 40 languages, Supercommunicators, also a bestseller published in 2024, and Smarter Faster Better, a third bestseller. Mr. Duhigg writes for The New Yorker magazine and is a graduate of Yale University and the Harvard Business School. He has been a frequent contributor to CNBC, This American Life, NPR, PBS’s NewsHour and Frontline. He was also, for one terrifying day in 1999, a bike messenger in San Francisco.

Dr. Jennifer Doudna
Biochemist and Nobel Prize-winning co-inventor of CRISPR technology

Eric Cook is the Executive Chef and Owner of award-winning New Orleans restaurants Gris-Gris and Saint John. A combat veteran who served six years in the United States Marine Corps, Cook entered the culinary world and worked in many of the city's most well-renowned kitchens before building a culinary empire of his own.

Catherine "Cady" Coleman is a chemist, an engineer, a former United States Air Force colonel, and a retired NASA astronaut. She is also now a highly regarded media adviser and on-air expert, known for her STEM/STEAM advocacy. Most recently Coleman co-anchored Netflix and Time’s livestream coverage of the SpaceX launch of four civilians into space (she had helped coach them) and, as a regular ABC contributor, co-anchored its special reports covering the SpaceX launches and the Perseverance Mars rover landing.
 

Daniel Black is professor of African American Studies at Clark Atlanta University. He is the author of several novels, namely Perfect Peace, The Coming, and Don’t Cry For Me, and one essay collection, Black on Black.

Bernice L. McFadden is a celebrated, award-winning author who's storytelling deeply explores themes of memory, ancestry, and the African American experience. Over the course of her career, McFadden has written more than a dozen novels, beginning with her acclaimed debut Sugar (2000). Her works include The Book of Harlan (2016), which received the American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, and Praise Song for the Butterflies (2018), longlisted for the prestigious 2019 Women’s Prize.

Kate Baldwin is a scholar and teacher who specializes in comparative literary and cultural histories. Her first book, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, remaps black American modernism by addressing the involvement of African-American intellectuals with Soviet communism and a Russian intellectual heritage.