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David Hume Kennerly
"In his photographs we see people and historical events through the keen, alert eye of an eminent camera artist."
. . . The Winds of War author Herman Wouk
David Hume Kennerly, a contributor for NBC News, has been shooting on the front lines of history for four decades. He has photographed eight wars, seven U.S. presidents, and has traveled to more than 140 countries along the way. He is an authentic global photographer, as much in his element in the desert covering combat as he is capturing dramatic and intimate behind-the-scenes photos of the world's leaders in the corridors of power.
Kennerly was recently named, "One of the Most 100 Most Important People in Photography" by American Photo Magazine, and last year was selected as the 2007, "Photography Person of the Year," by Photo Media Magazine.
At age 25 Kennerly won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for his photos of the Vietnam War, and two years later was appointed President Gerald R. Ford's personal photographer. He has also won the Overseas Press Club's Olivier Rebbot Award for "Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad," for his coverage of Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev's historic summit meeting in Geneva. He also won first prizes in the World Press contest for his dramatic and powerful photos of the war Cambodia just before it fell to the Khmer Rouge.
He was nominated for a Primetime Emmy as executive producer of NBC's, "The Taking of Flight 847," and was writer and Executive Producer of a two-hour NBC pilot, "Shooter," starring Helen Hunt, based on his Vietnam experiences. "Shooter" won the Emmy for "Outstanding Cinematography." He is executive producer of the recent short documentary, "Portraits of a Lady," starring former Justice Sandra Day O'Conner, which made the short list of films eligible for the 2008 Academy Award nominations.
Kennerly has been on the masthead of Time and John F. Kennedy, Jr's George magazine, and was a contributing photographer for Life Magazine, and a contributing editor for Newsweek magazine for ten years. He has more than 50 major magazine covers to his credit, featuring photos of Ansel Adams, Ronald Reagan, Gerald R. Ford, Deng Xiaoping, Anwar Sadat, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jonestown, The Clintons, John McCain, and many others.
Kennerly has published several books of his work, Shooter, Photo Op, Seinoff: The Final Days of Seinfeld, and in the year 2000, Kennerly traveled more than 250,000 miles to 38 states and seven countries for his fourth book, Photo du Jour: A Picture-a-Day Journey through the First Year of the New Millennium. Photo du Jour was selected as one of the best books of 2002 by American Photo Magazine, and the Smithsonian Institute exhibited photographs from the book in their Arts & Industry Building in Washington, D.C., one of the largest photographic shows ever mounted by them. He also worked on several, "Day in the Life," book projects on The Soviet Union, America, The People's Republic of China, and the United States Armed Forces.
His most recent book is Extraordinary Circumstances: The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford. Former First Lady Betty Ford said, "Extraordinary Circumstances is a wonderful record of the Ford Presidency. David Kennerly's heart and soul are in this book."
Award-winning photographer Doug Menuez said, "The range of images and perfect moments add up to a master class of great photojournalism, timeless, classic and relevant. It feels very emotional, intimate, and worlds away from our current super-posed, photo-op political culture. What is truly amazing is how easy Kennerly makes the photography look. . Extraordinary Circumstances fills an important gap in American history from a rare talent given a ringside seat, it is an incredible achievement."
Kennerly is on the Board of Trustees of the Gerald R. Ford Foundation, the board of the Eddie Adams Photo Workshop, the Atlanta Board of Visitors of the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), and a member of the advisory council, Center for American History, University of Texas, Austin. His archive is housed at the Center for American History at the University of Texas, Austin, which is also the publisher of three of his books.
Kennerly is a Canon Explorer of Light, and exclusively uses their digital cameras for his work. The August issue of "pdn" features a full page Canon ad about one of his photos that runs on the inside back cover of the magazine.
For more information about David Hume Kennerly go to www.kennerly.com
Mohamed El-Erian
[Excerpted from the Los Angeles Times, 9/5/2008]
Bond fund giant Pimco on Thursday said Mohamed El-Erian would take over as sole chief executive of the company at year's end, cementing his position as one of the world's most influential financial executives.
El-Erian, 50, will be alone at the top of Newport Beach-based Pimco, after sharing the reins as co-CEO for nine months with Bill Thompson, who has led the company for 15 years. Thompson, 63, had agreed in January to stay on for five more years. But he said he decided to retire because he believed that "CEOs shouldn't stay too long at the party."
He also said he believed that El-Erian was "uniquely qualified" to lead the money management firm, which has mushroomed to $840 billion in client assets and 1,000 employees from $40 billion and 125 employees when Thompson became CEO in 1993.
El-Erian's ascension was virtually assured after he returned to Pimco in January after less than two years as head of Harvard University's $35-billion endowment fund. Before taking the Harvard job, El-Erian had been one of the rising stars among Pimco's fund managers. He joined Pimco, short for Pacific Investment Management Co., in 1999.
The New York-born son of an Egyptian diplomat, El-Erian holds an Oxford economics degree and is fluent in Arabic, English and French. Before his first stint at Pimco, he spent 15 years with the International Monetary Fund, a lender to developing nations. At Pimco he racked up hefty returns managing the company's emerging-market bond portfolios.
Pimco is best known to many investors for its Total Return Fund, which with $130 billion in assets is the world's largest bond mutual fund and is a common investment option in retirement-savings plans. The fund is managed by Bill Gross, 64, who also is chief investment officer of Pimco -- a title El-Erian also shares and will continue to share, Pimco said.
The company, majority-owned by German insurance titan Allianz, has long encouraged its fund managers to have strong views on market trends and to invest accordingly. More than a year ago, Pimco was vocal about the threat the nation faced from years of mounting debt and speculation in the housing market and on Wall Street.
Gross -- frequently heard on CNBC -- over the last year has been insisting that the federal government would have to take a larger role in saving the economy and financial system from the housing crash. His critics say Gross is trying to protect Pimco portfolios that are heavy with bonds of troubled mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Brian Greene
Brian Greene is a physicist who has been working on quantum gravity and unified theories for nearly two decades. He is widely recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in the field and also for his lucid presentations of cutting-edge research to scientists and fellow physicists as well as to general audiences.
His books, The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos, both spent six months on The New York Times bestsellers list and have received much critical acclaim. The Elegant Universe was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of the 2000 Aventis Prize for Science Books. It has sold more than a million copies worldwide and has been translated into 35 languages. In its starred review of The Fabric of the Cosmos, Publishers Weekly hailed "Greene's unparalleled ability to translate higher mathematics and its findings into everyday language and images, through the adept use of metaphor and analogy, and crisp, witty prose." The New York Times concurred, saying that Greene's book "sends the reader's imagination hurtling through the universe on an astonishing ride," and The Washington Post calls Greene "the single best explainer of abstruse concepts in the world today." It is currently being adapted into a 4-part NOVA mini-series slated for broadcast in 2010.
Greene became the first physicist to edit the prestigious series, The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006. In his introduction, Greene wrote, "Willful ignorance of science is not okay. We are living through a radical cultural shift, once in which science and technology play an increasingly pervasive role in everyday life . . . A scientifically literate public is, plainly, increasingly vital."
Professor Greene received his undergraduate training at Harvard University where he graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1984. He went on to graduate school at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and received his doctorate in 1986. From 1987-90, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, and in 1990 he joined the faculty of Cornell University as an assistant professor. By 1995 he had been promoted to tenured associate and then full professor, along the way winning an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award. In 1996, Professor Greene left Cornell to join Columbia University, where he holds a full professorship in both the Physics and the Mathematics Departments. He has lectured in more than 25 countries at both a general and a technical level.
His research interests focus on the quantum mechanical properties of space and time. In 1990, Dr. Greene and a Harvard colleague discovered mirror symmetry - a remarkable property of string theory that has launched a vibrant field of research in both mathematics and physics. In 1993 and subsequently in 1995, Dr. Greene and his colleagues discovered topology change. Whereas Einstein's general relativity shows that the fabric of space can stretch in time (resulting in our expanding universe), it does not allow the fabric to rip. To the contrary, Dr. Greene and his colleagues showed that in string theory - by including quantum mechanics - the fabric of space can tear, establishing that the universe can evolve in far more dramatic ways than Einstein had envisioned. Greene's "elegant universe" and study of string theory have been widely profiled by the media including a one-hour segment on ABC's Brave New World series on Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, Charlie Rose, The Colbert Report, Seed Magazine, Scientific American, USA Today, The New York Times, Conan O'Brien and The Late Show with David Letterman. Currently, Greene is co-director of Columbia's ISCAP (Institute for Strings, Cosmology, and Astroparticle Physics) and is leading a research program studying the cosmological implications of string theory.
In the Fall of 2003, Dr. Greene hosted the three-part NOVA special The Elegant Universe, which won an Emmy Award and a 2004 Peabody Award for broadcast excellence. The NOVA website received nearly two million hits during the three day airing of the show.
He also co-founded the first annual World Science Festival, a weeklong extravaganza that enabled the general public to explore science, from cutting-edge research to works in theatre, film, and the arts inspired by scientific ideas. The hugely successful festival was held in New York City in 2008 and hosted over 120,000 visitors.
Dr. Greene's next book, Icarus at the Edge of Time, is a futuristic retelling of the Icarus myth. It will be published in September 2008.
Irshad Manji
The New York Times calls Irshad Manji "Osama bin Laden's worst nightmare." Oprah Winfrey has given her the first annual Chutzpah Award for "audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction." She takes both as a compliment.
Irshad is Director of the Moral Courage Project at New York University. It develops young leaders who will challenge conformity and champion creativity. They include reform-minded Muslims, whom Irshad is strengthening through her books and films.
She is the internationally bestselling author of the Trouble with Islam Today: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith. In those countries that have banned her book, Irshad is reaching readers by posting free translations on her popular blog. In just over a year, the Arabic translation has been downloaded 300,000 times and circulated by youth throughout the Middle East.
Irshad is also creator of the acclaimed PBS documentary, Faith Without Fear, which follows her journey to reconcile Islam with freedom and human rights. It is now being screened in Europe and shown via digital technologies in many parts of the Muslim world.
For her pioneering work, Irshad receives death threats and distinctions:
