Prior to his service as President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers enjoyed a brilliant career as an economist and public servant, culminating in a highly successful term as United States Secretary of the Treasury. The youngest tenured professor in Harvard's modern history, Dr. Summers was the first social scientist to win the prestigious Waterman Prize of the National Science Foundation. He was serving as chief economist of the World Bank when President Bill Clinton tapped him to serve...

Dean Ornish, M.D., is the founder and president of the Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California and Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. For over 30 years, Dr. Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse even severe coronary heart disease, without drugs or surgery. Medicare has recently agreed to provide coverage for this program, the first time that Medicare has...

Garth Fagan is one of America’s most original and influential choreographers. Born in Jamaica, Fagan graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, and studied in New York with many of the pioneers of 20th Century dance, including José Limon, Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham. Combining the traditions of Afro-Caribbean dance with classical ballet, modern and post-modern techniques, Fagan has developed a uniquely expressive dance vocabulary. He first won acclaim with works created for...

In 2000, Dr. John L. Hennessy was chosen to serve as the tenth President of Stanford University. A computer scientist and entrepreneur as well as educator, Hennessy is responsible for crucial innovations in computer programming that our present information age possible. John Hennesy's interest in computers began in adolescence. As a high school student on Long Island, he built home computers from mail-order kits. After earning a Ph.D. at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, he...

The only son of a widowed immigrant mother who worked as a cleaning lady, Donald Johanson did so poorly on his SATs that his high school guidance counselor told him to forget about going to college. Johanson ignored the counselor's advice, pursued higher education, and earned a Ph.D. in anthropology at the University of Chicago. Within a year of earning his doctorate, Johanson made news around the world with a discovery that dramatically altered our understanding of human evolution. The...

George F. Bass is the acknowledged father of underwater archeology. His excavations of shipwrecks around the world have revolutionized archeology and profoundly influenced our understanding of the earliest ages of civilization. He was a first-year doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania when he led his first undersea excavation. After only six diving lessons at his local YMCA, he directed the excavation of a Bronze Age shipwreck off the Turkish coast, the first ancient wreck to...

In 1992, Gary Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his application of economic theory to sociological issues, particularly his pioneering studies of human capital, discrimination and crime. A Princeton University graduate, he studied with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, where he first applied economic analysis to broader social issues. His dissertation on the effects of prejudice on the earnings and employment opportunities of minorities led to his landmark book...

In 1992, Gary Becker was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for his application of economic theory to sociological issues, particularly his pioneering studies of human capital, discrimination and crime. A Princeton University graduate, he studied with Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago, where he first applied economic analysis to broader social issues. His dissertation on the effects of prejudice on the earnings and employment opportunities of minorities led to his landmark book...

This podcast, recorded at the Academy of Achievement's 2000 gathering in Scottsdale, Arizona, features two outstanding space scientists, Story Musgrave and Donna Shirley. Story Musgrave grew up on a farm in Western Massachusetts, with what he calls "an extraordinarily dysfunctional family." Following service in the United States Marine Corps, he earned his medical degree at Columbia University. In 1967, he was selected by NASA to be among the first cohort of astronaut-scientists. He practiced...

In November 2000, Dr. Ruth J. Simmons became the 18th President of Brown University; she is the first African American to preside over an Ivy League school. The twelfth child of a sharecropper turned aircraft worker, she grew up in Houston in a home without books, or even a desk. She admits she was terrified to leave home for the first time to attend Dillard University in New Orleans, but Simmons overcame her fears, excelled in college, and went on to earn a Doctorate in Romance Languages and...

Frank McCourt was already retired when he published his first book at age 66. Angela's Ashes, a memoir of his impoverished boyhood in Limerick, Ireland, shot to the top of the best-seller lists and remained there for over a year. Angela's Ashes won McCourt the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It was still topping the paperback lists when McCourt's second book 'Tis hit the bookstores, and the best-seller lists. A third bestseller, Teacher Man, recounts...

Eric Steven Lander is the founding director of the Broad Institute (a collaboration between MIT and Harvard) and director of its genome biology program. As one of the principal leaders of the Human Genome Project, Lander is exploring the molecular mechanisms underlying the basis of human disease. He was captain of the math team at Stuyvesant High School, and graduated in 1974, and participated in the Achievement Summit in Salt Lake City as a high school delegate. Lander then attended...

Dr. William Daniel Phillips shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to laser cooling, a technique to slow the movement of gaseous atoms in order to better study them. He was the valedictorian of his high school class in rural Pennsylvania, went on to graduate summa cum laude from college, and after that earned his physics doctorate from MIT. Phillips studied and advanced the scientific art of supercooling atoms for trapping and examination. Cooling slows the speed of...

The Astronomer Royal of the United Kingdom, Martin Rees was appointed to the House of Lords in 2005 as Baron Rees of Ludlow. One of the world's leading cosmologists, he is renowned for his pioneering studies of quasars, galaxies, black holes and the origins of the universe. His early study of the distribution of quasars helped discredit the "steady state" theory of the universe. He was the first to propose the now widely accepted idea that the engines driving the high-energy deep space...

Although the historian Stephen Ambrose (1936 - 2002) wrote over 30 books, he was almost as well-known to the public for his appearances on television's political discussion programs, where he was frequently called upon to discuss the American presidency, the history of the American West and the legacy of the Second World War. As a boy growing up in Wisconsin, Stephen Ambrose planned to follow in his father's footsteps as a small-town doctor; he entered the University of Wisconsin as a pre-med...

For 18 years, Alan K. Simpson represented the State of Wyoming in the United States Senate. As Assistant Majority Leader for ten of those years, he was an influential member of the body's Republican leadership. Partisanship aside, he was noted throughout his service for independent thinking, personal integrity and for a dry sense of humor that evaporated pretension on both sides of the aisle. Simpson grew up in Cody, Wyoming, where members of his family have practiced law for over a century....

William Julius Wilson is an award-winning sociologist and one of only 22 University Professors at Harvard University (the highest professional distinction for a Harvard faculty member). He is Past President of the American Sociological Association. Wilson has received 44 honorary degrees as well as the National Medal of Science, the highest scientific honor in the United States. He is the author of numerous publications, including "The Declining Significance of Race" which argues that the...

A lifelong leader in academia and an esteemed scholar of constitutional law, Gerhard Casper was the ninth President of Stanford University, serving from 1992 to 2000. Casper was born in Hamburg, Germany, where he survived the wartime bombing of the city. He first visited the United States at age 16, as delegate to an international forum for high school students. He earned law degrees at the University of Hamburg and at Yale University, completing his Doctor of Laws at the University of...

Growing up in a working class neighborhood in Chicago, Mike Krzyzewski learned to rely on himself to organize the games he wanted to play. When he failed to make his high school football team, he turned to basketball and became a local star. At that time, he hoped for nothing more than to teach high school and coach basketball. A recruiter from the U.S. Military Academy changed all that. At West Point and in the United States Army, Krzyzewski began playing and coaching at a higher level...

David Herbert Donald (1920 - 2009) was a distinguished historian, longtime chair of the graduate program in American history at Harvard, and a leading authority on the Civil War era and the presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Donald's Lincoln studies began at the University of Illinois, where he was a graduate assistant to Professor James Randall. Donald assisted Randall in preparing a four-volume Lincoln biography that served as the definitive portrait of the 16th president until Donald's own...

John Hope Franklin (1915 - 2009) was a distinguished American historian. Author of more than dozen books, he is best known for his definitive history of the African American experience, From Slavery to Freedom. He was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, the son of an attorney and a schoolteacher. He earned his undergraduate degree at Fisk University in Nashville, where he found a mentor in Professor Theodore Currier, who provided a generous loan to pursue his doctorate at Harvard, a story...

For 40 years, Martin Perl plumbed the mysteries of matter. His experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center led to the discovery of the "tau lepton," a particle similar to an electron but vastly heavier, that plays a central role in one of the most fundamental questions in physics: "What is mass, and why do things have the masses they do?" This landmark contribution to science earned him the 1995 Nobel Prize in Physics. The son of Russian immigrants, he grew up in Brooklyn, New York....

Dr. Johnnetta Betsch Cole made history in 1987, when she became the first African-American woman to serve as President of Spelman College. Ever since it was founded, Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia has been the nation's foremost institution of higher education specifically intended for African American women. Yet, for the first century of Spelman's existence, no African American woman had ever served as president of the college. Spelman prospered under Dr. Cole's leadership. In 1992, the...

In 1995, Dr. Kent R. Weeks made one of the greatest archeological discoveries of the century, the tomb of the 50 sons of Pharaoh Rameses II. A vast complex, unseen by human eyes for over 3,0000 years, it is the largest tomb in Egypt's fabled Valley of the Kings. Kent Weeks was fascinated by ancient Egypt from childhood. He undertook his first field work in Egypt while earning a Master's degree in anthropology at the University of Washington. After conducting a groundbreaking x-ray study of...

The most honored and admired theatrical designer of our times, John Napier has received Broadway's Tony Award for his set designs for Nicholas Nickleby, Cats, Starlight Express, Les Miserables and Sunset Boulevard. He has also created acclaimed settings for the New York and London productions of Equus, Jesus Christ Superstar and Miss Saigon. A native Londoner, he began his formal art studies in his teens, and progressed from painting, to sculpture to set design. He became an Associate...