Camille Cates Barnett, Ph.D., Managing Director, City of Philadelphia since January 2008, is a professional manager, having worked in the cities of Sunnyvale, Ca, Dallas, Houston and Austin, Texas and Washington, DC. Before coming to Philadelphia as Managing Director, she was an advisor and consultant to public sector clients to improve governance, with the Public Strategies Group, and Public Financial Management. She encourages collaborative approaches to growth, disaster recovery, economic strength, environmental sustainability and other issues that cross governmental jurisdictions. She has written numerous articles on emerging networks in governing and transforming the public section. Dr. Barnett has a Ph.D. in public administration from the University of Southern California and has taught at the University of Southern California and the University of Texas at Austin.

Eugenie Birch is the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research and Education. She teaches courses in community and economic development as well as planning history. In 2003, Dr. Birch became a founding co-Director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research. Professor Birch has published widely in planning history and contemporary urban revitalization. Her most recent books are Growing Greener Cities, Urban Sustainability in the Twenty-First Century (2008) and Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster, Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (2006), both edited with Susan M. Wachter. In 2009, Routledge will publish the Urban and Regional Planning Reader (that she edited) and the International City/County Management Association and the American Planning Association will issue Local Government Planning or the "Green Book" (co-edited with Gary Hack, Paul Sedway and Mitchell Silver).

Robert Cervero is a professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches and conducts research in the area of sustainable transportation policy and planning. He has been an advisor and consultant on transport projects in many countries, most recently in China, Colombia, Brazil, the Philippines, and Indonesia. His current research is on: travel impacts of suburbanization in China through Berkeley's Volvo Center for Future Urban Transport; influences of built environments on public health in Bogotá; land-use and environmental impacts of freeway removal in San Francisco and Seoul, Korea; traffic generation effects of transit-oriented development; and transit value capture in Hong Kong.

Ingrid Gould Ellen is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning and Co-Director of NYU's Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy. She joined the Wagner faculty in the fall of 1997 and presently teaches courses in microeconomics, urban economics, and urban policy. Professor Ellen's research interests center on urban social and economic policy, with a particular focus on housing and community development. She is author of Sharing America's Neighborhoods: The Prospects for Stable Racial Integration (Harvard University Press, 2000) and has been published in such journals as Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Urban Studies, Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs, and Housing Policy Debate.

Howard Fineman is widely respected throughout the news industry for his knowledge of the political landscape. A senior Washington correspondent and columnist for Newsweek, Fineman has reported from the nation's capital since 1980. His "Living Politics" column appears weekly on Newsweek.com and MSNBC.com. He also serves as a political analyst for NBC News and is a frequent contributor to Hardball with Chris Matthews and Countdown with Keith Olbermann. An author as well, Fineman recently released his latest book, The Thirteen American Arguments, which was a national best-seller published by Random House, and will be released in paperback in 2009. Having interviewed and written about every major presidential candidate since 1984, Howard Fineman is one of the leading journalists in Washington. His cover story on President Bush, "Bush and God," was part of a series of Newsweek articles that won the magazine a National Magazine Award for General Excellence in 2003. Fineman's work on the 2004 presidential campaign led to another nomination in the same category that year.

Andrew Haughwout joined the Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in January 2000 as an Economist. He was appointed an officer of the Bank in 2003. In July 2005, Mr. Haughwout was appointed head of the Bank's newly created Microeconomic and Regional Studies group. He currently serves as Chair of the Federal Reserve System Committee on Regional Analysis. Prior to joining the New York Fed, Mr. Haughwout served as Assistant Professor at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 1992 to 2000, where he directed the Urban and Regional Planning program from 1998-1999. Mr. Haughwout was an economist with the Congressional Budget Office from 1985 to 1987. Mr. Haughwout served as Editor of the Journal of Regional Science from 2002 to 2006 and is currently Associate Editor for the International Regional Science Review and the Review of Regional Studies and a Councillor-at-large of the North American Regional Science Council. His publications have appeared in recent issues of the Journal of Public Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, and Brookings-Wharton Papers on Urban Affairs. Mr. Haughwout graduated with honors from Swarthmore College with a B.A. in Political Science and Economics, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1993.

Kenneth T. Jackson is a Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences and Director of the Herbert H. Lehman Center for American History, and specializes in urban, social, and military history. He received his doctorate from the University of Chicago (1966). Professor Jackson has been president of the Urban History Association, the Society of American Historians, the Organization of American Historians, and the New York Historical Society. His publications include: Cities in American History (with Stanley Schultz, 1972); Silent Cities: The Evolution of the American Cemetery (with Camilo Vergara, 1990); Encyclopedia of New York City (ed., 1995); Empire City: New York Through the Centuries (with David Dunbar, 2001); and Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (with Hilary Ballon, 2007). His best-known book is Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), which won both the Francis Parkman and Bancroft Prizes and which is now in its 28th printing.

Phyllis Kaniss is Executive Director of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, where she serves as Executive Editor of The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. She is the author of Making Local News (University of Chicago Press, 1991), a study of the metropolitan news media's coverage of their cities and regions and The Media and the Mayor's Race: The Failure of Urban Political Reporting (Indiana University Press, 1995), which won the 1995 Bart Richards Award for media criticism. Dr. Kaniss helped create Student Voices, a civic education initiative based at the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The project worked with 33 public high schools during the 1999 Philadelphia mayoral campaign, bringing online news into social studies classrooms, and creating opportunities for students to engage in civic life through direct interaction with candidates and the media. Previously, Dr. Kaniss served as Assistant Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication, where she continues to teach undergraduate courses, including "Local News and Urban Policy," and "The Future of News and the Young Audience." She has also worked with Penn's Urban Studies Program and the College of General Studies.

John Landis is the Crossways Professor of City and Regional Planning and the Chair of the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches courses in housing, urban economics, GIS, project development, and sustainable urban development. Prof. Landis' research interests span a variety of urban development topics; his recent research and publications focus on growth management, infill housing, and the geography of urban employment centers. Together with several generations of PhD students, Prof. Landis developed the California Urban Futures series of urban growth models. He is currently engaged in a National Science Foundation-funded project to model, forecast, and develop alternative spatial scenarios of U.S. population and employment patterns and their impacts on travel demand, habitat loss, and water use through 2050.

Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where he teaches in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Department of Sociology, the Program in Latin American Studies, the Program in African American Studies, and the Urban Studies Program. He has served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on international migration, race and housing, discrimination, education, urban poverty, and Latin America, especially Mexico. His most recent books are New Faces in New Places: The Changing Geography of American Immigration (Russell Sage Foundation 2008), Categorically Unequal: The American Stratification System (Russell Sage Foundation 2007), Crossing the Border: Research from the Mexican Migration Project co-editedwith Jorge Durand (Russell Sage Foundation 2006. He is also coauthor of the award winning books American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Harvard 1993) and Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Age of Economic Integration (Russell Sage 2002). In addition to serving as President of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, he is Past-President of the American Sociological Association and the Population Association of America.

Chris Matthews is the host of MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and of NBC News's "The Chris Matthews Show." Previously, Matthews served as Washington Bureau Chief for The San Francisco Examiner and as a national, syndicated columnist for The San Francisco Chronicle. Matthews spent 15 years in politics and government, working in the White House for four years under President Jimmy Carter as a Presidential speechwriter and on the President's Reorganization Project, in the U.S. Senate for five years on the staffs of Senator Frank Moss (Utah) and Senator Edmund Muskie (Maine), and as the top aide to Speaker of the House Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, Jr. for six years. Matthews is the author of Hardball (1988), American: Beyond Our Grandest Notions (2002), Kennedy & Nixon (1996), Now, Let me Tell What I Really Think (2001) and Life's a Campaign: What Politics Has Taught Me About Friendship, Rivalry, Reputation, and Success.

Stephen P. Mullin is Senior Vice President and Principal of Econsult Corporation. His consulting practice concentrates on state and public finance and policy analysis, economic and real estate development and impact analyses, and business strategies utilizing government incentive programs. Mr. Mullin served from 1993-2000 as Philadelphia's Director of Commerce, chairing the Mayor's Economic Development Cabinet and coordinating activities of the City's various development agencies. He served on many Boards and Commissions, including the City Planning Commission and Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, the Philadelphia Commercial Development Corporation (Chair), the Airport Advisory Board, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Historic Commission, the Port of Philadelphia and Camden and the Penn's Landing Development Corporation. Mr. Mullin also served as Philadelphia's Director of Finance from 1992-93, during the city's fiscal turnaround. He has authored articles, delivered speeches and participated on panels discussing local government policy, environmental issues, education, sports and convention center facility finance, and e-commerce.

Dowell Myers is professor of urban planning and demography in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development, at the University of Southern California. He is chair of the school's faculty council and directs the school's Population Dynamics Research Group, whose recent projects have been funded by the National Institute of Health, the Haynes Foundation, Fannie Mae Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Of particular note, Dr. Myers leads the ongoing USC California Demographic Futures research project. Recent applications have focused on the upward mobility of immigrants to the US and Southern California, trajectories into homeownership, changing transportation behavior, education and labor force trends, and projections for the future of the California population.

Arthur C. Nelson is Director of the Metropolitan Institute and Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning in the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech's Northern Virginia center in Alexandria. For the past thirty years, Dr. Nelson has conducted pioneering research in growth management, urban containment, public facility finance, economic development, and metropolitan development patterns. Numerous organizations have sponsored Dr. Nelson's research such as the National Science Foundation; National Academy of Sciences; U.S. Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Commerce, and Transportation; and the U.K. Department of the Environment. His research and practice has led to the publication of 14 books and more than 200 other scholarly and professional publications.

Georgette Chapman Phillips is the Vice Dean of the Wharton Undergraduate Division; a Professor of Real Estate and Legal Studies at Wharton, and a Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. She was also an academic visitor at the London School of Economics. Prior to joining the Penn faculty she was in private law practice in New York and Philadelphia. She was named as the Ballard Research Scholar at the Zell/Lurie Real Estate Center at the Wharton School. Professor Phillips lectures internationally on topics in commercial real estate and urban planning. She is a contributing editor of the Real Estate Law Journal and a member of the editorial board of The Practical Real Estate Lawyer. Her scholarly work has appeared in, among others, the Emory Law Journal, the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Boston University Law Review, the University of Connecticut Law Review and the Real Estate Law Journal.

Saskia Sassen is in the Department of Sociology and The Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She is also a Centennial Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. Saskia Sassen's research and writing focuses on globalization (including social, economic and political dimensions), immigration, global cities (including cities and terrorism), the new networked technologies, and changes within the liberal state that result from current transnational conditions. In her research she has focused on the unexpected and the counterintuitive as a way to cut through established "truths." Her three major books: The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge University Press 1988), The Global City (Princeton University Press 1991; 2nd ed 2002), and Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2006) have each sought to demolish a key established "truth."

Marilyn Jordan Taylor has recently been named Dean of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Taylor, Partner in Charge of the Urban Design and Planning Practice at Skidmore Owings & Merrill LLP and the first woman to serve as chairman of the firm, is internationally known for her involvement in the design of large-scale urban projects and civic initiatives. During a 35-year career with Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Ms. Taylor has led many of the firm's largest and most complex projects around the world. She was also the first architect and the first woman to serve as chairman of the Urban Land Institute, a non-profit research and educational institution, where she championed a renewed focus on cities, sustainable communities and infrastructure investment. She is a founding member of the New York New Visions Design and Planning Coalition and serves on the Advisory Board of the Penn Institute for Urban Research.

David B. Thornburgh is the Executive Director of the University of Pennsylvania's Fels Institute of Government. Prior to his appointment he served as a Senior Advisor to the Econsult Corporation, a Philadelphia-based regional economic consulting firm. In 2006 and 2007 he served as CEO of the Alliance for Regional Stewardship (ARS). Before joining the Alliance Mr. Thornburgh served as Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Economy League (PEL) in Greater Philadelphia from 1994 to 2006. Mr. Thornburgh has extensive experience in the areas of regional economic development and civic affairs. From 1988 to 1994 he served as Director of the Wharton Small Business Development Center. In 1990 Mr. Thornburgh founded the Enterprise Center in West Philadelphia, an urban business accelerator program for high-growth potential African-American entrepreneurs. He has spoken to over 200 business, civic and policy groups, and lectured at Wharton, Penn, Drexel and a number of other universities on topics such as higher education and economic development, entrepreneurship and business planning, and marketing, communications and strategic planning.

Susan Wachter is the Richard B. Worley Professor of Financial Management and Professor of Real Estate and Finance at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Co-Director, Penn Institute for Urban Research and the Director of the Wharton Geospatial Initiative. At Penn, Dr. Wachter served as chair of its Real Estate Department from 1997 to 1999. Dr. Wachter served as Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a President appointed and Senate confirmed position, from 1998 to 2001. Dr. Wachter lectures internationally to a diverse range of audiences from policy makers to industry groups on local governance, economic development and housing. She held the Celia Moh Visiting Professor Chair at Singapore Management University in 2006. Dr. Wachter is the author of over 150 publications. Her research on quantifying the impacts of greening has generated much interest. Her current research is directed towards modeling default and delinquency; tenure choice and homeownership affordability; real estate price index methodologies; modeling neighborhood change and sustainable homeownership.

Rae Zimmerman is Professor of Planning and Public Administration at New York University's Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and since 1998, Director of the Institute for Civil Infrastructure Systems (ICIS), a center, initially funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of collaborative and interdisciplinary research, education, and outreach on infrastructure services. She leads ICIS's partnership in the U.S. DHS-funded Homeland Security Center for Risk and Economic Modeling of Terrorism Events (CREATE) located at the University of Southern California, where her work focuses on critical infrastructure security, and also conducts research supported by New York University's Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response. She authored Governmental Management of Chemical Risk (Lewis/CRC), co-produced Beyond September 11th (University of Colorado (Boulder) 2003), and co-edited Digital Infrastructures (Routledge 2004) and Sustaining Urban Networks (Routledge, 2005). She directed Wagner's Urban Planning Program for the fourth time from 2004-2007.