Emeritus Professor of History, University of Tennessee Daniel Feller is Distinguished Professor in the Humanities Emeritus and Editor/Director Emeritus of The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Feller came to UT as Professor of History and Jackson project director in 2003 and continued until his retirement in 2020. Previously he had taught for 17 years at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and before that for three years at Northland College in Ashland, Wisconsin. Professor Feller’s scholarly interests encompass mid-nineteenth-century America as a whole, with special attention to Jacksonian politics and the coming of the Civil War. Besides the publications listed below, he has contributed to reference works and compilations including the Oxford Companion to United States History, Reader’s Guide to American History, Dictionary of American History, American National Biography, The Encyclopedia of American Political History, and the AHA Guide to Historical Literature. Feller’s critical essays and review articles have appeared in Reviews in American History, Documentary Editing, Tennessee Historical Quarterly, and on H-SHEAR. For 14 years Feller served as Conference Coordinator for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR), and in 2018 he was the recipient of SHEAR’s Distinguished Service Award. His other recognitions include the Knoxville Area Transit Most Valuable Passenger Award and the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for History in the Federal Government, awarded in 2017 for Volume X of The Papers of Andrew Jackson. Feller has spoken widely to public audiences and educators on Jacksonian Democracy, on Andrew Jackson’s presidential banking and Indian policies, and on slavery and the coming of the Civil War. He has given several presentations as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians, and in 2000 he was a Commonwealth Fund Lecturer in American History at University College London. His major current project is to complete a study of Benjamin Tappan, a Jacksonian politician, scientist, social reformer, and freethinker. Education Ph.D., University of Wisconsin, 1981 Selected Publications Editor, The Papers of Andrew Jackson, Volumes VII-XI, 1829–1833 (University of Tennessee Press, 2007–2019) Editor, Harriet Martineau’s 1838 Retrospect of Western Travel (M. E. Sharpe, 2000), abridged with Editor's introduction, notes and, index. The Jacksonian Promise: America, 1815-1840 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) The Public Lands in Jacksonian Politics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1984)
FedEx Professor of Law; Author of The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas, University of Memphis Daniel Kiel is the FedEx Professor of Law at the University of Memphis, where he teaches Property, Constitutional Law, and Education & Civil Rights. His scholarly work centers of education law, as well as constitutional questions of citizenship and justice. He is the director of The Memphis 13, a documentary film sharing the stories of the first graders who first desegregated schools in Memphis, and the author of The Transition: Interpreting Justice from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas (Stanford Univ. Press), which traces the lives and work of the two justices at the center of the most consequential Supreme Court transition of the past 75 years. In addition, Professor Kiel received a Fulbright Fellowship in 2015 and researched post-apartheid education policy at the University of the Free State in South Africa. Professor Kiel's broader scholarly work has been published in a variety of journals and periodicals and has been shared at museums, universities, film festivals, and conferences across the country. At the University of Memphis, he has been awarded both the university-wide Distinguished Teaching Award and the Martin Luther King, Jr., Human Rights Award, and has served in multiple capacities, including as an associate director, at the Benjamin Hooks Institute for Social Change. Education J.D., Harvard Law School, 2004; B.A., University of Texas at Austin, 2001
Faculty Lecturer, International Relations, McGill University My research specialization focuses on political violence in southern Africa. My teaching focuses on Africa and the Middle East.
Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, Harvard University David R. Liu is the Richard Merkin Professor and director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, vice-chair of the faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator. Liu’s research integrates chemistry and evolution to illuminate biology and enable next-generation therapeutics. His major research interests include the engineering, evolution, and in vivo delivery of genome editing proteins such as base editors to study and treat genetic diseases; the evolution of proteins with novel therapeutic potential using phage-assisted continuous evolution (PACE); and the discovery of bioactive synthetic small molecules and synthetic polymers using DNA-templated organic synthesis and DNA-encoded libraries. Base editing—the first general method to perform precision gene editing without double-stranded breaks, and a Science 2017 Breakthrough of the Year finalist—as well as prime editing, PACE, and DNA-templated synthesis are four examples of technologies pioneered in his laboratory. These technologies are used by thousands of laboratories around the world and have enabled the study and potential treatment of many genetic diseases. Liu graduated first in his class at Harvard College in 1994. During his doctoral research at UC Berkeley, Liu initiated the first general effort to expand the genetic code in living cells. He earned his PhD in 1999 and became assistant professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University in the same year. He was promoted to associate professor in 2003 and to full professor in 2005. Liu became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator in 2005 and joined the JASONs, academic science advisors to the U.S. government, in 2009. In 2016 he became a Core Institute Member and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Director of the Chemical Biology and Therapeutics Science Program. Liu has been elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the 2022 King Faisal Prize Laureate in Medicine. He has earned several University-wide distinctions for teaching at Harvard, including the Joseph R. Levenson Memorial Teaching Prize, the Roslyn Abramson Award, and a Harvard College Professorship. Liu has published more than 220 papers and is the inventor on more than 85 issued U.S. patents. His research accomplishments have earned distinctions including the Ronald Breslow Award for Biomimetic Chemistry, the American Chemical Society David Perlman Award, ACS Chemical Biology Award, the American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award, the Arthur Cope Young Scholar Award, the NIH Marshall Nirenberg Lecturer, and awards from the Sloan Foundation, Beckman Foundation, NSF CAREER Program, and Searle Scholars Program. In 2016 and 2020 he was named one of the Top 20 Translational Researchers in the world by Nature Biotechnology, and was named one of Nature’s 10 researchers in world and to the Foreign Policy Leading Global Thinkers in 2017. He is the founder or co-founder of several biotechnology and therapeutics companies, including Beam Therapeutics, Prime Medicine, Editas Medicine, Pairwise Plants, Exo Therapeutics, Chroma Medicine, and Resonance Medicine.
Assistant Professor of Finance and Financial Markets, Utrecht University Dirk works as Assistant Professor of Finance and Financial Markets at the Utrecht University School of Economics (U.S.E.). His research is focused on the behavior of financial consumers, financial institutions and financial markets. Examples of recent research topics in the area of consumer behavior involve checkout decisions when confronted with Dynamic Currency Conversion checkout options and switching behavior of bank clients based in deposit rate differentials. An example of a recent project on the interplay of financial institutions and financial markets is a study to the medium-term effects of ESG rating revisions on stock prices. In addition to his research, Dirk is program director of the MSc. in Banking and Finance at U.S.E. and teaches courses on Investment Management. Outside academia, he is a member of the Euronext AEX Indices Steering Committee and of the editorial board of the VBA Journaal which is a quarterly journal published by the CFA Society VBA Netherlands.
Climate Research Scientist, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Dillon Amaya is a research physical scientist at the Physical Sciences Laboratory (PSL) of the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratories in Boulder, Colorado. His main interests involve climate variability and change on seasonal-decadal timescales with an emphasis on tropical-extratropical interactions and air-sea feedbacks. His work further includes research into the dynamical drivers behind recent Northeast Pacific marine heatwaves. Dillon's current projects include investigating subseasonal-seasonal (S2S) predictability limits of ocean parameters in the California Current System, with the goal of assisting decision makers responsible for managing sensitive marine ecosystems along the U.S. West Coast.
