Anima Anandkumar is Bren Professor at Caltech and Senior Director of AI Research at NVIDIA. She received her B.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, and her Ph.D. from Cornell University. She did her postdoctoral research at MIT and an assistant professorship at the University of California Irvine. She has received several honors such as the IEEE fellowship, Alfred. P. Sloan Fellowship, NSF Career Award, and Faculty Fellowships from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Adobe. She is part of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network.

Tom Nichols is a contributing writer at The Atlantic magazine and Professor Emeritus of national security affairs at the Naval War College. His career included deep engagement on a range of foreign policy issues including Russia, nuclear weapons, and the role of war in international affairs. He also worked in government and public policy in the Massachusetts House and in the U.S. Senate. Today he writes on the fight for democracy in America and around the world. He is a prolific author. His most wellknown book, 2017’s The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters, examined the collapse of trust in experts and the increase in social attacks against science and learning from a public that thinks it knows as much as experts. He makes the case that that this false egalitarianism is dangerous to democracy. The Death of Expertise has been published in fifteen foreign editions, including Chinese (complex and simple), Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Armenian, Russian, Ukrainian, Finnish, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Romanian, Vietnamese, and Arabic.

Laura R. Olson is Thurmond Professor of Political Science, affiliated faculty in Religious Studies, and Director of the Ph.D. program in Policy Studies at Clemson University. She has been a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Italy (University of Bari, 2020), president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (2020), and editor-in-chief of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. A native of Racine, Wisconsin, she earned a B.A. in political science from Northwestern University in 1990, as well as an M.A. (1991) and Ph.D. (1996) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on contemporary religion and politics with emphases on public opinion and civic engagement. Her work has appeared in leading scholarly journals including Political Research Quarterly, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. She is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of nine books, most recently Religion and Politics in America: Faith, Culture, and Strategic Choices (Routledge, 2018), Beyond Red State, Blue State: Electoral Gaps in the Twenty-First Century American Electorate (Prentice Hall, 2008), and Religious Interests in Community Conflict: Beyond the Culture Wars (Baylor University Press, 2007). A frequent source for various media outlets, she has been interviewed on CNN, National Public Radio, and BBC Radio and quoted in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today. She also won Clemson University’s campus-wide Fluor Daniel Student Government Excellence in Teaching Award in 2003.

For more than 25 years, Amy Walter has built a reputation as an accurate, objective, and insightful political analyst with unparalleled access to campaign insiders and decision-makers. One of Washington’s Most Powerful Women in 2021, she is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter, where she provides analysis of the issues, trends and events that shape the political environment.

A contributor to the PBS NewsHour, she provides weekly political analysis for the popular “Politics Monday” segment and is a featured contributor for their Election and Convention special coverage events. She is also a regular Sunday panelist on NBC’s Meet the Press and CNN’s Inside Politics and appears frequently on Special Report with Bret Baier on Fox News Channel. From 2017 until early 2021, Walter was the host of the weekly nationally syndicated program Politics with Amy Walter on The Takeaway from WNYC and PRX. She’s also the former political director of ABC News.

Amy was an inaugural fellow at the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago, where she now serves on the Board of Advisors. She graduated summa cum laude from Colby College, earned an honorary degree as a Doctor of Letters, and serves as a Trustee to the Board.