Marian Miner Cook
Athenaeum

Laura Craft is a Senior Vice President, Heitman’s Global Head of Portfolio Sustainability Strategies, and an equity owner of the firm. She leads the firm’s sustainability platform and interacts across business lines and regions to establish systematic approaches to incorporate sustainability into investment decision-making and management of investments with the goal of creating value, reducing risk, and enhancing investment returns. Currently, Craft is the co-chair of the Pension Real Estate Association (PREA) Innovation Affinity Group and is a member of Urban Land Institute (ULI) Greenprint’s Performance Committee. Prior to joining Heitman, she spent 10 years at LaSalle Investment Management, where she began in LaSalle’s valuation and asset management groups and transitioned to develop the firm’s Global Sustainability Platform. Craft's early career experience includes market data coverage at Grubb & Ellis | Barkley Fraser, a real estate brokerage company, as well as Building Information Modeling (BIM) research and development at SmartBIM. Laura’s past industry involvement has included advising ULI Greenprint Center, the United Nations Principles for Responsible Investment (UNPRI), and the Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) on their reporting frameworks and environmental data platforms.

Craft received a double BA in Real Estate and Business Management from the University of Georgia, where she was one of 30 UGA students to earn a Leonard Leadership Scholar Certification. She is also a graduate of the Urban Land Institute’s Center for Leadership program and is a LEED Accredited Professional, having overseen over 100 LEED, IREM, Energy Star, and Green Globes designations.

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Ryan Patel is a globally recognized futurist and go-to authority on global business, political economy, and corporate governance. Currently the William F. Podlich Distinguished Fellow at CMC, Patel is an expert in scaling businesses, he's served startups and publicly traded firms. Listed as one of the “Creators to Follow” by LinkedIn Editor in Chief Daniel Roth and recognized as a “Top Voice” on Linkedin, Patel is a sought-after TV news commentator and Board Director. Patel also hosts "The Moment with Ryan Patel," featuring conversations with top innovators and executives filmed at the iconic HP Garage, the birthplace of Silicon Valley. He complements his literary talents with domestic and international keynote appearances, leading campaigns with corporations and universities such as the World Economic Forum, Davos, Mastercard, HP, Adobe, The Economist, Reuters, and more.

This Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Financial Economics Institute at CMC.

Judge John Owens has been a federal judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit since 2014. Prior to joining the court, Judge Owens was litigation partner in the Los Angeles office of Munger, Tolles & Olson LLP and a federal prosecutor for more than a decade. He earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his J.D. from Stanford Law School, where he graduated first in his class.  He served as a law clerk for the Honorable J. Clifford Wallace of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and the Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Professor Amit Ahuja is an Associate Professor of Political Science at University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the processes of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. He has studied this within the context of ethnic parties and movements, military organization, intercaste marriage, and skin color preferences in South Asia.

Professor Ahuja’s book, Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties without Ethnic Movements published by Oxford University Press was the winner of the 2020 New India Foundation Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Book Prize. He has coedited a volume with Devesh Kapur, Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State published by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a book-length project titled, Building National Armies in Multiethnic States. In 2022-23, he is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington DC. Professor Ahuja was awarded The Margret T. Getman Service to Students Award in 2015.

Professor Ahuja’s research has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies, the National Bureau of Asian Research and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, the Hellman Family Foundation, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Michigan.

Professor Ahuja's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Juliet Johnson is Professor in the Department of Political Science at McGill University, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, former President of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (2023), and former Director of the international research network Between the EU and Russia: Domains of Diversity and Contestation (2015-2023). Her research focuses on the politics of money and on memory politics, particularly in post-communist Europe. Her publications include Developments in Russian Politics (Duke 2024), Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World (Cornell 2016), A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System (Cornell 2000), and numerous scholarly and policy-oriented articles.

Professor Johnson's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at CMC.

Civitas Sessions is organized by the Kravis Lab and moderated by Executive Director Vernon C. Grigg III, JD. A lawyer by training, Grigg holds degrees from Yale Law School (J.D.), the London School of Economics (G.SC.), and the University of Michigan (BA).  Vernon comes to the Kravis Lab from his role as CEO & President of Up with People, a fifty-five-year-old international nonprofit education and arts organization. He managed a global team of 50 employees across three continents as he led the nonprofit to sustainability and health despite the challenges of the worldwide pandemic.

John J. Pitney, Jr. is Roy P. Crocker Professor of American History and Politics at Claremont McKenna College where he teaches courses on Congress, interest groups, political parties, and mass media. A leading expert on the structure and practice of American politics, Pitney is a widely published author or co-author of six books on American politics, including The Art of Political Warfare (2000), The Politics of Autism (2015) and Un-American: The Fake Patriotism of Donald J. Trump (2020). In addition to his books, Pitney has published numerous scholarly articles and short essays, and is a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines. He is routinely featured on NPR and other television and radio programs. 

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact and writes the “American Affairs” column for The New Statesman. Previously, he spent nearly a decade at News Corp., as op-ed editor of the New York Post and as a columnist and editor with the Wall Street Journal opinion pages in New York and London. Ahmari’s books include Tyranny, Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty — and What To Do About It (2023) and The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos (2021), both published by Penguin Random House.

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Jason Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, where he has published opinion pieces for more than 20 years. Topics include politics, economics, education, immigration, social inequality and race. He’s also a frequent public speaker and provides commentary for television and radio news outlets.

After joining the Journal in 1994, he was named a senior editorial page writer in 2000 and a member of the Editorial Board in 2005. He joined the Manhattan Institute, a public policy think tank focused on urban issues, in 2015. In 2008 he published Let Them In, which argues for a more free-market oriented U.S. immigration system. His second book, Please Stop Helping Us, which is about government efforts to help the black underclass, was published in 2014. In 2017, he published False Black Power?, an assessment of why black political success has not translated into more economic advancement. In 2021, he published  Maverick, a biography of the iconic economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell, and narrated the documentary film Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World. Riley’s most recent book is The Black Boom, an analysis of black economic progress prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Riley earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo. He has also worked for USA Today and the Buffalo News. He lives in suburban New York City.

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Aditya Pai '13 is a public servant and practicing attorney for entrepreneurs, workers, and low-income tenants in need of pro bono help.

Pai was a Democratic candidate for United States Representative for CA-45 (Artesia, Cerritos, north Orange County), with the platform of Service Over Politics: anti-corruption, pro-choice, with a focus on helping working families afford the American Dream.

He earned a B.A. from Claremont McKenna, J.D. from Harvard, M.Phil. from Cambridge. At 22, he managed a California policy think tank. From 24-27, his supervisor was Nobel Laureate in Economics Amartya Sen. Pai joined the California Bar at 26.

Pai was born in Bombay, India and raised in Orange County, CA where he grew up speaking Hindi and Marathi at home and Spanish and English at school. He loves language, ideas, and most of all, people.

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This program is co-sponsored by the Dreier Roundtable at CMC, whose mission it is to inspire public service.

Kenneth P. Miller is the Don H. and Edessa Rose Professor of State and Local Government at Claremont McKenna College, where he serves as Director of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government. Miller’s scholarship focuses on state and local politics, constitutional law, and political polarization. His publications include Texas vs. California: A History of Their Struggle for the Future of America (Oxford 2020), Direct Democracy and the Courts (Cambridge 2009), as well as numerous articles and book chapters on topics including the initiative process, political geography, state constitutionalism, state supreme courts, and voting rights.

The Rose Institute of State and Local Government, located at CMC, was founded in 1973. An unmatched resource for information on California state and local government, the Institute maintains extensive demographic, economic, and political databases on the Southern California region. Under the direction of nationally recognized faculty and staff, the best and brightest students from Claremont McKenna College play a significant role in researching, interpreting, and presenting data. 

This Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Rose Institute of State and Local Government at CMC.

Miriam Farah '23 graduated cum laude from Claremont McKenna College with a dual major in public policy and history with departmental honors and a minor in gender and sexuality studies. During her senior year, Farah wrote a year-long history thesis titled "The Criminalization of Girls' Mental Illness: Race, Gender, and Class in Juvenile Collaborative Courts," which won the best thesis in history and gender studies. On campus, she was heavily involved with the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and worked for Claremont Canopy, a nonprofit organization aimed to help resettle immigrants in Southern California. In high school, Farah explored her interest in the legal field by interning for McGregor Law Corp., a criminal defense law firm for three summers, and Teen Court. Her college coursework and previous experience in criminal law inspired her passion for civil rights law, leading her to work for Haysbert & Moultrie LLP, the Fair Housing and Community Development Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and the Constitutional Accountability Center. Since graduation, she has been working as a civil rights paralegal at Relman Colfax, a private public interest firm in Washington, DC focused on fair housing and fair lending. In her free time, Farah likes spending time with her family and friends, exploring D.C., and being outdoors. 

Valentina Gonzalez '23 is the Media Coordinator in the communications and external affairs department at the Vera Institute of Justice. In her role, Gonzalez tracks and distributes earned media, manages media inquiries, pitches Vera products to various news outlets, and manages administrative operations, supporting efforts to deliver messaging that advances the Institute's mission to reform the criminal legal and immigration systems. Before joining Vera in 2024, Gonzalez worked as an Elbaz Fellow in the communications division at Human Rights Watch (HRW). At HRW, she supported media strategy for research products on international human rights issues and contributed to large-scale media coverage and postproduction analytics of various products. During her fellowship, she directly worked on projects about Israel/Palestine, immigration in the U.S., the United Nations’ annual Climate Change Conference (COP28), and HRW’s 2024 World Report. Gonzalez earned a BA in International Relations with a sequence in Human Rights, Genocide, and Holocaust Studies from Claremont McKenna College in 2023. 

Michelle Ramirez '23 graduated from Claremont McKenna College with a degree in Public Policy and a Human Rights Sequence and has since been working as an impact litigation paralegal at Children's Rights. While at Claremont McKenna, Ramirez completed her senior thesis on “Examining the Equity of California’s School Funding Formula,” which aimed to measure the impact of equity-oriented school finance reforms in California on student achievement. Before joining Children’s Rights, she interned for the Learning Rights Law Center, the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and the Department for the Execution of Judgments at the Council of Europe. In her free time, Ramirez likes going to yoga, exploring new cuisines in New York City, and spending time with friends.  

Yi Shun Lai '96 is the author, most recently, of the young adult historical novel A Suffragist's Guide to the Antarctic (Simon & Schuster, 2024). Her memoir, Pin Ups, was published in 2020, and her debut novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu, was published in 2016. She has delivered inclusivity workshops to everyone from AAA video-game studios to international nonprofits, and also teaches in an MFA program for Creative Nonfiction. She graduated from Claremont McKenna College in 1996 and recently returned to campus as CMC's Assistant Director of Fellowships Advising. When she's not on campus or writing, she can be found teaching her intractable dog useless tricks.

This presentation is co-sponsored by the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights and the Elbaz Family Post-Graduate Fellowship Program.

Michelle Dowd is a contributor to The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, TIME magazine, Alpinist, The LA Review of Books, LA Parent Mag, and other national publications. She was raised on a mountain in the Angeles National Forest where she learned to navigate by the stars and forage for edible plants. Her memoir, Forager: Field Notes on Surviving a Family Cult, showcases her life growing up on an isolated mountain in California as part of an apocalyptic cult, and how she found her way out of poverty and illness by drawing on the gifts of the wilderness.
 

M. Gessen is a journalist and bestselling author who has covered political subjects from Russia, autocracy, L.G.B.T. rights, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump. Gessen's latest book is Surviving Autocracy, a bracing overview of the calamitous trajectory of American democracy under the Trump administration. As The New York Times Book Review noted in their review, “When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” Their understanding of the events and forces that have wracked Russia in recent times is unparalleled. Winner of the National Book Award, The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia follows the lives of four people born at what promised to be the dawn of democracy, against the machinations of the regime that would crush them all. Gessen’s other books include the New York Times bestseller, The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin, and Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot. An opinion writer at The New York Times, Gessen is the first Distinguished Professor at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, and is a founder of the Russian Independent Media Archive, a digital archive focused on preserving the last two decades of independent Russian journalism. They live in New York City. 

Gessen's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies, the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights, and the Women and Leadership Alliance at CMC.

Josef Avesar is an Israeli-born attorney who resides in Southern California. He has written numerous articles and commentaries, including: “The Israeli-Palestinian Confederation”; “Why Would the Israeli and Palestinian Government Accept a Confederation?”; “An Israeli-Palestinian Confederation Creates a Fair and Balanced Mechanism to Resolve the Issues”; “Israeli and Palestinian Governments Too Busy to Make Peace”; “Israeli-Palestinian Confederation Could Have Helped Prisoner Exchange”; “An Israeli-Palestinian Confederation Could Have Saved the Violence in Gaza”; “It’s Time to Take the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict by the Horns”; and “Israeli-Palestinian Confederation 101. He is the author of the book “ Peace, A Case for an Israeli Palestinian Confederation.”

Robert Hass is a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. In his tenure as United States Poet Laureate, Robert Hass spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra, “imagination makes communities.” He crisscrossed the country speaking at Rotary Club meetings, raising money to organize conferences such as “Watershed,” which brought together noted novelists, poets, and storytellers to talk about writing, nature, and community. When he is talking about poetry itself, Hass is both spontaneous and original, offering poetic insights that cannot be found in any textbook.

A prolific poet, Hass’s books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema, and Time and Materials, as well as his most recent best selling collection of poetry, Summer Snow: New Poems. Awarded the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, twice the National Book Critics’ Circle Award (in 1984 and 1997), the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1973, and the 2014 Wallace Stevens Award, Robert Hass is a professor of English at UC Berkeley.

(Adapted from The University of Arizona’s Poetry Center’s website.)

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One of contemporary American poetry’s most eclectic and formally innovative writers, Brenda Hillman is known for poems that draw on elements of found texts and document, personal meditation, observation, and literary theory. Often described as “sensuous” and “luminescent,” Hillman’s poetry investigates and pushes at the possibilities of form and voice, while remaining grounded in topics such as geology, the environment, politics, family, and spirituality. In an interview with Sarah Rosenthal, Hillman described her own understanding of form: “It is the artist’s job to make form. Not even to make it, but to allow it. Allow form. And all artists have a different relationship to it, and a different philosophy of it … I think that when you are trying to open up a territory—in this case I was working with a desire to open the lyric—you have to be greedy, in that you want more than you can do. And you’re always bound to fail.” Praising Hillman’s deft handling of form and subject, Marjorie Welish wrote, “Each poem … creates its own experimental configuration, within which the phrase swerves and discombobulates sense, as several registers of subject complicate the sampling of experiences and also as the experimental format throws the lyric into symbolic disarray one moment and naturalist scrutiny the next. And even more: she writes as if the lyric poem had a political calling.”

Born in 1951 in Tucson, Arizona, Hillman earned degrees at Pomona College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The author of over 10 books of poetry, she has received numerous awards for her work including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award. Her collection Bright Existence (1993) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Loose Sugar (1997) a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award. Her most recent poetry collection, In a Few Minutes Before Later, was published in 2022, and her first prose collection, Three Talks: Metaphor and Metonymy, Meaning and Mystery, Magic and Morality, was just published in September 2024. She co-translated Ashur Etwebi’s Poems from Above the Hill (2011), Jeongrye Choi’s Instances (2011), and Ana Cristina Cesar’s At Your Feet (2018); and edited or coedited several volumes, including The Pocket Emily Dickinson (2009). She is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary's College of California. 

(Adapted from the Poetry Foundation website.)

Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman's reading at the Athenaeum is co-sponsored by the Literature Department, the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies, and the Salvatori Center for the Study of Individual Freedom in the Modern World, all at CMC.

Memo Akten is a multi-disciplinary artist, musician, and researcher creating Speculative Simulations and Data Dramatizations investigating the intricacies of human-machine entanglements. His work explores perception and states of consciousness; the tensions between ecology, technology, science and spirituality; and for more than a decade he’s been working with Artificial Intelligence, Big Data and our Collective Consciousness as scraped by the Internet, to reflect on the human condition. He writes code and uses algorithmic / data-driven design and aesthetics to create moving images, sounds, large-scale responsive installations and performances. He holds a PhD from Goldsmiths University of London, specializing in artistic and creative applications of Artificial Intelligence, and he is currently Assistant Professor of Computational Art at University of California San Diego (UCSD). Akten has received numerous awards including the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica, his work has been widely exhibited and performed internationally and featured in major publications.

Dr. Akten's Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC.

Michael Chambers co-founded Aldevron while studying chemistry, microbiology, and biotechnology at North Dakota State University. Aldevron evolved from a small NDSU lab into a cornerstone of the global genetic medicine industry. Today, Aldevron manufactures nucleic acids, recombinant enzymes, and products used in molecular diagnostics, cell and gene therapies, gene editing, and vaccines.

Michael served as Aldevron's CEO until 2020 when he transitioned to Executive Chairman. In 2021, Danaher Corporation (DHR) acquired Aldevron for $9.6 billion. Michael continues to work at Aldevron, his family office, Hive & Colony, and the Centurion Foundation. He is a board member of the Whitehead Institute at MIT and Sarepta Therapeutics (SRPT). Michael's wife and five daughters split time between Fargo and Boston.

Mr. Chambers' Athenaeum visit is co-sponsored by the President's Leaders Forum.