Sissela Bok, Senior Visiting Fellow, a writer and philosopher, received her B.A. and M.A. in psychology at the George Washington University in 1957 and 1958, and her Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1970. She was formerly a Professor of Philosophy at Brandeis University. The third edition of her book Lying: Moral Choice in Private and Public Life (1978) was reissued in 1999 with a new preface. Other books include Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (1982, 1989); A Strategy for Peace: Human Values and the Threat of War (1989); Alva Myrdal: A Daughter's Memoir (1991); Common Values (1996, reissued in 2002 with a new preface); and Mayhem: Violence as Public Entertainment (1998). With John Behnke, Bok has co-edited The Dilemmas of Euthanasia (1975) and, with Daniel Callahan, Ethics Teaching in Higher Education (1980). With Gerald Dworkin and R. G. Frey, she has co-authored Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide (1998).

Jocelyn Finlay, Ph.D. is a Program on the Global Demography of Aging (PGDA) Research Associate at the Harvard Center for Population Studies. She came to Harvard in 2006 as a postdoctoral fellow and in June 2008 became a research associate. During her tenure, she has worked Professors David Bloom and David Canning in exploring the economic consequences of demographic change, including the decline in fertility rates around the world since 1960 and the rise in life expectancy have changed the age structure of populations. With a shift in the proportion of youth- and old-age to the number of workers, there are both accounting affects and behavioral responses that affect economic outcomes. She is also interested in the social and behavioral responses to natural disasters. Her analysis focuses on economic and health outcomes of exposure to natural disasters, and how these outcomes vary by disaster type and magnitude across the different age groups. Her goal is to create a more generalized understanding of the social and behavioral responses to disasters so that governments and aid agencies can help vulnerable communities better prepare for disasters and help those affected by disasters recover more effectively.

Rose E. Frisch, Associate Professor of Population Sciences, Emeritus, at the Department of Population and International Health, Harvard School of Public Health. Dr. Frisch obtained her Ph.D. in Genetics from the University of Wisconsin. She is Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the John S. Memorial Guggenheim Foundation, and former Sigma Xi National Lecturer from 1989-1990. Her research has shown that under-nutrition and intense physical activity can have a limiting effect on female fertility. She hypothesized that a critical, minimum amount of body fat is necessary for, and directly influences, female reproduction. Her research results are predictive and are now used clinically for evaluation of nutritional infertility and the restoration of fertility. Research on the long-term health of 5,498 U.S. college alumnae showed that moderate regular athletic activity resulted in a lower risk of breast cancer and cancers of the reproductive system and a lower risk of late onset diabetes in the menopausal years. She has shown how environmental factors of nutrition, physical activity and disease can affect each reproductive milestone from menarche to menopause. Leptin, a new protein hormone made by body fat, is a major signal to the hypothalamus. She has published numerous articles, and several books. The most recent, Female Fertility and the Body Fat Connection, University of Chicago Press, 2002, paperback 2004, covers her 35 years of research on the topic.

Heidi Larson is Associate Research Professor in the Department of International Development and Social Change at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is a Research Associate at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. She obtained a B.A. in visual and environmental studies from Harvard and a M.A. and Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkley.

Dr. Larson specializes is analysis and evaluation of health and development programmes on a global level with particular attention to social and political factors which can affect the delivery of services. Of particular interest is the area of risk and rumour management in health programmes and technologies, especially vaccines- from clinical trials to delivery - and building public trust. From 2001-2005 she served as Director of Communications for UNICEF's Immunization Programme and Chair of the Advocacy Task Force, Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI). In this role she advised on appropriate policy and advocacy strategies to support the global alliance as well as support to countries in scaling up immunization coverage and introducing new vaccines.

Dr. Larson also is Executive Director of aids2031, a UNAIDS commissioned initiative, whose secretariat is hosted by Clark University. Aids2031 is a multi-disciplinary look at the future options for the aids response involving nine issue-specific working groups including financing, modeling, social drivers, new trends in science and technology, leadership, communication. As Executive Director, her role is to convene regular meetings of the working group heads, oversee the multiple strands of research, and lead the preparation of a final report - aids2031: An Agenda for the Future - to be launched in late 2009.

Through the Harvard Pop Center, she is currently working on a book on risk and rumors in health, analyzing the experience of the Nigeria polio vaccination boycott and along with other examples of managing public questioning and rumors in public health.

Michael J. Levin is currently a Mid-Career MPA Student at the Kennedy School. His Ph.D. in Anthropology from Michigan looked at the effects of population pressure on scarce resources on a 26 acre atoll in Micronesia. He worked for 8 years in the East-West Center's Population Program and followed with 27 years at the U.S. Census Bureau. He has worked in most of the Pacific Islands countries and territories and a dozen African countries, mostly assisting statistical offices in collecting, processing, and analyzing census and survey data. He has published many articles and several books, including the UN Editing Handbook, Alaska Natives in a Century of Change, and the co-authored Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. At HCPDS, he is helping coordinate the revived census and survey training program.

George Zeidenstein, is a Visiting Distinguished Fellow at the Center, where he has been teaching and mentoring graduate students since 1993. Before that, he was President and a Trustee of the Population Council for seventeen years. Earlier, Zeidenstein worked on a wide spectrum of international development issues with the Ford Foundation and the Peace Corps, including several years of residence with his wife and their two children in Nepal as Country Director of the Peace Corps and in Bangladesh as Resident Representative of the Ford Foundation. Zeidenstein has been decorated by the governments of Finland and Senegal for his international development work. He is author of a published memoir of his early life entitled, Lifelines. During his first ten years of professional life, Zeidenstein practiced corporate and securities law in New York City.