All 2024 Authors and Speakers

Gordon Lithgow, Ph.D.

Dr. Lithgow received his PhD in Genetics from the University of Glasgow, Scotland. He completed postdoctoral training at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr. Lithgow was a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Gerontology at the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Manchester in England before coming to the Buck Institute in 2001.

He is the Principal Investigator and Director of the Buck Institute’s Interdisciplinary Research Consortium on Geroscience. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Larry L. Hillblom Network on the Chemical Biology of Aging, and is the Coordinator of the Hillblom Center for the Biology of Aging Support Award.

Dr. Lithgow sheds light on the mechanisms of aging by identifying agents that extend lifespan or prevent age-related disease.

The Lithgow lab has made seminal discoveries in the use of pharmacological agents to intervene in aging processes, such as antioxidants that protect cells against damage from unstable chemicals called free radicals. More recently, his lab has uncovered compounds that act as “stress response mimetics” that maintain protein balance and stability. These compounds suppress pathology associated with Alzheimer’s disease. The lab continues to undertake screens for chemical compounds that slow aging and extend healthspan.

Other 2019 Authors & Speakers

Jamie Bernstein

Author, Narrator, and Filmmaker, daughter of Leonard Bernstein

Tom Brokaw

Tom Brokaw is one of America’s most trusted and respected journalists.

Jeffrey Brown

Jeffrey Brown is Senior Correspondent and Chief Arts Correspondent for PBS NewsHour, public television’s prestigious nightly news program viewed by millions. During his career with NewsHour he has served as co-anchor, studio moderator, and field reporter on a wide range of national and international issues.

Charina Chou, Ph.D.

Google Scientist and Researcher, Specializing in Artificial Intelligence

Billy Collins

Two-time US Poet Laureate, dubbed “the most popular poet in America” by the New York Times

David Crane

David Crane is a lecturer in Public Policy at Stanford University and president of Govern for California.

Wade Davis

National Geographic Explorer in Residence, Ethnographer, Writer, Photographer and Filmmaker

Esi Edugyan

Esi Edugyan is the author of two Scotiabank Giller Prize-winning books, Washington Black (2018) and Half-Blood Blues (2011).

James and Deborah Fallows

James Fallows is the author of eleven books, including National Defense (1981), for which he received the 1983 National Book Award, Postcards from Tomorrow Square (2009), and China Airborne (2012). He has been a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly for over 30 years, and his work has also appeared in Slate, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the American Prospect, among others. Deborah Fallows is the author of Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language(2010).

Alex Filippenko

Filippenko is an Astrophysicist on a Nobel Prize winning team, as well as the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize, 2015 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to all team members. He was voted the “best professor at UC Berkeley 9 years!”.

Francis Fukuyama, Ph.D.

Francis Fukuyama is a renowned political scientist and public intellectual.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

A Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer, presidential historian, former sports journalist and political commentator.

Anthony Ray Hinton

Author, Social Commentator who spent 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a murder he did not commit

Philip K. Howard

Philip K. Howard is the author of the bestseller The Death of Common Sense (Random House, 1995), and The Rule of Nobody (W.W. Norton, 2014), which was a finalist for the Hayek Book Prize.

Pedro Irazoqui, Ph.D.

Head, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Johns Hopkins, Whitney School of Engineering. Pioneer in wireless implantable devices for treatment of epilepsy, glaucoma, depression, PTSD

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson is a thought leader of today’s interdisciplinary and collaborative approach to innovation.

Mack McCarter

Mack McCarter has been on a journey to impact the world his entire life, and he has.

Michael McFaul

McFaul is a leading expert on international relations, Russian politics, American foreign policy, and democratic development around the world.

Roger McNamee

If you had told Roger McNamee even three years ago that he would soon be devoting himself to stopping Facebook from destroying our democracy, he would have howled with laughter.

John McReynolds

An early interest in food and wine led John McReynolds to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, where he received a scholarship sponsored by Julia and Paul Child.

Alana Nichols

Author, Five-time Paralympian, Six-time Medalist (3 gold, 2 silver, 1 bronze)

Caitlin O’Connell, Ph.D.

Instructor, Harvard Medical School, Scientific Consultant, Author, specialist in elephant communications

Dr. Ramon Resa

Acclaimed Author and Physician, “Out of the Fields: My Journey from Farmworker Boy to Pediatrician” has for over 35 years taken care of children like himself as a child

John Burnham Schwartz

What best characterizes a John Burnham Schwartz novel is a quote from Reservation Road, the 1998 novel that cemented his reputation and was made into a screenplay…

Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger’s just released Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All has been called, “an extremely important book,” by none other than historian Richard Rhodes, who won the Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Dr. Gary Small

Dr. Gary Small invented the first brain scan that allows doctors to see the physical evidence of brain aging and Alzheimer’s disease in living people.

Anne Snyder

Anne Snyder is determined to make the world a better place through the lost art of building character and encourages us to join her mission.

Claire Spafford

Claire Spafford is the Science Educator at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

James Strock

Strock writes the ‘Next Nationalism’ on Substack and hosts the ‘Serve to Lead’ podcast.

Trudi Trueit

“I’m a writer of middle grade fiction because middle school was a tough time for me. I was a brainy, awkward, and shy kid…So if I can make it a bit easier for a reader, if he/she can find something to identify with in my books, then that’s all the reward I need.”

Jose Antonio Vargas

Vargas won the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for his contributions to three Washington Post articles about the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007.

Matthew Walker

Matthew Walker is dead serious about the dangers of sleep deprivation.

Justin Wangler and Tracey Shepos Cemani

Author-chefs Justin Wangler and Tracey Shepos Cemani have partnered with farmer Tucker Taylor, a world-renowned expert in sustainable culinary gardening, to celebrate the simple good taste of the farm-to-table lifestyle.