Jonathan Zinman: Innovating with Liability Mangement

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Jonathan Zinman is a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, and co-founder and Scientific Director of the U.S. Household Finance Initiative (USHFI) of Innovations for Poverty Action. He also serves on the inaugural Consumer Advisory Board of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and as a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. He is a member of the Behavioral Finance Forum and the Sage/Sloan Foundations Working Group on Behavioral Economics and Consumer Finance. He works directly with institutions to develop and test innovations – in pricing, product development, marketing, risk assessment, risk management, and client communication – that are beneficial to both institutions and their clients.

David Bellwood: Quality Not Quantity

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David Bellwood, a marine biologist and an internationally recognized expert in coral reef fishes and systems, combines skills in such disparate fields as ecology, palaeontology, biomechanics and molecular systems to understand the nature of reefs. “The argument would be that if you’ve got a reef with a thousand species, it is a lot more resilient, and a lot more capable of maintaining itself than a reef with a hundred species. I don’t think that is true.”

Jon Rinn: Hauls Junk Genes

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John Rinn is a biologist at Harvard and the Broad Institute, researching how “junk genes” actually play key regulatory roles in human health and disease. “My name is John Rinn and I drive a garbage truck for the human genome. It is the best job in the world.”

Dean Karlan : Poverty Measures

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Dean Karlan is President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization that creates and evaluates solutions to social and development problems, and works to scale-up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors and donors. He is a Professor of Economics at Yale University. "There are some problems that we can solve. But we have to be pragmatic about it and figure out what is actually working and what is not."

Peter Kareiva: Reframe & Rethink

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Peter Kareiva is the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy. A member of the National Academy of Sciences, Kareiva is often noted for his emphasis on nature’s resiliency, rather than its impending doom. “Totally unnecessarily we get into a conversation where it is farmers versus conservation, where it is loggers versus conservation, where it is fishermen versus conservation.”

David Eagleman: We Are Our Biology

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David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His areas of research include time perception, vision, synesthesia, and the intersection of neuroscience with the legal system. He is a pioneer on the power of the unconscious brain. "Are we free to choose how we act? Is the mind equal to the brain?"

Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir: Adapting & Learning

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Margrét Pála Ólafsdóttir is a preschool management specialist in Iceland who advocates sex-segregated classes, natural play material instead of conventional toys, and a long-forgotten belief in discipline to develop optimism, courage, and resiliency in young children. “Feel the cold! I even take them into the snow -- and then the lava. Scream a little bit! But continue! And enjoy it!”

Bill Shore: Break the Rules

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Bill Shore is the founder and chief executive officer of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit that is working to end childhood hunger in America. “Those of us who are passionate about social change and social innovation, we have got to find ways to break the rules. I believe it is a strategic necessity and a moral imperative.”

Sandro Galea: Rebounding After Trauma

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Sandro Galea is a doctor and epidemiologist who has researched the role of traumatic events in shaping population health; particularly the health of urban populations. "Ninety percent of people in this country will have a traumatic event in their lifetime."

David DeSteno: Compassion Science

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David DeSteno directs the Social Emotions Lab at Northeastern University where his research is pulling back the curtain to reveal some of the mechanics that drive human compassion. “It is not the severity or the objective facts of a disaster that motivate us to feel compassion and to help. It is whether or not we see ourselves in the victims.”

Vicki Arroyo: Climate Disasters

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Vicki Arroyo is the executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center of Georgetown University Law Center. She studies preparedness and resiliency with respect to climate-related catastrophes. “Traditional models of who is in charge in a disaster do not necessarily operate when you have a real disaster.”

Amanda Ripley: Where the Smart Kids Are

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Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who writes about human behavior and public policy. For Time Magazine and the Atlantic, she has chronicled the stories of American kids and teachers alongside groundbreaking new research into education reform. “Kids have strong opinions about school. We forget as adults how much time they sit there contemplating their situation.”

Nils Gilman: Deviant globalization

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Nils Gilman discusses Deviant globalization, the global flow of  “repugnant” goods and services like drugs, human trafficking and illegal wildlife. Such globalization leverages the mainstream infrastructure of the formal economy along with any downsizing in the role of the state. Gilman asks what this means for countries in flux like Greece and Libya.

Robert Neuwirth: Free Markets vs. Flea Markets

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Robert Neuwirth tells us about life in the informal economy, what French culture classifies as System D. 1.8 billion people on the planet subsist through economic transactions that happen outside legal spheres and, by 2020, two thirds of our planet will be doing business in this domain. The future is the free market vs. the flea market.

C.J. Huff : Resilience in the aftermath of the unthinkable

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C.J. Huff is the superintendent of Joplin, Mo. schools who led his district of thousands of employees and students through the recovery effort that followed the infamous Joplin tornado. “We had children in the rubble...and there is no worse feeling in the world,” he said about the moments after the storm. “I can tell you, at this time in my life, I had 7,747 kids that I was responsible for, and I could only account for my two children.”

Claressa Shields: Female Fighter From Flint

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Boxer Claressa Shields, age 17, clawed her way out of hardscrabble Flint Michigan to win the first ever Olympic gold medal for women’s middleweight boxing. She has won 31 fights -- and lost only one. “That fight made me work so much harder when I got back to the gym, even though I cried and I was sad. It made me hungrier.”

Laurie Leitch and Loree Sutton: Tapping social resilience

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Retired Army Brig. Gen. Loree Sutton, MD and clinical trainer Laurie Leitch, Ph.D., founded Threshold GlobalWorks to explore a neurobiological approach to social resilience. “We are all wired with it, in case you did not know that,” says Leitch. “We are born neurologically wired for resilience because our system is survival-based.”