About

Steven Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He conducts research on language, cognition, and social relations, writes for publications such as the New York Times, Time and The Atlantic, and is the author of twelve books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works , The Blank Slate The Better Angels of Our Nature, Enlightenment Now , and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters . He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, a Humanist of the Year, a recipient of nine honorary doctorates, and one of Foreign Policy’s “World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals” and Time’s “100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”

Belinha S. De Abreu, PhD. is a global media literacy educator. She served as an International Expert to the Forum on Media & Information Literacy for UNESCO's Communication & Information Section. Her research interests include media and information literacy education, educational technology, global perspectives, critical thinking, privacy & big data, young adults, and educator professional development. Dr. De Abreu is the founder of the International Media Literacy Research Symposium which has been held in the USA and Portugal, and serves as the President of the International Council for Media Literacy (IC4ML). She is the author of Media Literacy for Justice: Lessons for Changing the World (ALA: Neal-Schuman, 2022) and Teaching Media Literacy (ALA: Neal-Schuman, 2019) among other publications. Dr. De Abreu was the recipient of the 2021 US National Media Literacy Research Award.

Founder and CEO of Constructive Institute at Aarhus University with a mission of changing the global news culture in 5 years. For 10 years he was the Executive Director of News at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation, Denmark's public service broadcaster. He was previously editor-in-chief at Nordjyske Media from 2002 to 2007. Ulrik has held the position of chairman of the Center of Journalism at the University of Southern Denmark and is a Member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Journalism.

Andrea is founder of education publishing business Rising Stars which, in 2015, became part of the Hachette global publishing group. Andrea now works with organisations from across the education sector. She is chairman of Teacher Tapp and board director of Swedish technology company eEducation Albert, is advisor to a range of education technology businesses and investors and is trustee of Causeway Education and the Teacher Development Trust. She is also vice chair of a multi-academy trust in South London.

Jimmeka Anderson, Ph.D. is an author, media literacy educator, advisor, and consultant for several organizations in the United States such as the American Library Association, Women’s Sports Foundation, New America, National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE), 9 Story Media Group, US Department of Education Office of Education Technology, and WestEd. She is the creator of the Black Girls Film Camp and the Founder and Executive Director of I AM not the MEdia, Inc. Jimmeka has been featured in WIRED Magazine, the Washington Post, on NPR 1A, and in the award-winning Trust Me Documentary released in 2020. Her forthcoming book with coauthor Kelly Czarnecki, Power Lines: Connecting with Teens in Urban Communities through Media Literacy, will be published by ALA Neal-Schuman in the summer of 2022.

Nina is Editor at race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust. A Former journalist, Nina has provided communications leadership for human rights organisations for many years. Nina is now Senior Communications Advisor for international LGBT human rights organisation the Human Dignity Trust. She also consults on a pioneering research-led strategic communications program Reframing Race.

Samantha McCann is the Chief Operating Officer of the Solutions Journalism Network (SJN). Samantha directs SJN’s efforts to develop and align its network-based strategy with its organizational structure, systems and operations. She has trained journalists in nearly a dozen countries, and spoken about solutions journalism and media development at myriad conferences and universities around the world. Samantha is a lecturer at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) in organizational management and leadership. A 2021 Sulzberger Executive Leadership Fellow at the Columbia Journalism School, she has also worked as a freelance journalist and in environmental and fiscal policy research at Seattle University. She holds a Master of Public Administration (MPA) from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in Political Science from Seattle University.

Jenny Anderson is a journalist, author and the current host of the Learnit podcast. She spent 20 years covering finance, including a decade on staff at the New York Times. In 2008 she won a Gerald Loeb award for her coverage of Merrill Lynch leading up to the financial crisis. In 2015 she left the Times to join Quartz where she  pioneered interdisciplinary beats about the science of learning, the future of schools and the neuroscience of infants. She launched her podcast in 2020 alongside a newsletter about innovations in learning, which now reaches 90,000 global education leaders. 
 
Her first book, It's Not You, It's the Dishes (Random House, 2010) was about marriage and behavioral economics. It won a Books for a Better Life award in 2011. She is working on her second book, called SuperLearners: What Kids Need to Succeed in School, Work, and Life, which will be published by Crown. She lives in London with her husband and two daughters.  
 

Ola Rosling is a Swedish statistician known for his work for the Gapminder Foundation on changing global quality of life. He is the chairman, director and co-founder of the foundation. Ola Rosling co-authored the book called Factfulness: Ten Reasons we’re wrong about the world – and why things are better than you think.