After spending nearly 15 years at the New York Times, where she served as deputy international editor and bureau chiefs for West Africa, South Asia and Johannesburg, Lydia Polgreen was named editor-in-chief of HuffPost in 2016; in early 2020, she became managing director of Spotify’s podcast studio Gimlet. In 2022, Lydia returned to the New York Times as an Opinion Columnist. She received the 2006 George Polk Award for foreign reporting and the 2008 Livingston Award for international reporting.

Joshua Rogers is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Arete Wealth, the financial investment entity within the Arete family of companies. He is an elected Board Member with oversight of the university’s Finance, Investment, and Audit committees and teaches Entrepreneurship on both St. John’s Annapolis and Sante Fe campuses.

Shannon Hateley is a computational biologist and senior staff scientist at Ancestry.com. She received her PhD in Molecular and Cell Biology with a designated emphasis in Genomics and Computational Biology from the University of California, Berkeley.

Anika Prather is the founder and creator of the Living Water School. Inspired by the Sudbury democratic model, Living Water is based upon the idea that students should be responsible for and direct their own learning. She received her PhD in English and Literacy Education from the University of Maryland.

Mark Stephen Meadows is founder and CEO of Botanic Technologies, which designs personalized chatbots and 3D avatars for Fortune 100 clients such as Skype and Logitech, as well as for government agencies.

Sean Di Ianni is COO of Meow Wolf, the world-renowned interactive arts space in Santa Fe. There, he oversees organizational structure, systems, and logistics. Recently, Meow Wolf announced its expansion into Denver, Las Vegas, and DC. Meow Wolf was named Time Out’s Top 50 Things to Do in the World Right Now, coming in at #4.

Before becoming President of the University of Florida, Ben Sasse served as a U.S. senator for Nebraska, serving on the following Senate committees: Judiciary; Armed Services; Joint Economics; and Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. Ben Sasse earned a PhD in American history from Yale and at age 37 became president of Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska.

Omar Manejwala, MD (A93) is an international expert and speaker in the fields of addiction and mental health. He is the author of Craving: Why We Can’t Seem to Get Enough and currently serves as the chief medical officer of DarioHealth. He is a recipient of the 2018 Award of Merit from the St. John’s College Alumni Association.

Pressure Analysis Company designs and manufactures wireless impact sensors that detect and track direct impacts with accuracy. Their SmackCAP Athlytics™ is a skullcap for athletes in contact sports that tracks every hit, every time. One of 15 companies chosen to pitch at SXSW’s 2016 TechCo’s StartUp Night, it was a finalist for TechCo’s StartUp of the Year.

Robert A. George is a member of the Bloomberg Opinion editorial board. He has previously been published in the New York Daily News, the New York Post, the Huffington Post, and the National Review, among others.

A Hampton University professor of nuclear, quantum and medical physics, Keppel is a group leader at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility. Among Keppel’s many professional accolades is a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a 2019 Distinguished Lecturer on the Application of Physics award from the American Physical Society, where she is a fellow.

Salvatore Scibona is a novelist and short story writer who has been nominated for the National Book Award for his 2008 novel The End. His latest book, The Volunteer, came out in 2019, and his fiction frequently appears in The New Yorker—where he also published an excellent article about St. John’s called “Where I Learned to Read.”

Shawn Watts is the associate director of the Edson Queiroz Foundation Mediation Program at Columbia Law School. A Citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, he developed and teaches a course on Native American Peacemaking, a traditional form of dispute resolution, and he has mediated in the New York City Civil Court, Harlem Small Claims Court, and the Institute for Mediation and Conflict Resolution.

Cecelia Watson’s new book, Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark, garnered acclaim from The New Yorker, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and more. Watson is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at Bard College, worked at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany, and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago.

From 2016 to 2019, Jamaal Sebastian-Barnes worked for Google, where he helped lead the worldwide effort to discern the ethics of artificial intelligence. Now, he’s the Global Head of Digital Talent Acquisition for Novartis, an international healthcare company with a focus on rethinking and transforming medicine.

Devendra Contractor’s award-winning architecture firm, DNCA, was selected as the designer of the New Mexico Museum of Art’s new Vladem Contemporary, an annex dedicated to contemporary art and art education in Santa Fe. Contractor’s designs come alive in the galleries of Santa Fe’s Railyard Arts District and in some of Albuquerque and Santa Fe’s most celebrated contemporary residences.