Tommie Shelby is an Africana studies scholar whose writings focus on racial and economic justice and on the history of black political thought. He is the Caldwell Titcomb Professor of African and African American Studies and of Philosophy at Harvard.

Gail Collins joined the editorial board of The New York Times in 1995 and six years later became the first woman editor of The Times’ editorial page. At the beginning of 2007, she stepped down and took a leave in order to finish a book, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. She returned to the paper as an Op-Ed columnist later in 2007.

Robert Blau, a New York City native, has carved an eclectic path up the journalistic ranks. He wrote about music, reviewed movies and covered the police beat, before turning his attention to investigative reporting and editing. Following a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1997, he began overseeing all major enterprise at the Chicago Tribune, including its years-long probe of the failures of the criminal justice system in Illinois, which yielded numerous reforms and was emulated by news organizations across the country.

Columbia Journalism School Dean Steve Coll is a staff writer at The New Yorker, the author of eight books of nonfiction, and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Between 1985 and 2005, he was a reporter, foreign correspondent and senior editor at The Washington Post. There he covered Wall Street, served as the paper’s South Asia correspondent in New Delhi, and was the Post’s first international investigative correspondent, based in London. He served as managing editor of the Post between 1998 and 2004.

As executive editor of The Miami Herald, Aminda Marqués Gonzalez has oversight and responsibility for the newspaper’s print and online news operation, which reaches 1.2 million readers a week.

A creative writing professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Junot Díaz won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his best-selling first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.

The Pulitzer Board described the work as “a dazzling, richly layered novel about an overweight, nerdy Dominican-American teenager who comes of age in a multi-generational immigrant family, devouring comic books, spinning fantasies and searching for love.”

Eugene Robinson is a columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, where he has worked since 1980. His twice-weekly column on the paper’s op-ed page debuted in February 2005 and is now syndicated by the Washington Post Writers Group to 262 newspapers.

In 2009, Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for his columns about the 2008 presidential campaign and the election of President Barack Obama.

Stephen Engelberg became ProPublica's editor-in-chief on Jan. 1, 2013. He oversees its day-to-day editorial operations, long-term projects and Web strategy. During his time as managing editor, ProPublica became the first online news organization to win Pulitzer Prizes. In 2010, it won the Investigative Reporting prize for chronicling the life-and-death decisions by a hospital’s exhausted doctors when they were isolated by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina.

Lee C. Bollinger is a renowned legal scholar, with an expertise in free speech and the First Amendment. He is an alumnus of Columbia's Law School, where he is also a professor. He became president of Columbia University on June 1, 2002.