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.