Trish Tillman
Trish Tillman, a graduate of Northwestern University in Performance Studies, studied the psychological and cultural aspects of performance in society.
She later studied in New York and trained with the renowned film director Mike Nichols and the founder of Chicago’s famous Second City, Paul Sills.
For 16 years, she’s brought fun and enthusiasm to the Student Ideas Festival as a senior advisor and audience favorite, presenting a Shakespearean play with students in 30 seconds.
Ronald D. Sugar
Ronald D. Sugar served as Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of Northrop Grumman from 2003 until his retirement in 2010.
During his tenure, Northrop Grumman grew to become one of the world’s largest aerospace and defense companies, with 120,000 employees and $35B annual revenue.
Prior to joining Northrop Grumman in 2001, Sugar held senior operating, technical, and financial positions at TRW Inc. and Litton Industries.
He is currently Chairman of the Board of Uber Technologies, a director of Apple Inc., and was formerly lead director of Chevron Corporation and director of Amgen Inc. He also serves as senior advisor to the private investment firm Ares Management LLC and Bain & Company.
He is a trustee of the University of Southern California, where he also holds the Judge Widney Chair as Professor of Management and Technology, member of UCLA Anderson School of Management board of advisors, and director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association.
He is past chairman of the Aerospace Industries Association, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of both the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Royal Aeronautical Society. He was appointed earlier by the President of the United States to the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee.
He received BS (summa cum laude), MS, and PhD degrees in engineering from UCLA and was subsequently honored as UCLA Alumnus of the Year.
Alan Shipnuck
Alan Shipnuck is one of the most prominent sportswriters in the country.
He is the author of 9 books, including best-sellers Phil; LIV and Let Die; The Swinger; and Bud, Sweat & Tees.
Shipnuck has won 13 first-place awards from the Golf Writers Association of America, breaking the record of Dan Jenkins, a member of the World Golf Hall of Fame.
Shipnuck lives in Carmel, California, where he is the head coach of the Carmel High girls varsity basketball team.
Todd S. Purdum
Todd S. Purdum is a veteran journalist and author. In a career of more than forty years, he has written widely about politics and culture, starting at The New York Times, where he spent twenty-three years, covering politics from city hall to the White House, later serving as diplomatic correspondent and Los Angeles bureau chief.
He has also been a staff writer at Vanity Fair, Politico, and The Atlantic. He is the author of Something Wonderful: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway Revolution and An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers, with whom he has two grown children.
Steve Palumbi
Steve Palumbi is a Professor of Oceans, and Professor of Biology, based at Stanford’s marine lab in Monterey.
He has used genetic detective work to identify whales, sharks, and fish for sale in retail markets, and is genetically mapping corals resistant to climate change. His work has been used in design of the current network of marine protected areas and focuses on collaborating on environmentalDNA with the Chumash community in central California in the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.
Steve’s latest book for non-scientists is about the amazing species in the sea, written with Steve’s son and novelist Anthony. The Extreme Life of the Sea tells you about the fastest species in the sea, and hottest, coldest, oldest etc.
Steve co-founded the video production company Short Attention Span Science Theatre, the band Sustainable Sole, and appears in many films and TV series about the sea.
His current science expansion project is to use narrative non-fiction to turn sharks from villains into wildlife in people’s minds.
Susan Page
Susan Page is the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, where she writes about the White House and national politics. She is the author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power, published in 2021, and The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, published in 2019. Both were New York Times best-sellers. Her third book, The Rulebreaker: The Life and Times of Barbara Walters, was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2024.
Susan covered her twelfth presidential election in 2024. She has covered seven presidential administration and interviewed the past ten presidents, from Richard Nixon through Joe Biden — three after they had left the White House, six while they were there, and one before he moved in. She has reported from six continents and dozens of foreign countries. As a reporter -- first for Newsday and then for USA TODAY -- she drove to Three Mile Island hours after the nuclear mishap was reported, traveled across Southeast Asia to chronicle the exodus of Vietnamese ‘boat people,’ and interviewed physicist Stephen Hawking through his computerized ‘voice.’
She has won every journalism award given specifically for coverage of the White House, including the Gerald R. Ford Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency, the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence in White House Coverage, and the Merriman Smith Award for Excellence in Presidential News Coverage Under Deadline Pressure. She has served as president of the White House Correspondents Association and as president of the Gridiron Club, the oldest association of journalists in Washington. She was the moderator of the vice-presidential debate in 2020 between Mike Pence and Kamala Harris.
A native of Wichita, Kansas, she received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University, where she was editor-in-chief of The Daily Northwestern. She received a master’s degree from Columbia University, where she was a Pulitzer Fellow. She is married to Carl Leubsdorf, a columnist with The Dallas Morning News. They have two sons, Ben and Will.
Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell
Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, Ph.D. is an award-winning author, photographer and documentarian. She is a Research Affiliate at Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology and Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Center for Conservation Biology. She had been an Instructor at both Harvard and Stanford Medical Schools and is one of the world’s leading experts on elephants.
She has published eight popular books about her study subjects, including two science memoirs and two thrillers. She won the Sibert and Horn Book Honor for her co-authored autobiographical work of nonfiction, The Elephant Scientist (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books For Young Readers), along with four other literary awards in 2012.
In 2014, A Baby Elephant in the Wild (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Books For Young Readers) was awarded Outstanding Science Trade Book and chosen as a Junior Library Guild Selection. Inspired by a true story, Caitlin’s thriller series about the ivory trade, Ivory Ghosts (Random House Alibi), was nominated for an International Thriller Writer’s Award and was made into a comic series, Ivory Ghosts, that she authored.
Her nature prescriptive, Wild Rituals (Chronicle Prism, 2021), was selected as a New York Times Notable Book and explores the importance of ritual to humans and nonhuman social animals.
She co-founded the nonprofit, Utopia Scientific (www.utopiascientific.org) with her husband, and leads science trips to Africa annually.
You can find Caitlin’s books at www.caitlineoconnell.com.
Selected blurbs about Caitlin’s adult books:
The Elephant’s Secret Sense “…is a successful combination of science and soulfulness.” – Publishers Weekly, 2007
Elephant Don “takes us inside the little-known world of African male elephants, a world that is steeped in ritual, where bonds are maintained by unexpected tenderness punctuated by violence.” – Jane Goodall, 2015
Mike McDermott
Mike McDermott, MD, MBA is President and CEO of Montage Health, an integrated, not for profit medical system that provides emergency, inpatient and outpatient care through more than 20 facilities in Monterey, California. Montage Health operates Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP), employs over 3,000 team members, and generates annual net revenues of over $1.1 billion.
Mike received his undergraduate degree at Villanova University and his medical degree from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. He received his MBA degree from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. He performed his Diagnostic Radiology residency and Interventional Radiology fellowship at the University of Maryland Medical System.
Mike practiced clinical medicine for 17 years as an Interventional Radiologist with the Radiologic Associates of Fredericksburg. During his clinical career, Dr. McDermott served in many administrative roles including Physician Director of Interventional Radiology, Chairman of Radiology, President and Medical Director of the Medical Imaging of Fredericksburg imaging facilities, and as a Trustee of the Mary Washington Healthcare System. In 2015, Mike moved from the clinical practice of medicine to a leadership role as President and CEO of Mary Washington Healthcare, a two hospital not for profit regional healthcare system serving Fredericksburg, Virginia.
Mike is a prior Chair of the Virginia Hospital and Healthcare Association and prior member of the American Hospital Association Region 3 Policy Board. Mike is a Fellow of the American College of Radiology (FACR) and a Fellow of the Society of Interventional Radiology (FSIR).
Eric LoMonaco
Eric LoMonaco is the director of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology at Community Hospital, a position he has held since 2006.
Prior to coming to the Monterey Peninsula, Eric worked first as a radiologic technologist and then as a radiation therapist at several facilities, including Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center, City of Hope National Medical Center, and the Lowell General Hospital Cancer Center in Massachusetts. Eric is a certified radiology administrator, a certified radiologic technologist, and a certified radiation therapist who holds a master’s degree in imaging sciences.
Eric devotes considerable time and energy to serving at-risk youth in our community, regularly giving talks where he shares his own personal journey out of difficult circumstances and inspires students toward academic achievement and healthcare careers.
He has served as a mentor in CSUMB’s Pay it Forward program, is a past chair of the advisory committee for Cabrillo College’s radiological sciences program, and past chair of the board of Breakthrough, a local nonprofit organization.
Eric was also just featured on the cover of The Radiology Business Journal (2017) and selected for the Ted x Monterey “Outed for Awesome”. Prior to that Eric was voted in the Top 25 for the Monterey County Weekly’s “Movers and Shakers” and earned a feature article in 65 Degree magazine. In 2014 Eric received the Leadership Monterey Peninsula Founders Award for outstanding community service.
Eric will present to our local Monterey County Students at this year’s Student Ideas Festival.
Khoi Le
Khoi Le, MD was born in Hue, Vietnam and came to the US in 1975. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Dr. Le is currently a cardiologist at the Eisenhower Desert Cardiology Center in Rancho Mirage, CA. Dr. Le has participated in humanitarian and medical education missions in Asia and Central and South America.
In 1997, he performed the first coronary stent and mitral valvuloplasty procedures in Vietnam.
Since 2018 Dr. Le has served as a moderator in the Rancho Mirage Writers Festival and the Writers Series.