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 has been presenting to local Monterey County Students for several years, during the Student Ideas Festival, reaching over 20,000 students annually.
Khoi Le, MD
Khoi Le, MD was born in Hue, Vietnam and came to the US in 1975.
A graduate of Harvard Medical School, Dr. Le trained at Mass General Hospital, UCSF, and Emory University. He 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.
Dr. Le has served as a moderator in literary events since 2018.
Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D.
Markos Kounalakis, Ph.D. is a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a Senior Fellow at the Center on Media, Data, and Society at Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, and a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oregon-UNESCO Crossings Institute.
He is an award-winning, nationally syndicated foreign affairs columnist, author, and scholar. Wars and revolutions are where he cut his teeth as a foreign correspondent.
For nearly a decade, his columns appeared weekly in the McClatchy chain of 30 newspapers from Sacramento, California to Miami, Florida. His work remains in global syndication and is read worldwide. In 2018, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists recognized “Kounalakis’s world affairs columns not only offer strong prose and strong opinions, they offer an education.”
Newsweek and NBC-Mutual News posted him as a foreign correspondent in news bureaus in Italy, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the USSR. Kounalakis covered dramatic political and military developments at the end of the 20th century, both in superpower capitals and regional outposts. He covered the fall of the Berlin Wall to the street protests in Budapest, the Velvet Revolution in Prague, revolutionary movements in Bulgaria, and the violent overthrow of the Romanian regime. He was present at the Warsaw Pact meeting where the organization was dissolved. As a war correspondent, his reporting assignments landed him in Yugoslavia during the early phases of the civil war before heading off to Afghanistan with the Soviets to cover the last stages of their military occupation and the rise of the Mujahedin.
Dr. Kounalakis later became the president and publisher of the Washington Monthly magazine and host of the POTUS ’08 satellite-distributed program “Washington Monthly on the Radio.” Earlier in his journalism career he co-produced and co-hosted the weekly syndicated radio program, “Spotlight on World Affairs.” He most recently co-hosted public broadcasting’s “World Affairs” program and continues to appear frequently as a foreign affairs analyst on television.
Books authored by Dr. Kounalakis are wide-ranging – topics ranging from the Silicon Valley’s global technological revolution to America’s geopolitical struggles with China and Russia. “Freedom isn’t Free: The Price of World Order” (Anthem Press, 2022) is his most recent book and takes an analytical look at political, economic, social and moral trade-offs in a world in flux.
His most recent Hoover Institution Press book is “Spin Wars & Spy Games: Global Media and Intelligence Gathering” (2018). In this volume, he makes clear that China and Russia’s global media organizations operate as both intelligence-gathering networks and diplomatic outposts. His research and advocacy actively supported a policy (since enacted) to subject Russian and Chinese to the U.S. Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).
Dr. Kounalakis earned his Political Science Ph.D. summa cum laude in the International Relations subfield from Central European University, MSc at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, and his Political Science BSc at the University of California, Berkeley. As an International Journalism Fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School, he studied and researched in Guatemala and Cuba and at El Colegio de México in Mexico City. He was a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow in Europe, studying at both the Bundesakademie für öffentliche Verwaltung in Bonn, Germany, and the École Nationale d'Administration in Paris.
In 2017, President Barack Obama appointed Dr. Kounalakis to the Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board in the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. He has been a Trustee of The Asia Foundation since 2020 and joined the Advisory Board of the Council for International Relations in Greece in 2021.
Dr. Kounalakis is married to Eleni Kounalakis, the former U.S. Ambassador to Hungary and current Lt. Governor of the State of California, making him California’s “Second Partner.” The family has two teenaged boys anagrammatically named Neo and Eon.
MORE INFO: www.MarkosKounalakis.com
Instagram: @MarkosKounalakis
Scott James
Scott James is a veteran journalist, bestselling author, television news executive, producer, novelist, and newspaper columnist.
His most recent book is Trial by Fire, which reopens the case of the Station nightclub disaster, one of the deadliest fires and largest criminal cases in American history. 100 people died in just 90 seconds when a rock band ignited fireworks inside a crowded club. James’ decade-long investigation questioned whether the wrong people were convicted. As a result of the book, two men were publicly exonerated.
Trial by Fire won the top prize for nonfiction from the New England Society of New York, one of America’s oldest culture organizations, started by founding fathers. The book was adapted for television by CBS News for the program “48 Hours.” The first airing was viewed three million times and remains available on streaming services.
As a columnist, James covered California for The New York Times. Stories that became viral internet sensations included the tale of an ordinary local man who awoke one day to discover he’d been declared God by a British cult. Spoiler alert: he was not.
Earlier in his career James worked in TV news where he won three Emmy awards. In Rhode Island he headed an investigative team focused on government misuse of public funds. In a notoriously crooked state, “On a slow day you could do a corruption story,” he said.
James is also the author of two bestselling novels, The Sower and SoMa, honored as a finalist for debut fiction by the national Lambda Literary Awards. Both books take readers into the underground of San Francisco.
James has been with the Pebble Beach Authors and Ideas Festival for 19 years, most often as an on-stage interviewer. Among his fondest memories is being backstage with Angela’s Ashes author Frank McCourt, who asked James for help with a bedeviling new gadget he’d just been given…a cell phone.
MORE INFO: www.scottjameswriter.com
Chris Impey
Chris Impey is a University Distinguished Professor. For 18 years he was Deputy Head of the Astronomy Department at the University of Arizona, and for 4 years he was an Associate Dean of the College of Science. He has over 260 refereed publications and 100 conference proceedings in astronomy and 150 publications on educational topics. His work has been supported by $20 million in grants from NASA and the NSF. As a professor, he has won eleven teaching awards and has been involved in curriculum and instructional technology development. He has mentored 30 graduate students and 280 undergraduates. Chris Impey is a past Vice President of the American Astronomical Society. He has also been an NSF Distinguished Teaching Scholar, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and Carnegie Council on Teaching’s Arizona Professor of the Year. He was a co-chair of the Education and Public Outreach Study Group for the 2010 Decadal Survey of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2009 he was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and in 2014 he was the first astronomer named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor.
Chris Impey aims to convey the excitement of astronomy in as many ways as possible to a large public audience. He gives 30 public talks a year, to audiences as large as 6000 and as varied as NASA engineers, first graders, and judges of the Ninth Circuit Court. For a decade, he has traveled to India to teach Buddhist monks in a program started by the Dalai Lama. He designed and led tours for donors and alumni to Italy, Chile, Britain, and South Africa, and he has been an enrichment lecturer for 4 cruise lines: Scientific American, Norwegian, Princess, and Viking. He has written 120 popular articles on cosmology and astrobiology and co-authored two introductory textbooks. He has written 10 popular science books: The Living Cosmos (2007, Random House), How It Ends (2010, W.W. Norton), How It Began (2012, W.W. Norton), Talking About Life (2010, Cambridge Univ.), Dreams of Other Worlds (2013, Princeton), Humble Before the Void (2014, Templeton), Beyond (2015, W.W. Norton), Einstein’s Monsters (2018, Norton), Worlds Without End (2023, MIT), and Recipe for a Universe (2026, MIT). His first novel, Shadow World, came out in 2013. His “Teach Astronomy” web site has had 4 million visitors, and his YouTube lectures and videos have 7 million views. He has surveyed 25,000 college students and members of the general public on their science literacy and attitudes towards science. Over 420,000 adults from 190 countries have enrolled in his Massive Open Online Classes (MOOCs), watching over 7 million minutes of video lectures since 2013. His 36 online articles for The Conversation have had 4.3 million readers.
MORE INFO: https://chrisimpey-astronomy.com/
Jonathan Gienapp
Jonathan Gienapp is Associate Professor of History and Law and the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching. He specializes in the constitutional, political, legal, and intellectual history of the early United States. His primary focus to date has been the origins and development of the U.S. Constitution, in particular the ways in which Founding-era Americans understood and debated constitutionalism across the nation's early decades. His historical interests intersect with modern legal debates over constitutional interpretation and theory, especially those centered on the theory of constitutional originalism.
He is the author of two books on American constitutional history and interpretation that have garnered wide acclaim.
His most recent book, Against Constitutional Originalism: A Historical Critique (Yale University Press, 2024), critiques the theory of constitutional originalism's engagement with history. The book won the 2025 Order of the Coif Book Award from the Association of American Law Schools, was longlisted for the 2025 Cundill History Prize, and was named a History Today Book of the Year for 2024. It has been reviewed in several high-profile venues, including The Washington Post, which read: "What are the chances that, in 2024, a new book could fundamentally reorient how we understand America’s founding? Jonathan Gienapp . . . has written such a book. . . . You read it, and you get vertigo. . . . Gienapp’s book comes as a thunderclap. . . . this brilliant book is . . . the most forceful objection to originalism to date."
His first book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence. It investigates how early political debates over the Constitution’s meaning altered how Americans imagined the Constitution and its possibilities, showing how these changes created a distinct kind of constitutional culture, the consequences of which endure to this day. It won the 2017 Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize from Harvard University Press and the 2019 Best Book in American Political Thought Award from the American Political Science Association and was a finalist for the 2019 Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians. In addition, it was named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2019 and a Spectator USA Book of the Year for 2018. It was reviewed in numerous places including The Nation.
His next book chronicles the forgotten history of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Currently entitled "We the People of the United States: The Struggle over Popular Sovereignty and Nationhood," it tells the story of the Preamble's early vitality and eventual descent into political and legal irrelevance, probing the often entwined debates over popular rule, sovereignty, federalism, and constitutionalism in the nation's earliest years to understand the full meanings of the Constitution's opening words: "We the People of the United States."
Gienapp has lectured across the country on the history of the nation’s founding and the U.S. Constitution. He is actively involved in deepening the public’s understanding of constitutional history through public-facing writing and interviews and extensive work with institutions such as the National Constitution Center and the United States Marine Corp. As a member of the Historians Council on the Constitution at the Brennan Center for Justice, he helps advise legal experts on the historical dimensions of constitutional issues before the Supreme Court of the United States. As part of this activity, he has contributed to several amicus briefs to the Supreme Court. He is also heavily involved in various initiatives to reinvigorate civics education in America.
Gienapp is also a celebrated teacher who has been awarded numerous accolades for his teaching and dedication to students. At Stanford, he has been awarded the university’s highest teaching award, the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching, in addition to the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize and the Dean’s Award for Distinguished Teaching in the School of Humanities and Sciences in the area of First Years of Teaching. Beyond Stanford, he has been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Northern California Association.
MORE INFO: https://www.jonathangienapp.com/
David Frankel
David Frankel is the director of The Devil Wears Prada 2, which was released by Disney in May, 2026.
His previous work as a director includes The Devil Wears Prada, starring Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci; Marley & Me, starring Owen Wilson, Jennifer Aniston and Alan Arkin; The Big Year, starring Jack Black, Steve Martin and Wilson; Collateral Beauty, starring Will Smith, Helen Mirren, Edward Norton, Kate Winslet, Keira Knightley, and Michael Pena; Jerry and Marge Go Large, starring Bryan Cranston and Annette Bening; One Chance, starring James Corden, Alexandra Roach, Colm Meaney and Julie Walters; Miami Rhapsody, starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Antonio Banderas and Mia Farrow; and Hope Springs, starring Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, and Steve Carell.
He won an Academy Award for Best Short for his film, Dear Diary, and an Emmy for his direction of HBO’s Band of Brothers. His other work for HBO includes the pilot for Entourage, several episodes of Sex and the City, and From the Earth to the Moon. His other television work includes episodes of The Morning Show starring Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Carell for AppleTV+; the pilots for Manifest (on NBC & Netflix), The Baker and the Beauty (on ABC) and The Irrational (on NBC); and the Netflix pilot for Inventing Anna, starring Julia Garner.
He lives in Miami with his wife, Jennifer Beber.
David Eagleman
David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University, a New York Times best-selling author, and host of the #1 science podcast “Inner Cosmos”.
His areas of research include brain plasticity, sensory substitution, vision, and time perception.
His books include Sum, Incognito, and the Pulitzer-nominated Livewired. He runs the neurotech company Jojo Health, and he wrote and presented the Emmy-nominated PBS series The Brain.
He is a Guggenheim Fellow, and a recipient of the Wozniak Innovation award, and the Shannon Innovation Award from Bell Labs.
Anthony Doerr
Anthony Doerr is the author of the New York Times best-selling Cloud Cuckoo Land, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller.
He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome.
He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize.
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons.
Frances Dinkelspiel
Frances Dinkelspiel is an award-winning journalist and author who co-founded Cityside, the nonprofit news organization behind Berkeleyside, Oaklandside and Richmondside. She’s contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Daily Beast, People, and AARP. She got her start in the news business as a staff writer at the Syracuse Newspapers and then at the San Jose Mercury News.
Frances is the author of two books, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California, which was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, one of the Chronicle’s best books of the year, and a finalist for a Northern California Book Award. It won a Golden Poppy award from the Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Association. Her second book, Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession, and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California, was a New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, a finalist for a Northern California Book Award, and was named a best wine book of the year by the Wall Street Journal and Food and Wine magazine.
Frances got a degree in history from Stanford University and attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She has taught at UC Berkeley’s journalism school and at the Community of Writers program in the Sierra Nevada. She has served as a judge for the Los Angeles Times Book Awards and as a reviewer for the Public Scholar program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
She has appeared in television shows and documentaries, including American Greed, Who Do You Think You Are? (with Helen Hunt), and American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco.
Frances is a member of the San-Francisco-based writing group North 24th Writers, whose members have published more than two dozen non-fiction books. She has two adult daughters and lives in Berkeley with her husband, Gary.
MORE INFO: https://francesdinkelspiel.com/