Speakers

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GIL ZAMORA

Gil has spoken to audiences around the world about forensic art and in particular about his composite sketch methodology. He retired as the Police Artist for the largest police agency in Silicon Valley in 2011. He has interviewed over 3,000 eyewitnesses and was instrumental in solving some of the most heinous crimes in the Bay Area.

The Real Beauty Sketches campaign (2013) asked Gil to be the sketch artist in a social experiment that focused on how real women saw themselves. Over 100 million views worldwide on the internet brought attention to the subject of self perception and beauty. Gil was able to showcase his forensic art techniques in a way that brought about real discussions on self esteem. The sketch results were dramatic.

The Real Beauty Sketch interviews were reminiscent of Gil’s informal forensic art apprenticeship, when he sat several feet away as his mentor conducted interviews with actual crime victims.

Looking back on his career he realized he had always been asking witnesses to give their perspective about an unknown person: He starting calling these sketches: Perspective Sketches™.

Gil continues his forensic art practice working with law enforcement agencies around the country. His Perspective Sketches are still in demand and he is working on a book about his mindful approach to forensic art.

ROBERT MENDOZA

Robert Mendoza is a forensic neuropsychologist and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tufts Medical School as well as on the special and scientific staff at Tufts Medical Center.  He is the Chief of Clinical Psychology at the Metro Boston Forensic Inpatient Units and the Director of Psychology Doctoral Training at the same hospital. He is the founder of the mental health forensic group practice, Boston Forensic Associates.  He has performed hundreds of forensic assessments and testifies in federal, superior, and districts courts. He has developed an area of specialty examining those accused of serial murders, murder, terrorism, sex offenses, and other particularly violent offenses. He is involved in forensic research studying violence, cognition, and the impact on statutory forensic assessments including insanity pleas/criminal responsibilities, dangerousness assessment, and competence to stand trial.  Dr. Mendoza is a frequent presenter at professional meetings throughout the United States. He completed his fellowship in neuropsychology at Harvard Medical School and was also a United States Congressional Fellow for the American Psychological Association.

Website: bostonforensicassociates.com

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JOHNATHON LEE IVERSON

#TheLastRingmaster is a proud native of New York City, NY, who began his career with The Boys Choir Of Harlem crisscrossing the globe and sharing the stage with the likes of Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Luciano Pavarotti, Roberta Flack, Tony Bennett, Betty Buckley, and Kathleen Battle, among others, as well as, performing for four American Presidents and Nobel Peace Prize recipient and South African President, Nelson Mandela. His historic and near two-decade tenure with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey was met with record-breaking box offices as Iverson took his first steps into the pages of history at only 22 years old, becoming the youngest, the first New Yorker, and the first African American Ringmaster in the near 150 years of the circus’ history.

Iverson’s historical tenure with The Greatest Show On Earth is documented in numerous publications, including, Black First: 4,000 Ground-Breaking and Pioneering Historical Events by Jessie Carney Smith, African-American First by Joan Potter, Live Life! Be Young, Black, and Successful by Quincy Benton, Beat of a Different Drum: The Untold Stories of African-Americans Forging Their Own Paths in Work and Life by Dax-Devlon Ross, and Beyond the Statistics by Zane Massey.  Among the many accolades and praise received by Iverson, was being named one of Barbara Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People.

He has since made a much celebrated return to theatrical and operatic stage, where he was praised for his work in The Garden Theatre’s “A Tennessee Walk” and Opera Orlando Presents “The Companion” and “Safe Word” at the Orlando Fringe. He still dust off the top hat and tails from time to time as he did for the Lone Star Circus and The Flying Carrs Circus. He’s also a contributor to Circustalk.com, Boxing.com, and the Huffington Post.

For more information visit bigtopvoice.com.

SOFIA BABOOL

Sofia Babool is an Ismaili Muslim currently studying neuroscience at the University of Texas at Dallas. In addition to being a staff writer for the school paper, “The Mercury,” she is also a lab researcher at the Close Relationships and Health Lab. Over the past four years, she has published 4+ articles about international poverty alleviation, as well as various nationally published poetry and short stories. In the summer of 2017, she was chosen for a highly competitive international camp known as “Global Encounters,” which took place in Pakistan. Upon her return to the United States, she gave a Ted Talk in San Diego on the importance of recognizing the potential of developing countries around the world.  In her free time, she enjoys baking, playing badminton, and listening to Bollywood music.

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RANDALL DAVIS

Dr. Davis has been a seminal contributor to the fields of knowledge-based systems and human-computer interaction, publishing some more than 100 articles and playing a central role in the development of several systems. He and his research group are developing advanced tools that permit natural multi-modal interaction with computers by creating software that understands users as they sketch, gesture, and talk.

He is the co-author of Knowledge-Based Systems in AI. In 1990 he was named a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI and in 1995 was elected to a two-year term as its President. From 1995-1998 he served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the U. S. Air Force, earning the USAF Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service.

Dr. Davis has also been active in the area of intellectual property and software. In 1990 he served as expert to the Court in Computer Associates v. Altai, a case that produced the abstraction, filtration, comparison test now widely used in software copyright cases.

From 1998 to 2000 he served as the chairman of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences study on intellectual property rights and the information infrastructure entitled The Digital Dilemma: Intellectual Property in the Information Age, published by the National Academy Press in February, 2000.

Dr. Davis has been a Full Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT since 1989. He has served as Associate Director of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (1993-1998), as a Research Director of CSAIL from 2003-2007, and as Associate Director of CSAIL from 2012-2014.

ELLEN LANGER

Dr. Ellen Langer, Ph.D., is a social psychologist and the first female professor to gain tenure in the Psychology Department at Harvard University. She is the author of eleven books and more than two hundred research articles written for general and academic readers on mindfulness for over 35 years. Her best selling books include Mindfulness; The Power of Mindful Learning; On Becoming an Artist: Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity; and Counterclockwise: Mindful Health and the Power of Possibility. Her most most recent book is The Art of Noticing which pairs one-liners culled from her research with her original paintings. She has also edited the Wiley Mindfulness Handbook, an anthology on mindfulness in which leading researchers integrate work derived from her western scientific theoretical base of mindfulness with research on eastern derived forms of meditation.

Dr. Langer has been described as the “mother of mindfulness” and has written extensively on the illusion of control, mindful aging, stress, decision-making, and health. Among other honors, she is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and three Distinguished Scientist Awards, the World Congress Award, the NYU Alumni Achievement Award, and the Staats award for Unifying Psychology. Most recently she received the Liberty Science Genius Award.

Dr. Langer is a frequent speaker on mindfulness at academic, professional and public events. She is also the founder of The Langer Mindfulness Institute, and is a gallery exhibiting artist.

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Pawan Dhingra is Professor of American Studies and Contributing Faculty in Anthropology/Sociology at Amherst College. He is Former Curator and Senior Advisor to the historic Smithsonian Institution’s Beyond Bollywood project. He and his work have been profiled on numerous media and public outlets, including the White House forum on AAPI heritage, National Public Radio, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Colorlines, Times of India, and many more. He has written and spoken on various aspects of the immigrant experience. This includes the award-winning Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream(Stanford University Press, 2012) and the award-winning Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (Stanford University Press, 2007). He co-authored, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Polity Press 2014). In addition to writing op-eds and award-winning articles, he also appears in the documentary on Indian American spelling bee kids, Breaking the Bee. He has been President of the Board of the South Asian American Digital Archive. He has been department chair and held tenured positions at Tufts University and Oberlin College. He is @phdhingra1.