Molly Cross
Molly Cross, Ph.D., is the Climate Change Adaptation Coordinator for the North America Program of the Wildlife Conservation Society. She brings together experts in the fields of climate change, ecology, conservation-planning and land management to help conservation practitioners translate climate change science into on-the-ground actions and outcomes. Molly is leading collaborative climate change planning efforts involving diverse stakeholders at several landscapes across North America, focused on a range of ecosystems and fish, wildlife and plant species. She has been researching, writing reports, and coordinating outreach on the potential ecological, social and economic impacts of climate change for over fifteen years. For her, thinking about ways to help wildlife and wild places cope with and respond to climate change is a challenge, but an inspiring one. Molly’s quest is to enable conservation practitioners to move similarly away from feeling depressed and helpless about climate change, and towards a pro-active, solution-seeking mentality. When not mired in the science and politics of climate change, she can be found hiking, exploring and dancing with her two young daughters and husband.
Greg Gianforte
Greg Gianforte and his wife Susan have called Bozeman home since 1995. They have three boys and a girl of which they are very proud. He is a serial entrepreneur and active mentor of Montana entrepreneurs. His focus is job creation in Montana. Greg founded RightNow, in Bozeman in 1997 in an extra bedroom of their home. The company grew to more than 1,100 employees worldwide and more than $225 million in annual revenue. RightNow was the largest commercial employer in Bozeman and the only publically traded technology company headquartered in Montana. He took RightNow public in 2004. In 2012, Oracle purchased RightNow for over $1.8 billion. RightNow was his fifth software startup. Greg was selected as the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Pacific Northwest in 2003. Currently Greg splits his time between mentoring Montana entrepreneurs, philanthropic work through the Gianforte Family Foundation, which he and his wife founded, and service on various local and national for-profit and not-for-profits boards. He also tries to hunt or fish at least one day per week. Greg earned his B.E. degree in Electrical Engineering and M.S. degree in Computer Science from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1983.
Carmen McSpadden
Carmen has worked, volunteered and lived in Bozeman, Montana for 29 years. She received the Community Mediation Center’s Peacemaker Award and three Chamber of Commerce and MSU Alumni Association’s MSU Awards for Excellence.
In 2008, she was the Bozeman Daily Chronicle’s Woman of the Year and in 2012 the MSU College of Business' Mentor of the Year. Carmen is the Director of the Montana State University (MSU) Leadership Institute and Leadership Fellows Program. These programs focus on advancing and inspiring students to become catalysts for positive change through effective leadership. For eight years she has been a leadership trainer for Leadership Montana, whose mission is to empower the great leaders Montana deserves.
A member of the Gallatin County Planning Board for five years, Carmen then chaired the Gallatin County Open Lands Board to create the State’s first $10 million bond to support open space. She chaired and was a member of the Anderson School Board for ten years and she served as President of the Montana School Board Association during her eight years of service. She currently serves on the board of Humanities Montana and chairs the board of Headwaters Economics.
Craig Beals
Craig Beals is a science teacher at Senior High School in Billings, Montana. Craig has spent his whole life under the Big Sky. He grew up in Billings then moved to Bozeman where he attended Montana State University and earned a Bachelor of Science in Biology. After nearly a decade in Bozeman, Craig moved back to Billings to marry, raise a family, and teach. He later went on to earn a Masters in Zoology from Miami University in Ohio. He has spent time assisting atmospheric chemistry research on Greenland’s ice sheet and currently travels the world each summer teaching ecology field courses for Miami University (Ohio). Craig is passionate about education and its ability to create opportunities for all people, young and old. He continually explores ways to use science education as a tool to inspire creative thinking and encourage the exploration of one’s curiosity. Following his own curiosities, Craig’s latest journey has taken him deep into the teenage mind where he has the learned the power and importance of compassion in education and in life.
Gary Robson
Gary D. Robson is a writer and closed-captioning expert from Red Lodge, Montana. He has worked as a software engineer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and he brought all of his varied expertise and passion to the field of closed captioning for deaf and hard-of-hearing people.
Gary wrote the Closed Captioning Handbook, the captioning article in the World Book Encyclopedia and over 50 other articles and papers about the subject. He served on the EIA/CEA standards committee that defined how closed captioning equipment works, and chaired the working group that wrote EIA-708, the standards document for captioning on digital television. He also has two patents related to broadcast closed captioning. TDI (Telecommunications for the Deaf, Inc.) honored Gary by presenting him with the Andrew Saks Engineering Award in 1997 for “outstanding contributions in improving visual accessibility to information via real-time captioning for deaf and hard of hearing Americans.”
Gary has spoken widely about closed captioning to audiences including U.C. Berkeley, the U.S. Department of Education, the International Television Association, Telecommunications for the Deaf, the California Association for the Deaf, and most major closed captioning associations. He has written over 20 books in total, which have sold a total of over 350,000 copies. His wife performs realtime closed captioning for broadcast news, local government, and major sporting events.
Michelle Larson
Michelle B. Larson, PhD, is the President and Chief Executive Officer of the Adler Planetarium. As president of America’s first planetarium, Larson oversees a 21st century space science center that includes the institution’s landmark museum complex, exhibition galleries, and three theaters; a robust research enterprise; one of the world’s leading collections documenting the history of astronomy; and an award-winning education and outreach program. Annually, more than 470,000 people visit the Adler, making it one of Chicago’s leading tourist attractions.
Dr. Larson grew up in Anchorage, Alaska and earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees in Physics from Montana State University. She is an astrophysicist who did her doctoral work in neutron star astrophysics. It was during this time that she discovered astronomy as a vehicle to engage people in science. Her professional passion is enabling engagement and communication between scientists and the public. She also enjoys sharing the more spectacular objects of the night sky with the public through her telescope. A favorite highlight was when a young child exclaimed, “Wow! Saturn looks just like a Chevy symbol.” Dr. Larson serves on the Advisory Boards for the ARCS (Achievement Rewards for College Scientists) Foundation Illinois Chapter, After School Matters (Chicago), and the Montana Space Grant Consortium. She is married to Shane L. Larson, PhD, also an astrophysicist; and they have one daughter.
Tate Chamberlin
Tate Chamberlin is pushing the envelope in social, educational and musical events by continually reintegrating an arsenal of new concepts and human connections. Through an experiential remix uniting music and expression, each step and swell brings a new experience by cultivating empathy. This arsenal will serve well as he descends upon the world like a platinum-fisted pterodactyl, dropping artistic carpet-bombs carrying the seed of expression and social conglomeration. Crushing underfoot the banality of average events, flying high the mighty banner of unconventional creativity and blasting his mighty war horns across the battlefields of entertainment.
Rebecca Watters
Rebecca Watters grew up near Boston, Massachusetts, has a BA in anthropology from St. Lawrence University, and did her Master’s in environmental science at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She was a Peace Corps environmental volunteer in Mongolia and has lived, worked, and studied around the world. She currently directs the Mongolian Wolverine Project, which builds ties between Mongolia and the greater Yellowstone ecosystem for scientific exchange, capacity building, and data-sharing on the social, economic, and environmental effects of climate change in these two similar ecosystems. She writes about her conservation research and experiences online at the Wolverine Blog and in various print publications. She lives in Mongolia during field seasons, and Bozeman, Montana, when she is in the US.
Theo Bennett
Theo Bennett has lived in Bozeman since he was 6 years old and is currently a senior at Bozeman High School. He is an Eagle scout and is active in a number of athletic, academic, and service organizations, including the National Honor Society, Key club, and the Hawks varsity cross country team. Although plans can change, he currently is considering psychiatry or neuroscience as future careers.
Mary Schweitzer
I came to paleontology rather late in life, attaining my PhD from Montana State University at age 40. A strong background in biology and three young children still at home precluded a ‘normal’ path to the study of dinosaurs, so my research is lab-based and largely experimental. I have focused on the recovery of endogenous molecules from fossils, and on the study of the interactions between biomolecules and the environment that lead to both alteration and preservation of biological molecules. I am interested in molecular taphonomy—how organisms transition from the biosphere to the geosphere, at the molecular level, what preserves over geological time, how to interpret those data, and what we may learn from molecules retained in well preserved fossils. I focus on proteins rather than ancient DNA, because proteins have greater potential to preserve in deep time. Proteins impart very different information than DNA sequence data, because it is the proteins that affect actual organismal function. Patterns of folding and post translational modifications that give molecules their unique properties cannot always be discerned from DNA sequence, and both are important for understanding the biology of extinct organisms. My passion is to understand how extinct organisms functioned in their environments, and what molecular components made it possible for them to succeed.
Josh Powell
Josh Powell is an eighteen year old multi-instrumentalist from Bozeman, Montana. Although he's been playing guitar since fifth grade, he has only recently begun exploring the possibilities presented with percussive-fingerstlye acoustic guitar. Josh believes that music should be created as art, rather than entertainment, and hopes to use music as a bridge between people and the world around them.
Rob Irizarry
Rob has spent three decades working with hardware and software technology in the finance, garment and automotive industries, with twelve of those years engaged in pioneering multi-tenant Software as a Service for the Customer Experience market. He's been involved in multiple startups in a variety of roles and now spend my time split between investing in and coaching startups and working to improve education at all levels to help prepare America's youth for the technology that will shape their (and our country's) future. Additionally, Rob has worked in and with public and private sector organizations from 10 people to the Fortune 10 building systems, processes and teams in the United States, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and South Africa and spent a decade living in Asia.
Graham Austin
Dr. Graham Austin obtained her Ph.D. in marketing, with an emphasis on consumer behavior, communication, and qualitative research methods, from the University of Georgia in 2008. She is an assistant professor of marketing at Montana State University, where she teaches principles of marketing and consumer behavior.
In a nutshell, Graham finds projects to research by paying attention to the interesting and/or funny things people do, and then figuring out why they behave this way. As part of her doctoral research, she developed a theory called “strategic empathy,” which says that being self-aware, aware of other people’s humanity, and open to understanding our differences, allows brand managers – and marketing researchers – to be successful in increasing human happiness, connectedness, and achievement.
Basement Jazz
Basement Jazz formed at Camp Epic in 2010 and has since played the annual Jazz Montana dinner, the Women's Expo, the Christmas Stroll, Bozeman Art Walks, the Cikan House and fundraisers for Hand Me Down Some Silver, Reach, Thrive, Haven, and the Bozeman Public Library. They opened for the Los Angeles Guitar Quartet at the 2011 Big Sky Summer Classical Music Festival, and were featured at the 2012 Sweet Pea Ball. They recently opened for The Bad Plus at the Emerson Center for the Arts, and the Detroit Soul Collective at the Jazz Montana Festival. Two CDs have been released so far, with the 2nd one featuring original compositions. Their performance on “11th and Grant with Eric Funk” will air on Montana PBS in April and will be followed by the release of their third CD, which contains spontaneous improvisations with Eric Funk. Jake Fleming writes original music for them and coaches them on their compositions. Claire Young, tenor sax, is a music technology major at Montana State University; Amy Giullian, drums, plans to enroll at Brigham Young University in the fall; Colleen Schmidt, bass, attended the 2013 Stanford Jazz Workshop and Caroline Janssen, guitar, is a three time recipient of the Jazz Montana scholarship. Her original songs have been selected three times to be a part of Hand Me Down Some Silver’s Young Songwriter’s competition and recordings.
Bobcat Singers
The Bobcat Singers are a group of Native American students and community members from Bozeman and beyond. Revolving membership has allowed for the group to exist, and for over 20 years the inter-tribal singing group has performed for community events and educational gathering to showcase songs from Native America. Currently, the tribes represented at the drum are Cree, Northern Cheyenne, Eastern Shoshone, Navajo, Crow, and Lakota.
