David Quammen is an author and journalist whose books include The Song of the Dodo (1996), The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006), and Spillover (2014), a work on the science, history, and human impacts of emerging diseases (especially viral diseases), which was short-listed for eight national and international awards and won three. His shorter books Ebola (2014) and The Chimp and the River(2015) were drawn from Spillover, each with a new introduction. His forthcoming book (August 2018) is The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life, which explores the drastic revisions in understanding of life’s history on Earth forced by recent discoveries from genome sequencing, and the story of a scientist named Carl Woese. In the past thirty years Quammen has also published a few hundred pieces of short nonfiction—feature articles, essays, columns—in magazines such as Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, Esquire, The Atlantic, Powder, and Rolling Stone. He writes occasional Op Eds for The New York Times and reviews for The New York Times Book Review. Quammen has been honored with an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and is a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award. He is a Contributing Writer for National Geographic, in whose service he travels often, usually to wild and remote places. Home is Bozeman, Montana.

Photo Credit: Lynn Donaldson

Wade has over 30 years of financial services experience and leadership. Wade was the face of American Skandia, leading its sales and marketing strategy from their inception in 1988 to becoming the #1 variable annuity seller in the first quarter of 2000, and ultimately spearheaded their sale as CEO in 2003. Dokken is the author of “New Century, New Deal,” a public policy analysis of the challenges facing Social Security in the coming decades. Dokken is also a columnist at FA Magazine, providing research white papers on diverse topics such as Sustainable Withdrawal Rates, Sequence of Returns, and Portfolio Optimization.