Jennifer A. Roecklein-Canfield is a Professor of Chemistry at Simmons University and an accomplished research Biochemist with over 30 years of experience. She has mentored more than 100 undergraduate women in STEM, fostering the next generation of scientists. Her innovative teaching and research have earned national recognition from multiple professional organizations.

A dedicated advocate for gender equity in STEM, Dr. Canfield serves on the Women in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Committee for the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB) and was elected an ASBMB Fellow in 2024. She is also a member of the Massachusetts Governor’s STEM Advisory Council, working to expand high-quality STEM education across the state.

Dr. Canfield is the Southern New England Team Leader for the National Girls Collaborative Project (NGCP) and the Chair of the Steering Committee for the Massachusetts Collaborative for the Million Women Mentors Initiative, both aimed at encouraging and supporting girls in STEM. Additionally, she serves on the Upper Middlesex Commission for the Status of Women, advocating for the economic and social empowerment of women and girls.

Her career is marked by a deep commitment to creating opportunities for women in science at local, regional, and national levels, ensuring equitable access to STEM education and careers.

Pamela R. McCauley  is a pioneering Industrial Engineering researcher, entrepreneur, and STEM advocate known for her contributions to human factors, ergonomics, biomechanics, and leadership in STEM. Currently serving as the Dean of the School of Engineering at Widener University, she has previously held leadership roles at the National Science Foundation and North Carolina State University and was a Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Associate Professor at MIT. An award-winning educator and accomplished author, Dr. McCauley has published extensively, including a best-selling ergonomics textbook and leadership books aimed at empowering women in STEM.

Christina Hoff Sommers is a senior fellow emeritus at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she studies the politics of gender and feminism, as well as free expression, due process, and the preservation of liberty in the academy. Before joining AEI, Dr. Sommers was a philosophy professor at Clark University.

She is best known for her defense of classical liberal feminism and her critique of gender feminism. Her books include “Freedom Feminism—Its Surprising History and Why It Matters Today” (AEI, 2013); “One Nation Under Therapy” (St. Martin’s Press, 2005), coauthored with Sally Satel; “The War Against Boys” (Simon & Schuster, 2001 and 2013), which was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 2001; and “Who Stole Feminism?” (Simon & Schuster, 1995). Her textbook, “Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life,” currently in its ninth edition, is a bestseller in college ethics.

Cory Clark is the Executive Director and Co-Founder (along with Professor Philip Tetlock) of The Adversarial Collaboration Project at University of Pennsylvania and a Visiting Scholar in Management in the Wharton School. She received her PhD from University of California, Irvine in Social and Personality Psychology, and previously worked as an Assistant Professor at Durham University in the United Kingdom and the Director of Academic Engagement for Heterodox Academy.

She is interested in biased evaluations of science, especially among scientists themselves. She has studied how moral and political concerns interfere with academic freedom and pursuit of truth. Lately, she has become interested in how the culture of academia has changed (in favor of equity over merit and harm reduction over academic freedom) as female scholars have come to dominate the institution.

Linda Rabieh (Moderator) is a Senior Lecturer at MIT.  She has taught political philosophy there since 2010, primarily in Concourse, an interdisciplinary program in the humanities and sciences, but also in the political science and philosophy departments. Linda received her Ph.D from the University of Toronto and is the author of Plato and the Virtue of Courage, which won the inaugural Delba Winthrop Mansfield prize for excellence in political science. She is also the author of numerous articles that explore the political thought of ancient and medieval thinkers, including Thucydides, Plato and Maimonides. She has been the recipient of a National Endowment of Humanities Independent Scholar Fellowship and various awards and fellowships at MIT. For the past nine years, Linda has been co-director of an annual January study program for MIT students to Greece and Rome, and, more recently, she became one of the faculty directors of the Civil Discourse Project at MIT. She writes and teaches courses on ancient and medieval treatments of ethics in war, political ambition, and the extent and limits of knowledge.