MODERATOR: RICHARD SAMUELS Director, Center for International Studies Ford International Professor of Political Science, MIT

Richard J. Samuels is also the Founding Director of the MIT Japan Program. In 2001 he became Chairman of the Japan-US Friendship Commission, an independent Federal grant-making agency that supports Japanese studies and policy-oriented research in the United States. In 2005 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Samuels served as Head of the MIT Department of Political Science between 1992-1997 and as Vice-Chairman of the Committee on Japan of the National Research Council until 1996.

Samuels' next book, Securing Japan, will be published in 2007 by Cornell University Press. His previous books include Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan, a comparative political and economic history of political leadership in Italy and Japan,and "Rich Nation, Strong Army": National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan,and The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective. Samuels received his Ph.D. from MIT in 1980.

BARRY POSEN Ford International Professor of Political Science Director, CIS Security Studies Program, MIT

Barry R. Posen serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI, an educational program for senior military officers, government officials and business executives in the national security policy community. He has written two books, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks and The Sources of Military Doctrine, which won two awards: The American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award.

Posen is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November/December 2007) and "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony," International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, Smithsonian Institution; and most recently, Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Posen's current research interests include U.S. national security policy, the security policy of the European Union, the organization and employment of military force, great power intervention into civil conflicts, and innovation in the U.S. Army, 1970-1980.

HENRY D. JACOBY William F. Pounds Professor of Management Emeritus Professor of Applied Economics Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, MIT Sloan School of Management Co-Director, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, MIT

Henry "Jake" Jacoby studies policy and management in the areas of energy, natural resources, and the environment, writing widely on these topics, including five books. He is a former Chair of the MIT Faculty, and former Director of the Harvard Environmental Systems Program, former Director of CEEPR, and former Associate Director of the MIT Energy Laboratory. He currently serves on the Scientific Committee for the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program and on the Climate Research Committee of the U.S. National Research Council. His current research is focused on economic analysis of climate change and greenhouse gas mitigation, and the integration of this work with the natural science of the issue.

Jacoby received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin in 1957, an M.P.A. in Public Administration from Harvard University in 1963, and a Ph.D. in Economics, also from Harvard University, in 1967.

SIMON JOHNSON Ronald A. Kurtz (1954) Professor of Entrepreneurship, MIT Sloan School of Management

Simon Johnson is also a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., and co-founder of a website on the global economic and financial crisis, BaselineScenario.com. He is co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research project on Africa and President of the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (term of office 2008-09).

From March 2007 through the end of August 2008, Professor Johnson was the International Monetary Fund's Economic Counsellor (chief economist) and Director of its Research Department. In 2000-2001 Professor Johnson was a member of the US Securities and Exchange Commissions Advisory Committee on Market Information. Johnson is an expert on financial and economic crises. As an academic, in policy roles, and with the private sector, over the past 20 years he has worked on crisis prevention, amelioration, and recovery around the world, in both relatively rich and relatively poor countries.

He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Financial Economics, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Journal of Comparative Economics, and Cliometrica (a new Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History). In January 2010, he joined The Huffington Post as contributing business editor. Johnson earned his B.A. from the University of Oxford, his M.A. from the University of Manchester, and his Ph.D. in Economics from MIT.