Associate Professor-Addiction Medicine, Harvard Medical School and Director, Recovery Research Institute, MA General Hospital

Dr. Kelly is the Elizabeth R. Spallin Associate Professor of Psychiatry in Addiction Medicine at Harvard Medical School-the first endowed professor in addiction medicine at Harvard. He is also the founder and Director of the Recovery Research Institute at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), the Program Director of the Addiction Recovery Management Service (ARMS) and the Associate Director of the Center for Addiction Medicine at MGH. Dr. Kelly is a former President of the American Psychological Association (APA) Society of Addiction Psychology, and is also a Fellow of the APA and a diplomate of the American Board of Professional Psychology. He has served as a consultant to U.S. federal agencies and non-Federal institutions, and foreign governments. His clinical and research work has focused on addiction treatment and the recovery process, mechanisms of behavior change, and in reducing stigma and discrimination among individuals suffering from addiction.

Author, Comedian and Wilmington School Committee member

He’s come a long way from the nights of frying up mozzarella sticks in the back room of an obscure comedy club in the Boston suburbs. He was a college student, using that part-time job to study the craft of stand-up comedy by catching glimpses of the performers on stage. Today, Stephen Bjork is a polished veteran of the highly competitive Boston comedy scene with crisscrossing tours of the country under his belt. A longtime favorite in nightclubs and colleges around the country, Steve enjoys equal success in corporate settings.

From the supermarket, to recess, to family life, and even to cannibalism, Bjork crafts hysterical anecdotes and observations from everyday life. In addition to hundreds of top echelon industry-respected comedians, Bjork has performed with such luminaries as Dane Cook, Steven Wright, Dom Irrera, Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan, Dana Gould, and Tommy Chong. He has also opened for the legendary musical group The Platters.

Bjork has performed at all of the major Boston and New England comedy clubs along with The Improv in Las Vegas, NV; Mohegan Sun in CT and many, many others.

Bill Daggett, Founder and Chairman of the International Center for Leadership in Education, is recognized worldwide for his proven ability to move preK-12

education systems towards more rigorous and relevant skills and knowledge for all students. For 25 years, he has crisscrossed the US, as well as the industrialized world, to lead school reform efforts to effectively prepare students for their future.

While an avid supporter of public education, he also challenges all of us to be more focused on our children’s future than on maintaining the schools of our youth. He is the creator of the Rigor/Relevance Framework which has recently become the cornerstone of much of the nation’s school reform efforts. He is also the author of numerous books about learning and education, textbooks, research reports, and journal articles.

Before founding and now serving as Chairman of the International Center for Leadership in Education, Dr. Daggett was a teacher, local administrator, and a director with the New York State Education Department. Dr. Daggett has been recognized as a distinguished alumnus by both Temple University and the State University at Albany.

Dr. Daggett has a special commitment to individuals with disabilities. He and his wife, Bonnie, volunteer their time and lend their support to Wildwood Programs in upstate New York. Wildwood serves the needs of people of all ages who, like their daughter Audrey, have neurological impairments/learning disabilities or autism, by enabling them to become the best that they can be.

Steve Buckley has been a sportswriter for more than 35 years, and has been a columnist with the Boston Herald since 1995. Prior to joining the Herald, he was a columnist for the National Sports Daily, and covered baseball for the Hartford Courant, Tacoma News-Tribune and Portland Press Herald.

His last book, “Wicked Good Year,” (HarperCollins, 2009), tells the back stories of the Red Sox, Patriots and Celtics all vying for championships between October 2007 and June 2008. He has covered every major Boston sporting event over the past 20 years, including the Patriots’ five Super Bowl championships, the Red Sox’ three World Series championship victories, the Celtics’ run to the NBA championship in the spring of 2008 and the Bruins’ 2011 Stanley Cup title.

Buckley is also a founder of the Oldtime Baseball Game, an annual charity event at St. Peter’s field in Cambridge featuring local players who don throwback uniforms representing virtually every era in baseball history, from the minor leagues to the Negro Leagues. Since its inception in 1994, the game has raised more than $800,000 for local charities. He also sits on the board of directors of the Sports Museum of New England.

For more than 25 years he has written an annual Memorial Day column in which he chooses a monument or “hero square” in the Boston area and researches the life of the fallen solider for whom it is named. He took his 1991 feature on the late Cpl. Albert S. Teevan and later wrote, produced and directed the documentary “Of Monuments and Men: An American Story of World War II,” which aired on New England Cable News.

He is also gay. Now that isn’t unusual in itself, except that his coming-out column that appeared in the Herald on January 6, 2011 stamped him as one of the country’s first openly-gay big-city sports columnists.

Buckley is a 1978 graduate of the University of Massachusetts. He lives in Somerville, Mass.