1996 Council On Ideas Members

Mary Catherine Bateson
Noted cultural anthropologist and linguist, Mary Catherine Bateson received her B.A. at Radcliffe (1960) and earned her Ph.D. from Harvard (1963). Currently the Clarence Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA., Bateson has also taught in the US at Harvard, Northeastern University, and Amherst College, and abroad at Ateneo de Manila University and Damavand College in Tehran. She is the author of several books, including With a Daughters Eye: A memoir of Margret Mead and Gregory Bateson (1984), Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred (with Gregory Bateson, 1987), Thinking AIDS (with Richard Goldsby, 1988), Composing a life (1990) and Peripheral Visions: Learning Along the Way (1994). Bateson is the current President of New York's Institute for Intercultural Studies.

Alan Kay
Currently Vice-President of Creative Technology, Research and Development for Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow, Kay is known for the idea of personal computing, the conception of the ultimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface and modern object-oriented programming. Before coming to Walt Disney Imagineering, Kay was an Apple Fellow with Apple Computers Inc. for thirteen years. Kay co-founded the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center which was instrumental in the development of modern workstations, laser printing, and network "client-servers". Prior to his work at Zerox, Kay was a member of the University of Utah ARPA research team that developed 3-D graphics. A graduate of the University of Colorado in mathematics and molecular biology, Kay earned his Ph.D. at the University of Utah in 1969. Kay is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Arts and the World Economic Forum. A former professional jazz guitarist and composer, he is now an amateur classical pipe organist.

Todd Siler
A visual artist, writer, inventor, scientist and educator, Todd Siler was the first visual artist to receive his Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies in psychology and art from MIT (1986). Upon graduating, he joined MIT for six years as a visiting scientist at the Computer-Aided Design Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. An internationally renowned artist represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York, Siler's work is held in numerous collections including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. He is the author of Breaking The Mind Barrier (1992) and Think Like a Genius (1996). Siler, who resides in Englewood, CO, is founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications, a company which specializes in developing innovative multimedia learning materials and processes to advance the integration of art , science and technology in education.

Roberto Suro
The son of Hispanic immigrants, Roberto Suro was born and raised in Washington, DC. After graduating from Yale (BA, 1993) and Columbia University (MS, 1974), he began a career as a newspaper reporter in Chicago. He was employed as a correspondent for Time Magazine from 1978-1985 when he joined the New York Times as bureau chief, first in Rome and then in Houston. In March 1994, Suro became staff writer for the Washington Post and was promoted to his current position as Deputy National Editor in March, 1995. He authored the critically acclaimed Remembering The American Dream: Hispanic Immigration and National Policy (1994), and is completing Not As Strangers: The Latinos Come North, due to be published in 1997.