Dr. Eric W. Sanderson is a Senior Conservation Ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS). He is the author of the bestselling, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City (2009), and also Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs (2013). He is director of the Mannahatta and Welikia Projects on the historical ecology of New York City and co-inventor of Visionmaker.nyc, an ecological democracy platform to investigate alternative futures for the city. He holds adjunct faculty at New York University (NYU) and Columbia University. Sanderson earned a Ph.D. in ecosystem and landscape ecology (1998) from the University of California, Davis. He is also an Eagle Scout (1985).

Lynne is the Earle W. Kazis and Benjamin Schore Professor Emerita of Real Estate, Columbia Business School, where she taught for more than twenty years. An expert in real estate development and finance, she is widely known for her research on public/private partnerships and city building. She is the author of Power at Ground Zero: Politics, Money, and the Remaking of Lower Manhattan (Oxford University Press, 2016), Times Square Roulette: Remaking the City Icon (MIT Press, 2001), and co-author of Downtown, Inc.: How America Rebuilds Cities (MIT Press, 1989). Born in Queens, Professor Sagalyn now lives on the Upper West Side in Manhattan with her husband.  She received her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master of City and Regional Planning from Rutgers University, and a B.S. from Cornell University with distinction.

A scholar of American Jewish and American immigration history, Hasia Diner is a member of the Department of History and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies. Author of numerous books in her field, she won a Guggenheim fellowship in 2011.