Schedule

Bob Woodward is a legendary investigative journalist, an associate editor at The Washington Post, and a veteran of the U.S. Navy who has authored 21 bestselling books. Bob is the most famous political investigative reporter in America and a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who provides a behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of government, politics, and the role of leadership.

Ron Nixon is Vice President, News and Head of Investigations, Enterprise, Partnerships and Grants at the Associated Press. Nixon received the inaugural 2021 News Leader of the Year award from the News Leaders Association.

He has overseen investigations that have won a number of national and international awards including: A Pulitzer finalist in investigative reporting, the Worth Bingham Award for Investigative reporting, the Selden Ring Award for investigative reporting, an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, the 2021 Joe and Laurie Dine Award from the Overseas Press Club and the Anthony Shadid Award for Journalism Ethics, a Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award, the Society of Publishers in Asia award, and the Human Rights Press Award, to name a few.

He oversaw a 2019 investigation in collaboration with PBS Frontline that won a national News and Documentary Emmy for an in-depth look into the record-breaking numbers of migrant children in detention under President Trump. A collaboration with Frontline in 2020 won an IRE award for an investigation into the impact of Covid-19 on the global medical supply chain.

Nixon joined the AP in 2019 from The New York Times Washington bureau, where he was homeland security correspondent, covering border and aviation security, immigration, cybercrime and cyber security, transnational crime, and violent extremism.

He has reported from Rwanda, Uganda, Belgium, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Senegal, Mozambique, Burundi, Kenya, El Salvador, the United Kingdom, Peru, Brazil, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is the author of the book Selling Apartheid: Apartheid South Africa’s Global Propaganda War.

Nixon is also co-founder of the Ida b Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, a news trade organization with a mission of increasing the ranks, retention, and profile of reporters and editors of color in the field of investigative reporting.

In 2015, Ron co-founded TruthBeTold.news, a non-profit, non-partisan fact-checking website and digital network, run and edited from Howard University’s Department of Media, Journalism, and Film in the School of Communication.

Ron is currently the visiting associate for Journalism and Media Studies at The University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Nixon is a Marine Corps infantry veteran who saw combat in the 1990 Persian Gulf War. He was part of the U.S. Marine Corps Security Forces Battalion at Norfolk, the security and counterterrorism unit of the Corps.

Ethan Bueno de Mesquita is the Sydney Stein Professor and Interim Dean at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on applications of game theoretic models to a variety of political phenomena including conflict, political violence, national security, and electoral accountability. He has also written extensively on methodological issues in the social sciences. He both writes and advises on issues at the intersection of tech and society.

He is the author or co-author of Political Economy for Public Policy, Theory and Credibility, and Thinking Clearly with Data (all from Princeton University Press) as well as many articles in both political science and economics. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, and the United States Institute of Peace.

Before coming to the University of Chicago, Ethan taught in the political science department at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his BA from the University of Chicago in 1996 and his MA and PhD from Harvard University in 2003.

Michèle Flournoy is co-founder and managing partner of WestExec Advisors, and former Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), where she currently serves as Chair of the Board of Directors. Michèle served as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy from February 2009 to February 2012 where she was the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense in formulating national security and defense policy, oversight of military plans and operations, and in National Security Council deliberations. Michèle earned a bachelor’s degree in social studies from Harvard University and a master’s degree in international relations from Balliol College, Oxford University, where she was a Newton-Tatum scholar. She is a founding board member of The War Horse.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran is an award-winning journalist and bestselling author that served as a senior correspondent and associate editor of The Washington Post. During his newspaper career, he reported from more than three dozen countries and was bureau chief in Baghdad, Cairo and Southeast Asia. His bestselling book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone," was named one of the 10 best books of 2007 by The New York Times and inspired the movie Green Zone. He has twice served as a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., and as a journalist in residence at the International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. He is a graduate of Stanford University, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award for non-fiction, and the recipient of 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize.

Thomas Brennan is the founder of The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit newsroom exploring the human impact of military service. He served as a Marine infantryman in Iraq and Afghanistan before studying investigative reporting at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His reporting has appeared in Vanity Fair, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and on the front page of The New York Times.

Thomas has received two Fourth Estate Awards, three Edward R. Murrow Awards, and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Journalism Award.

U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth is an Iraq War Veteran, Purple Heart recipient and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs who was among the first handful of Army women to fly combat missions during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Duckworth served in the Reserve Forces for 23 years before retiring at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in 2014. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016 after representing Illinois’s Eighth Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives for two terms.

In 2004, Duckworth was deployed to Iraq as a Blackhawk helicopter pilot for the Illinois Army National Guard. On November 12, 2004, her helicopter was hit by an RPG and she lost her legs and partial use of her right arm. Senator Duckworth spent the next year recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where she quickly became an advocate for her fellow Soldiers. After she recovered, she became Director of the Illinois Department of Veterans’ Affairs, where she helped create a tax credit for employers that hire Veterans, established a first-in-the-nation 24/7 Veterans crisis hotline and developed innovative programs to improve Veterans’ access to housing and health care.

In 2009, President Obama appointed Duckworth as an Assistant Secretary of Veterans Affairs, where she coordinated a joint initiative with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to help end Veteran homelessness, worked to address the unique challenges faced by female as well as Native American Veterans and created the Office of Online Communications to improve the VA’s accessibility, especially among young Veterans.

In the U.S. House, Duckworth served on the Armed Services Committee and was an advocate for working families and job creation, introducing bills like her bipartisan Friendly Airports for Mothers (FAM) Act to ensure new mothers have access to safe, clean and accessible lactation rooms when traveling through airports, which is now law. She helped lead passage of the bipartisan Clay Hunt SAV Act, which enhanced efforts to track and reduce Veteran suicides. She also passed the Troop Talent Act to help returning Veterans find jobs in the private sector and worked to cut waste and fraud at the Pentagon and throughout government, including passing a common-sense provision that was projected to save taxpayers $4 billion by reducing redundancy in military uniforms.  

In the U.S. Senate, Duckworth advocates for practical, common-sense solutions needed to move our state and country forward like rebuilding our crumbling infrastructure, protecting Illinoisans from lead poisoning, growing manufacturing jobs while supporting minority-owned small businesses, investing in communities that have been ignored for too long and making college more affordable for all Americans. She co-founded the Senate’s first-ever Environmental Justice Caucus and also continues her lifelong mission of supporting, protecting and keeping the promises we’ve made to our Veterans as well as ensuring that we stand fully behind the troops our nation sends into danger overseas. In 2018, after Duckworth became the first Senator to give birth while serving in office, she sent a message to working families across the country about the value of family-friendly policies by securing a historic rules change that allows Senators to bring their infant children onto the Senate floor.

Senator Duckworth serves on several influential committees that give her an important platform to advocate for Illinois’s working families and entrepreneurs: the Armed Services Committee; the Environment & Public Works Committee; the Commerce, Science, & Transportation Committee; and the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Committee. The first Senate bill she introduced—which supports Illinois jobs by helping prevent bureaucratic delays in infrastructure projects—became law in record time. As a result of her achievements, Duckworth was ranked as a "highly effective lawmaker" and as the most effective freshman Democratic Senator in the 115th Congress by the Center for Effective Lawmaking.

Duckworth is fluent in Thai and Indonesian. She attended college at the University of Hawaii and earned a Master of Arts in International Affairs from the George Washington University. Following graduation, Duckworth moved to Illinois and began pursuing a Ph.D. in Political Science at Northern Illinois University and later worked for Rotary International. To this day, the Senator volunteers at local food pantries and participates in community service projects in her free time.

Senator Duckworth and her husband Bryan are the proud parents of two daughters, Abigail and Maile. 

Dan Clare is the chief communications and outreach officer for the DAV, a veteran service organization with more than a million members. Clare is a Marine Corps and Air Force veteran who served during the Persian Gulf era and in Iraq. In 2001, he deployed to Balad Air Base, where he was on the crisis communications team for the largest post-9/11 burn pit. Clare is credited with providing critical evidence that was used to bring the subject of burn pit exposure to the public’s attention, and was named the Air National Guard Print Journalist of the Year for 2007 for his coverage of the hospital and combat in Iraq. He is a past president and board member for the U.S. Marine Corps Combat Correspondents Association and a member of DAV Chapter 19 in Erlanger, Kentucky.