Fran Ulmer is currently the chair of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, where she has served since being appointed by President Obama in March 2011. In June 2010, President Obama appointed her to the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling. From 2007 to 2011, Ms. Ulmer was chancellor of Alaska’s largest public university, the University of Alaska Anchorage. Before that, she was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Policy and Director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research at UAA. She is a member of the Global Board of the Nature Conservancy and on the Board of the National Parks Conservation Association.

Ms. Ulmer served as an elected official for 18 years as the mayor of Juneau, a state representative, and as Lieutenant Governor of Alaska. She previously worked as legal counsel to the Alaska Legislature, legislative assistant to Governor Jay Hammond, and Director of Policy Development for the state. In addition, she was the first Chair of the Alaska Coastal Policy Council and served more than 10 years on the North Pacific Anadromous Fish Commission. She earned a J.D. cum laude from the University of Wisconsin Law School, and has been a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government.

Fran Ulmer

Journalist Mark Trahant  serves as the 20th Atwood Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Anchorage. The position brings nationally known journalists to teach courses and speak to students, journalists and the public in Alaska.Trahant was recently awarded a fellowship to the Rockefeller Bellagio Center in Italy and for the past three years, he was an editor in residence at the University of Idaho, School of Journalism and Mass Media. In 2009, he was awarded a Kaiser Media Fellowship and wrote about health care reform, focusing on its impact in Indian Country. He also reported for PBS’ Frontline series, featuring a program titled “The Silence,” a piece about sexual abuse committed by priests in an Alaska native village.

Trahant is the former editor of the editorial page for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, where he chaired the daily editorial board, directed a staff of writers, editors and a cartoonist. He has been chairman and chief executive officer at the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education and a former columnist at The Seattle Times. He has been publisher of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News in Moscow, Idaho; executive news editor of The Salt Lake Tribune; a reporter at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix; and has worked at several tribal newspapers.

“This is an exciting time for a young person to begin a career in journalism today,” Trahant said. “I look forward to working with the students at the University of Alaska Anchorage to help shape that future.”

Trahant will teach Information Gathering and Global Media and Communications Systems this fall and Multimedia Journalism and Enterprise Reporting in the spring.

The Atwood Chair of Journalism is among the nation’s most prestigious endowed journalism chairs. Anchorage Times publisher Robert B. Atwood established the Atwood Chair at the University of Alaska Anchorage in 1979. Among the many positive contributions Bob and Evangeline Atwood made to Alaska’s civic life, the Atwood Chair of Journalism has helped educate the state’s next generation of journalists.

Learn more about the 2014 Atwood Chair.

Trahant is an editor, reporter, columnist, television correspondent and the author of several books. A member of Idaho’s Shoshone-Bannock Tribes and former president of the Native American Journalists Association, he has been reporting on Native American issues since the 1970s. Trahant’s most recent book “The Last Great Battle of the Indian Wars,” is about Sen. Henry M. Jackson. He also publishes a daily poem about the news to Twitter @newsrimes4lines.

Mark Trahant

Rick Goodfellow – President / Programming Director / Grand Puh-bah –Rick is the heart and soul of KLEF. He hand selects all the music, manages the station, and is one of the voice talents on the station. He is also the newest inductee into the ABA Hall of Fame, as well as the Guide for the Ghost Tours of Anchorage.

Jan Ingram – Children’s Programming Director / Voice Talent (KLEF Notes)– Jan is one of the voice talents on KLEF. She is the Children’s Programming Director. She is co-owner with her husband, Rick.

Rick and Jan will talk about their radio station, KLEF (which just has its 25th anniversary), the Ghost Tours of Anchorage, and a new talk show – the Ghost Show – on KFQD.

Rick Goodfellow and Jan Ingram

President of The Growth Company, Inc., a management consulting, training, human resources and organizational strategy firm, Lynne Curry brings her clients a track record in management consulting; Board, manager and employee training; human resources and organizational strategy consulting.

Training and facilitation

Curry provides dynamic, professional, results-oriented training sessions in more than 200 areas including: leadership; management and supervision; Board of Directors’ work; training, presentations, facilitation and mediation; coaching; marketing, sales and customer service; personal and professional development; memory; time and stress management; team-building; diversity; GenX/Y; media; ethics; communications, conflict management and negotiation; motivation and change management. Curry has been awarded the Trainer of the Year award multiple times by the Anchorage chapter of the American Society of Training and Development. Curry teaches facilitators and also provides facilitation, meeting management and team-building for a large variety of organizations.

Lynne Curry

Polly Smith’s interest and passion for adult literacy began many years ago as a volunteer tutor and teacher, and she has never looked back.  She has worked with learners of all ages, from preschool in family-literacy programs to adults in college and the workforce. Polly has been awarded the Alaska Adult Education Association Administrator’s Award and the Alaska Adult Educations Association’s  John L. Hulbert Award for outstanding long-term contributions to adult learning in the state of Alaska.

Polly is a teacher, trainer and administrator for the Alaska Literacy Program, a volunteer-based nonprofit providing literacy instruction to adults and families with young children. She has a Master’s degree in Education, Learning Disabilities. She serves on the board of the Commission of Adult Basic Education and as secretary for the ProLiteracy Council of State Organizations. She is an ardent admirer of all things Alaskan, realizing her childhood dream of becoming an Alaskan in 1987.

Polly Smith

Michael Carey was born and raised in Fairbanks. He graduated from Lathrop High School in 1963 and attended Ithaca College (BA 1967) and Duke University where he took graduate courses without completing his degree. For most of the late Sixties and into the Seventies he lived around New York City before returning to Alaska and entering the newspaper business. He was a member of the Anchorage Daily News editorial page stuff before becoming a columnist. For the last decade, he has been the host of public broadcasting’s “Alaska Edition,” a political analysis show. He lives in Anchorage.

Michael Carey

Harper is the Producing Artistic Director of the award-winning Cyrano’s Theatre Company.  In this capacity, Harper is responsible for programming, marketing, fundraising, and project management for each production.  Sandy and her husband, Jerry, founding members of Cyrano’s Theatre Company, spent their earlier years under the mentorship of Obie award-winner Rachel Rosenthal.  Both were core members in Rosenthal’s innovative new theatre form, called “Instant Theatre” and “Instant Fairy Tales”, in Los Angeles.  While in LA, Sandy earned her Master’s Degree in Human Development from Pacific Oaks College in Pasadena.

In Alaska, Sandy has served on the national board of the Last Frontier Theatre Conference, the Anchorage Downtown Partnership, the Rasmuson Foundation, and the Anchorage Downtown Association.  She also served as President of the Anchorage Cultural Council.  Sandy continues to co-host a monthly radio program about the arts on KSKA public broadcasting in Anchorage.

Sandy’s awards include: the “Contribution to Literacy in Alaska” award, as the founding member of the Alaska Center for the book; the YWCA “Notable Woman of the Year”; and was inducted into the ATHENA Society in 2009.  In 2010, Sandy was recognized by the Soroptimist society for her encouragement of women in the arts.  In 2011, Sandy received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from UAA and the Lorene Harrison Lifetime Achievement Award.  Sandy has been featured in the national magazine American Theatre for producing a series of plays honoring the indigenous peoples of Alaska.

Sandy Harper

In 2010 Mary Katzke and her 10-year-old son, Corin, sold all their worldly possession and bought one-way tickets to Ireland. It was just the beginning of a world-class adventure. Twenty-eight countries and a world education later, Katzke and her son share their adventures in the documentary “World School.” Cruise ships, bicycles, airplanes and almost every form of transportation available carried them around the globe. Corin says his favorite places were Dubai and China, “…it’s like being in school, and being teleported to the places in your textbook.”

Kids grow up so quickly and there is no getting that time back,” said Mary Katzke. “Family travel allows both education, and the chance to savor this precious time.”

Cover of Mary Katzke’s World School

Philip “Flip” Todd is a native of Washington DC, a graduate of the Sidwell Friends School and Boston University with a degree in government. He began work at Lappi’s Chevron in Gulkana, Alaska in 1969 where he was a proficient tire changer before joining the Anchorage Times that year as an obituary writer. He progressed to covering the Anchorage School board before being drafted into the U.S. Army.

Stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. attached to the Special Forces before being transferred to Ft. Richardson, AK, he worked as a general assignment and sports reporter at the Anchorage Daily News at night and on weekends while in the Army.
A fourth generation journalist, he returned to the Anchorage Times after discharge from the Army in 1972 and spent several years as a business writer and editor.

In 1976 he became a full time free-lance writer and photographer for the AP and both local and national publications such as Alaska Industry Magazine, Business Week and the Washington Post. He is a fourth generation journalist.

In 1978 he began publishing the Alaska Directory of Attorneys, a semi-annual publication still produced by his publishing company, Todd Communications. The directory which lists all active members of the Alaska bar along with information ranging from members’ year of admission, undergraduate school, year of graduation and major, to law school and e-mail address, has become the bible of the Alaska legal community.

He brought the first color scanner to the state in 1982 when he founded Alaska Color Scan. He is president of Todd Communications which publishes many books, calendars and maps. The company is also the state’s primary wholesale distributor of these products to more than 700 stores, as well as providing international print brokering services to other publishers.

He is a past president of the Alaska World Affairs Council and has served on its board for more than 20 years.

He has led Todd Communications for more than 35 years and developed it into a fully integrated publishing and publishing services company serving publishers ranging from the largest New York houses to regional and local concerns.

Increasingly its services are focused on assisting Alaska and Pacific Northwest authors and photographers to self-publish their own works.  It accomplishes this by offering editing, book design, printing and wholesale distribution of books about Alaska and by Alaska authors. The company has 20 employees and offices in Ketchikan, Juneau, Fairbanks and Juneau serving the entire state with publishing services and wholesale book, calendar and map distribution.

Philip “Flip” Todd