Members of the Board: Ellen Barry, Raymond Barfield, Semyon Dukach, Dean Grodzins, Lee Grodzins, Katia Kapovich, Sabina Murray, Fan Ogilvie, Esther Pullman, Chris Pullman, Susan Rappaport, Stephanie Sandler, Dan Sofaer, David Sykes, John Wronoski

Ellen Barry is a reporter based in New York for The Los Angeles Times. Her work was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize. She has supported Fulcrum since its inception.

Raymond Barfield, poet, philosopher by education who shares with Fulcrum a deep interest in Plato, contributor to Fulcrum 5, and leading neurosurgeon, is a physician and researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, where he serves on the Bone Marrow Transplantation faculty. The focus of his medical research is the development of immune therapies for high-risk solid tumors. In addition he has studied and written about moral issues that arise in the context of clinical research with children. He received both his MD and his PhD in philosophy from Emory University in Atlanta. His poems have been published in many literary journals, and he is now working on a book about the relationship of poetry and philosophy in the Western tradition. He lives in Memphis, Tennessee with his wife Karen, and their children Micah and Alexandra.

Semyon Dukach, a cult figure, known to the casinos as “the Darling of Las Vegas, “ was a notorious player on the MIT Strategic Investments Blackjack Team, as well as founder and president of the MIT Amphibian Investments Team. Banned from the casinos for winning too much money, he has trained and mentored dozens of successful MIT blackjack team players. He holds an MS from MIT and a BS from Columbia. He was founder and CEO of Fast Engines, founder of Vert, Inc., and is a CEO mentor at the Cambridge Business Development Center. His current projects include GottaFlirt and SMTP.com, investing in start-ups, and, of course, running Blackjack Seminars. In recent television appearances and interviews on ABC Primetime and CNN, Dukach has vowed to share his knowledge about beating the casinos with a larger audience. His other TV spots include a two-hour History Channel feature, a BBC special, and a National Geographic Channel documentary. There are books written about him, including most recently Ben Mezrich’s Busting Vegas, and a popular movie made.

Dean Grodzins, an important historian of American transcendentalism and a cartoonist, a man with an extreme form of encyclopedic knowledge, graduated from Williams College and received a PhD in history from Harvard University. His American Heretic: Theodore Parker and Transcendentalism (UNC Press, 2002), a definitive work of intellectual biography, won the Alan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians. He co-edits The Journal of Unitarian Universalist History. Dean has been a supporter of Fulcrum since its inception. He is back here this year doing some kind of research at Harvard.

Henry Grodzins is General Manager of Thermo Electron’s NITON Analyzers business unit and was President and CEO of Niton LLC in 1997-2005. Over a 10-year period, Mr. Grodzins has grown the Niton analytical instrument business by more than 50 times to its current run rate of over $100 million; increased the company’s market share for portable x-ray fluorescence (XRF) products from 10 percent to over 70 percent; and has been instrumental in growing the world market for portable XRF products from approximately $15 million in 1995 to $130 million. He directed and managed the sale of Niton LLC and its subsidiaries to Thermo Electron Corporation in March 2005 and continues to be responsible for all aspects of the company’s business as an executive for Thermo. Previously, he worked as a fixed-income trader and broker for Stoever Glass & Co in New York in 1991-2004. He has over 20 years experience in management, business development, marketing, sales and strategic planning. Mr. Grodzins is a Director of Ridgecrest Financial, Inc. and a member of the Board of Advisors for Praesidium ID Global Corp. and Lamplighter Studios, Inc. He is a co-inventor of patents and patents pending in x-ray fluorescence and optical emission spectroscopy; winner of the 2003 R&D 100 Award as principal designer of Niton’s XLt Series XRF analyzers; and winner of national awards for sales achievement and product presentation. He has been extremely generous in his enthusiastic backing of Fulcrum.

Lee Grodzins, one of the world’s top nuclear physicists and experts on running creative think tanks, has been Professor of Physics, MIT, since 1966. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was a Guggenheim Fellow twice, in 1964-65 and 1971-72. As a nuclear physicist, Dr. Grodzins has performed many profound and pioneering experiments that are famous for the originality of the experimental technique and the significance of the questions addressed, and are discussed in many textbooks on nuclear and elementary particle physics. When Dr. Grodzins was not asking fundamental questions of physics, he was using his creative side to put his knowledge of nuclear physics to practical use. He developed a scanning proton-induced x-ray microspectrometer for measuring elemental concentrations in air. This led Dr. Grodzins to start a company, NITON Corporation (now run by his son Henry Grodzins) to manufacture and market instruments to measure pollutants in the environment. His farthest-reaching invention, for which he holds four patents, is a new x-ray fluorescence method to quantify concentrations of buried lead and other elements. In 1995, Dr. Grodzins received an R&D 100 Award from R & D magazine and was a finalist for a Discovery Award for the Niton XL, based on those patents. Since 1988, he has spent an increasing effort on developing methods for finding clandestine explosives, drugs and other contraband in luggage and cargo containers. He already has numerous publications in this important field. Dr. Grodzins’s social conscience led him to co-found the Union of Concerned Scientists (1970), which he chaired in 1972. He also devoted a number of years to studying many aspects of scientific manpower. He has been one of Fulcrum ‘s most generous endowers.

Katia Kapovich, Coeditor of Fulcrum, is a bilingual poet writing in English and Russian. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her Russian verse has received wide acclaim in her country of origin. Her English-language poems are anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2006 and 180 Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House, 2005), and have appeared in the London Review of Books, Jacket, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, Stand, The Dark Horse, and numerous other journals. Her first English-language book of poems, Gogol in Rome, was shortlisted for the Jerwood Aldeburgh Prize. The US Library of Congress awarded her its 2001 Witter Bynner Poetry Fellowship.

Julia Kleyman, one of Fulcrum's old friends and now its Director of Marketing and Development, graduated from Brandeis University with a BA in Linguistics and Cognitive Science and in Cross-cultural and Cross-linguistic Studies. She has native proficiency in English, Russian and Spanish, and is also fluent in French and Italian, with a working knowledge of German and a basic knowledge of Japanese. Her assets include a lifetime of travel and cross-cultural experience and extensive knowledge and work in Latin American arts and culture. In time free from serving Fulcrum, Julia works as a Business Development and Marketing Specialist at Thermo Electron NITON Analyzers.

Sabina Murray grew up in Australia and the Philippines. She is the author of the novels A Carnivore’s Inquiry (Grove, 2004), Slow Burn (Ballantine, 1990), and The Lovers (Grove, 2007). Her short story collection The Caprices (Houghton Mifflin, 2002, Grove, 2007) was the winner of the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her stories are anthologized in The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction and Charilie Chan is Dead II: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian Fiction. She is the writer of the screenplay for the film Beautiful Country, which was an Independent Spirit Award Best First Screenplay nominee. She completed her Master of Arts as a James A. Michener Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin and is a former Bunting Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University and a recipient of a major grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Murray has served as the Roger Murray Writer in Residence at Phillips Academy, Andover, and is currently an associate professor of English, Program for Poets and Writers, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Philip Nikolayev’s latest book of poems, Monkey Time, won the 2001 Verse Prize and was published by Verse Press in 2003. His new collection, Letters from Aldenderry, is forthcoming from Salt in the fall of 2006. He co-edits the award-winning Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. His poems have also appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Grand Street, Harvard Review, The Boston Globe, Verse, LIT, Stand, overland, Jacket, and many others across the English-speaking world, and are anthologized in 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day (Random House, 2005).

Fan Ogilvie, a poet, teaches poetry at Featherstone Meeting House for the Arts on Martha’s Vineyard, where she lives. Her public readings include the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Corcoran Museum of Art, Georgetown University, and the Stirling Library at Yale University, MIT, and other venues. In 1986 she established the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Poetry Board and served as Chair of that organization and the Folger Poetry Reading Series for nine years in Washington, DC. Her poems appear, among numerous other publications, in volumes 2, 3 and 5 of Fulcrum. Her childhood memoir, KNOTHOLE, was published in 2004. She currently serves on the Board of the Poetry Society of America.

Esther Pullman is a photographer and graphic designer. She graduated as a major in art from Smith College, and received a BFA and an MFA in graphic design at Yale. In 1966-83 her clients as a graphic designer included the Yale University Art Gallery, American Heritage Magazine, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Robertson-Montgomery, San Francisco. She also worked a typographer and letterpress printer. Her photographic work has been displayed in numerous exhibits, and is found in such collections in Boston as those of the Federal Reserve Bank, Fidelity Investments, and the Wellington Management Company.

Christopher Pullman has served since 1973 as Vice President for Design for WGBH, public broadcasting in Boston. He and his staff are responsible for the visual personality of WGBH as expressed through its on-air titles, credits and animation. In 1986, WGBH was awarded the Design Leadership Award from the American Institute of Graphic Arts. He graduated from Princeton in 1963 and received his MFA in Graphic Design at Yale in 1966, where he began teaching in the graduate and undergraduate programs-an affiliation he still maintains as Senior Critic. In 1966-73 he operated a freelance design practice in New Haven, and in 1968-72 was a consultant designer to the office of George Nelson in New York while serving on the original design faculty at SUNY Purchase. From 1976 to 1986 Mr. Pullman was a member of the Board of the Design Management Institute, an association that reflects his interest in the relationship between design and business. He has also served on the national boards of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA), the American Center for Design (ACD), and the Corporate Design Foundation. In 1993 he was included in the first list of the I.D. Forty, the forty most influential designers, published by International Design Magazine. In 2002 he won the AIGA Medal, the highest individual honor awarded to a designer by the American Institute of Graphic Arts.

Susan Rappaport’s (standing) numerous positions and engagements include: President, Museum Guide Publications; Steering Committee, Women’s Foreign Policy Group (WFPG); Washington Advisory Committee, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights; Washington Advisory Board, Children’s Rights Project of Human Rights Watch; Trustee, Washington Institute for Near East Policy; active participant, Vital Voices, empowering women in developing countries; Trustee, CEC, dedicated to cultural exchange with Russia and Eastern European countries; Board, Folger Shakespeare Library Poetry Program; Women’s Political Forum of the DNC.

Stephanie Sandler, originally from Houston, TX, is a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Harvard University. She previously taught for twenty years at Amherst College. Sandler has broad expertise in Russian literature, speaks perfect Russian, and specializes in Russian poetry, especially Alexander Pushkin and a number of modern poets. Her degrees include a B.A., summa cum laude, from Princeton, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Yale. Her books include Alexander Pushkin and the Writing of Exile (1989, also published in Russian translation in 1999), and Commemorating Pushkin: Russia’s Myth of a National Poet (2004).

Mark Schorr, a poet, serves as Executive Director of the Robert Frost Foundation in Lawrence, MA (www.frostfoundation.org). He teaches American Literature at Cambridge College. When it rains a lot, he paddles a small canoe in his own backyard.

Dan Sofaer is a poet who worked at the Seminary Co-op Book Store in Chicago for a year back in 1995 but has not worked since then. He belongs to the Film Society of the Lincoln Center and to Jewish Voice for Peace. He graduated from the University of Chicago, and also studied classics in Hebrew at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he won a prize as the top graduate student of the department. However, he left without getting his Master’s. He also took adult classes in drawing and painting at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, and studied Greek and Latin at UC Berkeley for three years, where he maintained an A average as a concurrently enrolled graduate student. He lives in New York City.

David Sykes, one of Fulcrum’s earliest endowers, graduated from UC, Berkeley, and holds an MA in Cognitive Science from Cornell. He is Program Director at Harvard Business School. His first entrepreneurial venture, Passport Ltd., pioneered the soft luggage movement that redefined the travel equipment market. He served as strategic advisor to Boston-area companies including Cyrk, a brand management startup that went public in the mid-80s and reached $1 billion in sales. He was then invited to found and co-lead the Project for Interdisciplinary Research in Information (PIRI) to conduct research for the US Congress. He taught graduate seminars on technological innovation and social change at BU, and consulted with companies such as Agfa and Apple Computer on the launch of the Macintosh and creation of “desktop publishing.” He advised and invested in numerous ventures, including a “disruptive “ method for marketing musical recordings through concert venues and national public broadcasting.” He was profiled in The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and Harvard Magazine. Mr. Sykes has served as an activist board member of several prominent, national non-profit institutions where he designed and implemented turnaround strategies. Two widely-regarded success stories led by Mr. Sykes were Jacobs Pillow, where a dramatic turnaround provided a successful model for other arts organizations, and Boston University’s nationally recognized Program in Artisanry, both widely reported in national media including the New York Times. In the 1980s, Mr. Sykes met and advised the founder of nanotechnology, K. Eric Drexler, and is credited in Drexler’s book, Engines of Creation. In 1990, Mr. Sykes joined Remington Remington Partners LLC, a strategic advisor to Fortune 500 and Global 100 companies and a stakeholder in early and mid-stage technology ventures. Mr. Sykes serves on the CEO Council of Puretech Ventures, as a member of the Steering Committee of the Massachusetts Nanotechnology Initiative, as lead manager of NanoNexis ‘07 (with the MIT Enterprise Forum), as Executive Secretary of the Joint Committee on Privacy of the ASA, INCE and NCAC.

John Wronoski is an art and book collector and owner of Lame Duck Books, one of the most prestigious rare book stores in the world, which is located in Harvard Square (www.lameduckbooks.com) and has just now extended itself to include the newly founded Pierre Menard Gallery. Fulcrum 5 includes a feature of several E. E. Cummings drawings from John’s collection. He is also co-founder of Volume Gallery, New York, and Principal in Locus Solus Rare Books, New York. As proprietor of Lame Duck Books, John Wronoski has published over eighty catalogues devoted to rare books in the fields of modern literature and intellectual history. A member of Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America and Verband Deutscher Antiquare, he is a specialist in the assessment and sale of literary archives. He has represented many of the most prominent writers of our time in the sale of their literary papers, including three Nobel laureates.