James Gelfand is a government affairs, communications, policy, and strategy professional who has more than a decade of experience in senior positions with trade associations, private firms, campaigns, and on Capitol Hill. Gelfand has served on two United States Senate Committees, having joined Senator Olympia Snowe’s staff on the Senate Small Business Committee in March of 2011 and then working on the Senate Homeland Security Committee for Senator Tom Coburn. His work on the Hill included a broad range of issues, from health and pensions, to tax and budget, regulatory reform, labor, and immigration. Prior to his work on Capitol Hill, Gelfand served as a Director at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He co-managed the Chamber’s Employee Benefits Committee, the body responsible for formulating policy positions on health and retirement issues.
Gelfand joined the Chamber from The ERISA Industry Committee, where he served as manager of health policy, focusing on research and advocacy for health issues of concern to Fortune 100 companies. He has been quoted regularly in publications including The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the National Journal, and Business Insurance and is interviewed by major news networks and talk radio.
Gelfand attended Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, graduating with a double major in political science and legal studies. He received his Juris Doctorate from the George Washington University Law School, and is a member of the Maryland state bar.
Robert Winthrop (“Robin”) Johnson II was born in Alabama in 1946, where his family operated a cattle and dairy farm. He graduated from Princeton University in 1968 with a major in philosophy, from Tulane Law School in 1974 with a J.D. degree, and from Georgetown University in 1978 with an L.L.M. in international law. He has been in the private practice of international law in Washington since 1979. In his law practice he has represented multinational corporations, international businesses, and foreign governments before the U.S. Congress, the Administration, and various regulatory agencies. He began his law career as a law clerk with the Supreme Court of Alabama; following that he worked in the Office of the General Counsel in the Department of Agriculture. Between 1977 and 1978 he was a senior staff assistant to the Chairman of the House Appropriations Committee. During the Reagan Administration he served on the U. S. Trade Representative’s Commodity Policy Advisory Committee. He has worked on various legal matters involving international trade regulation, including economic sanctions and embargoes, export controls, customs issues, and the operation of free trade arrangements for over 25 years.
He also served the Bush Campaign in 1987-88 as an advisor on international trade and competitiveness and on energy issues. He has been elected to various positions in the Virginia Republican Party.
He joined the U.S. Marine Corps in 1967. He served in Vietnam as a company commander of a combined U. S. Marine – Vietnamese irregular unit involved in counterinsurgency operations and was awarded the Bronze Star, the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry, and numerous other combat decorations. After his Vietnam service he remained in the Marine Corps Reserves and retired in July 1998, as a Colonel. During his last ten years in the Marines he was assigned to the Special Operations/Low Intensity Conflict and Coalition and Special Warfare Divisions at Quantico, where he worked on special international projects with foreign military forces. He is a qualified military parachutist and holds jump wings from Israel, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, and El Salvador.
Johnny Monsarrat is the former founder and CEO of Turbine, a videogames company that employed 350 and was acquired by Warner Brothers. After business and technical education from MIT, Brown, and Harvard, where he worked at the MIT Media Lab and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory building robots, he worked in biotech sequencing bacterial DNA before the Human Genome Project. Monsarrat then became founder and CEO of Hard Data Factory, Alliance Director for the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and Alliance Director for the Secular Coalition for America.
Monsarrat holds two patents and has consulted to top-level executives at Citigroup and General Electric. He runs the Guinness World Record winning atheist community art project, Soulburners, and a website on New England events, Events INSIDER. He is an award-winning public speaker.
Greg Neimeyer
Dr. Greg Neimeyer is professor of psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida. He has served as the Director of Training in an APA-approved doctoral program, as Graduate Coordinator in the Department of Psychology, and as the Chair of the Executive Board of the Council of Counseling Psychology Training Programs in the United States.
A Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Dr. Neimeyer has also been a recipient of its Award for Outstanding Research in Career and Personality Research. With over 200 published articles and 10 books, his interests are focused primarily in the areas of professional training and development. His teaching contributions have been acknowledged through a wide range of awards and recognitions, including the Psi Chi Department of Psychology Teacher of the Year Award, the Golden Key Outstanding Teacher Award, the University of Florida Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Graduate School’s Outstanding Mentor Award, among others.
Dr. Neimeyer continues to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in the Department of Psychology at the University of Florida where he has been inducted into the Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars.
Edwina Rogers
Edwina has been a public policy expert for over twenty years and has worked for two Presidents and four Senators.
Ms. Rogers worked on international trade for President Bush at the Department of Commerce from 1989 to 1991, and became General Counsel of the National Republican Senatorial Committee during the Republican take-over of the Senate in 1994. She worked for Senator Lott while he was a Majority Leader in 1999 and then an economic advisor for President George W Bush at the White House during 2001 and 2002 at the National Economic Council, focusing on health and social security policy.
Ms. Rogers handled health policy for Senator Sessions in 2003 and 2004, and served as Vice President of the Health Policy for the ERISA Industry Committee (ERIC) in Washington, DC from 2004 to 2009. She was also the founding Executive Director of the Patient Centered Primary Care Collaborative from 2006-2011, a Washington DC trade association, responsible for the national Patient Centered Medical Home movement and implementing the model around the US.
Previously, Ms. Rogers practiced law in the Washington office of Balch and Bingham from 1991 until 1994. She received her BS in Corporate Finance from the University of Alabama and a JD from Catholic University in Washington DC. In 1996, she was a Fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard.
Most recently, Ms. Rogers was Executive Director at the Secular Coalition for America, a non-profit coalition to represent the diverse and growing voice for separation of religion and government. Ms. Rogers has been a regular contributor of conservative newspaper columns, health and policy journals, and a regular strategist on cable news television.