Biographical Profiles of Charity Tillemann Dick and Geoffrey West

CHARITY TILLEMANN DICK Charity Tillemann Dick is an American-born soprano and a recipient of two double lung transplants. Charity has performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia in venues as diverse as the Rose Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City; The Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Severance Hall in Cleveland, Ohio; II Giardino Di Boboli in Florence, Italy; the National Palace of the Arts in Budapest, Hungary; the Tel Aviv Opera House in Israel; the American Embassy in Beijing, China; the United Nations in New York; and National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. She has collaborated and performed with noted conductors and musicians including Eva Marton, Bruno Rigacci, Joela Jones, Marvin Hamlisch, Bono, Zoltan Kocis, Joan Dornemann, and former Secretary of State Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Some of her operatic roles have included Titania in A Mid Summer’s Night Dream, Gilda in Rigoletto, Violetta in La Traviata, and Ophelia in Ophelia Forever. Charity has also performed for numerous presidents, prime ministers, members of Congress, and world dignitaries. After receiving a diagnosis of Idiopathic Pulmonary Hypertension in 2004, Charity served as the national spokesperson for the Pulmonary Hypertension Association, working to raise awareness, increase federal research funding, expand stem cell research, and promote preventative and alternative medicine. In September of 2009, Charity received a bilateral lung transplant at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. After complications from rejection, Charity received a second bilateral lung transplant in January 2012. Since receiving her first transplant, Charity has shared her amazing story and vocal talents at numerous conferences, musical performance, and events, including: TEDMED 2010 in San Diego, CA; the 6th National Learning Congress on Organ Donation in Dallas, TX; the 2010 Empathy and Innovation Summit in Cleveland, OH; and the EG Conference in Monterey, CA. Charity has been featured on CNN with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CBS This Morning, Glamour magazine, ABCNews.com, TED.com, The Huffington Post, The Wail Street Journal Health Blog, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Sunday Times (London). Her performances have been broadcast around the world on CNN, CBS, BBC, FOX, MSNBC, PBS, C-SPAN and NPR. Charity received a Bachelor’s degree with high honors from Regis University in Denver, CO, where she was raised with her 10 brothers and sisters. She later studied music at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University and the Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. She currently resides in Washington, DC and New York City. GEOFFREY WEST Geoffrey West is Distinguished Professor and former President of the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and an Associate Fellow of the Said Business School, Oxford University. Prior to joining SFI in 2003, he was leader of high energy physics at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he remains a Senior Fellow. He received his B.A. from Cambridge University in 1961 and his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1966. After spells at Cornell and Harvard Universities, he returned to Stanford in 1970 to join the faculty. He was President of SFI from 2005-2009. West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests have been in fundamental questions in physics and biology, ranging from the elementary particles, their interactions and cosmological implications to the origins of universal scaling laws and a unifying quantitative framework of biology. His research in biology has included metabolic rate, growth, aging and mortality, sleep, cancer, and ecosystem dynamics. His recent work has focused on developing an underlying quantitative theory for the structure and dynamics of cities, companies and long-term sustainability, including rates of growth and innovation, the accelerating pace of life, and why companies die, yet cities survive. He has given many colloquia, keynote addresses and public lectures world-wide. Awards include the Mercer Prize from the Ecological Society of America, the Weldon Prize for Mathematical Biology, and the Glenn Award for Aging research. He has been featured in many publications world-wide including The New York Times, Nature, Science, The Financial Times, Time, Newsweek and Scientific American and has participated in television productions including Nova, National Geographic and the BBC. His work was selected as a breakthrough idea of 2007 by Harvard Business Review and, in 2006, he was named to Time magazine’s list of “100 Most Influential People in the World”. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_017560