Join Students For Liberty at Columbia University in New York, NY on Saturday, October 27 for the 2012 Students For Liberty New York Regional Conference. New York City is annually SFL’s largest regional conference and we look forward to breaking previous records again as we bring together students from the New York City metro area and all over the northeast for an incredible event.
- Where: Columbia University
- Host: Columbia University Libertarians
- Location: Lerner Hall, 2920 Broadway New York, NY 10027
- When: October 27, 2012
- Conference: 9am – 8pm
- Cost: FREE of Charge
Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE
Greg Lukianoff is the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and has been with FIRE since 2001, when he was hired to be the organization’s first director of legal and public advocacy. Greg is a member of the State Bar of California and the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States. In 2008 he became the first ever recipient of the Playboy Foundation Freedom of Expression Award and in 2010 he received Ford Hall Forum’s Louis P. and Evelyn Smith First Amendment Award on behalf of FIRE.
Greg is a graduate of American University and of Stanford Law School, where he focused on First Amendment and constitutional law. Before joining FIRE, Greg practiced law in Northern California, interned at the ACLU of Northern California and the Organization for Aid to Refugees in Prague, Czech Republic, and was the development manager of the EnvironMentors Project in Washington, D.C. Greg, along with Harvey A. Silverglate and David French, is a co-author of FIRE’s Guide to Free Speech on Campus. Greg is also a proud member of the board of directors of Philadelphia’s Theatre Exile. Greg’s new book, Unlearning Liberty, is set for release this fall and is currently available for pre-order.
Matt Welch, Editor in Chief of Reason Magazine
Matt Welch is editor in chief of Reason, the libertarian magazine of “Free Minds and Free Markets.” He is co-author, along with Nick Gillespie, of the 2011 book The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong With America, which Tyler Cowen called ”the up-to-date statement of libertarianism.”
Reason has been a Western Publications Association magazine of the year finalist every year under Welch’s leadership, winning three total first-place Maggie awards, as well as another six first-place notices from the Greater Los Angeles Press Club. Welch himself has won a half-dozen first-place L.A. Press Club awards over the years, for work ranging from coverage of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, to reportage on Cuban baseball players, to essays of and about media criticism.
Before assuming editorship of Reason in 2008, Welch worked as an assistant editorial pages editor for the Los Angeles Times, as a media columnist for Reason, California correspondent for The National Post, political columnist for WorkingForChange.com, and regular contributor to the Online Journalism Review. Before 1998, he lived for eight years in Central Europe, where he co-founded the region’s first post-communist English-language newspaper, Prognosis, worked as UPI’s Slovakia correspondent and managed the Budapest Business Journal.
Tom G. Palmer, VP of the Atlas Network & Cato Senior Fellow
Tom G. Palmer is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, and director of Cato University, the Institute’s educational arm. Palmer is also the executive vice president for international programs at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and is responsible for establishing operating programs in 14 languages 
and managing programs for a worldwide network of think tanks. Before joining Cato he was an H. B. Earhart Fellow at Hertford College, Oxford University, and a vice president of the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. He frequently lectures in North America, Europe, Eurasia, Africa, Latin America, India, China and throughout Asia, and the Middle East on political science, public choice, civil society, and the moral, legal, and historical foundations of individual rights.
He has published reviews and articles on politics and morality in scholarly journals such as the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, Ethics, Critical Review, and Constitutional Political Economy, as well as in publications such as Slate, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Die Welt, Caixing, Al Hayat, the Washington Post, and The Spectator of London. He is the author of Realizing Freedom: Libertarian Theory, History, and Practice, published in 2009, and the editor of The Morality of Capitalism, published in 2011. Palmer received his B.A. in liberal arts from St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland, his M.A. in philosophy from The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., and his doctorate in politics from Oxford University.
Thor Halvorssen - Human Rights Foundation
A human rights advocate and film producer, Thor Halvorssen founded the Human Rights Foundation in the spring of 2005. Thor began advocating for human rights in 1989 in London by organizing opposition to South African apartheid. After completing his secondary education in the United Kingdom, he attended the University of Pennsylvania; there he became a judicial advisor for students charged inside the college judicial system. Thor’s advocacy of individual rights earned him an Ivy Day Award from the university president for “protecting freedom of speech on campus.” Having witnessed countless violations of freedom of speech and due process on United States college campuses, Thor was instrumental in creating and developing the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, serving as its first executive director and then CEO from its founding in 1999 until 2004. Under his decisive leadership, FIRE became the nation’s pre-eminent student rights organization.
Omar Wasow – BlackPlanet.com
Institute for Humane Studies Speaker Series
Omar Wasow is pursuing a doctorate in African American studies and political science at Harvard. In addition to his graduate work, Omar is the co-founder of BlackPlanet.com and an on-air technology analyst. Under Omar’s leadership BlackPlanet.com became the leading site for African Americans, reaching over three million people a month. Omar also works to demystify technology issues through regular TV and radio segments on shows like NBC’s Today, CNN’s American Morning and public radio’s Tavis Smiley show. Similarly, Omar tutored Oprah Winfrey in her first exploration of the Net in the 12-part series ‘Oprah Goes Online’.
In 1999, as a result of his active participation in a number of social issues, particularly the charter school movement, Omar was selected to be a fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership program. In Fall 2003, a K-8 charter school that Omar helped found opened in his hometown of Brooklyn. In 2007, in recognition of the promise of his academic research, the National Science Foundation selected him for a Graduate Research Fellowship. Most recently, the Aspen Institute selected him for their Henry Crown Fellowship that recognizes emerging leaders. He received his BA in Race and Ethnic Relations from Stanford University.
Gene Epstein – Barron’s Magazine
Gene Epstein, former chief economist for the New York Stock Exchange, is the economics editor at Barron’s magazine. Earning a BA from Brandeis University and MA in economics from the New School, Gene Epstein taught economics at St. John’s University and the City University of New York, publishing Making Money in Commodities (1976). Gene Epstein went on to work as a senior economist for the New York Stock Exchange and with co-author William C. Freund published People and Productivity: The New York Stock Exchange Guide to Financial Incentives and the Quality of Work Life in 1984. In 1993 he became Barron’s economics editor and columnist of Economic Beat. Since writing Econospinning (2006) Gene Epstein is a frequent speaker on the conference circuit and has appeared on NPR, CNBC, CNN, Fox, and BBC TV.
Nigel Ashford – Institute for Humane Studies
Nigel Ashford is senior program officer at the Institute for Humane Studies. He joined IHS from the United Kingdom where he was professor of politics and Jean Monnet Scholar in European Integration at Staffordshire University, England. Dr. Ashford has also directed the Principles for a Free Society Project at the Jarl Hjalmarson Foundation in Sweden, and was a Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation and Visiting Scholar at the Social and Philosophy Policy Center in Bowling Green. He is a recipient of the International Anthony Fisher Trust Prize for published work which strengthens public understanding of the political economy of the free society.
Dr. Ashford works on many of the Institute’s educational programs, teaches at summer seminars, liaises with the IHS faculty network, produces regular academic newsletters for faculty and graduate students, and provides academic career advice to graduate students.
Civil Liberties Panel
Nahal Zamani - Center for Constitutional Rights
Kassandra Frederique - Drug Policy Alliance
Kassandra Frederique is a New York Policy Coordinator at the Drug Policy Alliance. Frederique works to build powerful coalitions in communities devastated by drug misuse and the war on drugs.Prior to joining DPA, Frederique completed a year-long internship with DPA’s State Organizing and Policy Project, served as a social worker in New York City schools and domestic violence clinics, organized workers in Chicago and New Orleans, and worked as a higher education paraprofessional in Ithaca and New York City.
Frederique earned her master’s degree in Social Work at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, where she specialized in advanced generalist practice, with a focus on contemporary social issues. She previously completed a B.S. in Industrial Labor Relations at Cornell University, with minors in Social Inequalities and Law & Society. While pursuing her undergraduate and graduate degrees, Frederique developed curricula to address social oppression, which were used for more than 4,000 students at both Cornell and Columbia University’s student orientations. Her passion for challenging social oppression and inequalities led her to work on ending the drug war – which she believes is the amalgamation of all the issues she has worked on thus far.
Drug War Panel
Katharine Celentano – SSDP International
Katharine Celentano is currently an undergraduate at Columbia University where she studies Neuroscience and Behavior and Economics. Katharine’s experience within the recovery community, including spending two years as a client of a residential psychiatric treatment facility, motivates her work towards a world where illness is not treated with handcuffs. Having lost several friends to overdose and seeing the criminalization of addiction otherwise injure those working to heal themselves convinced her that the correct question is not whether or not legalization is compatible with recovery, but whether or not prohibition is compatible with recovery.
Previously President of her school’s SSDP chapter, she is a recipient of the 2012 Columbia University School of General Studies Spirit Award. She played a key role in the passage of Columbia’s new Good Samaritan Policy and served as College Coordinator at Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a Research Assistant at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, a volunteer at The Washington Heights CORNER Project, a Manhattan syringe exchange and harm reduction facility, and has also worked in retail pharmacy.
Doug Greene – Empire State NORML
Doug Greene first got involved in drug policy reform by founding a chapter of NORML (the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) at New York University. He then co-founded Cures not Wars, a drug reform advocacy organization that was the nexus for the Global Marijuana March (which takes place in hundreds of cities around the world every May) and one of the earliest advocates for research and development of ibogaine, a revolutionary treatment for drug abuse. He is currently the Legislative Director for Empire State NORML (the New York State affiliate of NORML), an advisory member of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York’s Special Committee on Drugs and the Law and in training to become a Certified Alcohol and Substance Abuse Counselor.