His Excellency Whit Grant Fraser is the spouse of Mary May Simon, Canada’s first Indigenous governor general and the 30th governor general since Confederation. He was born in Merigomish, Pictou County, Nova Scotia on November 26, 1942. Mr. Fraser is an author and a storyteller who has had a front seat to many of the historic events in the last half century in the Canadian Arctic.

He will reframe how we understand addiction in our society and what we should do about it.

Paul Van Nest grew up in Brantford Ontario. He studied at McMaster University, attaining first an honours degree in Physics, and then a Master’s Degree in 1964. He became a physics lecturer at RMC in 1965, and then joined the teaching staff of St Lawrence College in 1968. As the Chair of Technology at St Lawrence, he turned his energies to designing and developing the Open Learning Centre there. He shared this expertise throughout Ontario, the US, Malaysia, Hungary and Iqaluit in Canada’s North.

Dr. Teresa Purzner earned her MD in 2009 and completed four years of neurosurgical residency in Toronto before pursuing a PhD in developmental neurobiology at Stanford University. There, she combined mass spectrometry with developmental biology to identify novel therapeutic targets for pediatric brain tumors, leading to the discovery of a new drug target in medulloblastoma. In collaboration with Stanford SPARK and the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium, she helped translate this discovery into a first-in-child clinical trial of a CK2 inhibitor.

Eric Friesen is a broadcaster, writer, speaker and consultant on music, culture, broadcasting and religion in both Canada and the United States. He was a network host and executive for both CBC Radio and Minnesota Public Radio (NPR).

Mark Gerretsen was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Kingston and the Islands in 2015 and has since worked hard to grow the local economy, strengthen the middle class, and help families and communities thrive.

Bhavana Varma has been a force for good in the Kingston charitable landscape for many years. Her journey is truly inspiring, from starting fresh in Canada to making big changes at United Way, showing how passion and hard work can lead to remarkable achievements.

Jonathan Rose’s interests are varied, and include Canadian politics, mass media, political communication, political advertising, propaganda. More recently he has been interested in the practice of deliberative democracy and the demands such experiments make on citizens and governments. As part of that, from April 2006 to June 2007 he was on leave from Queen’s to serve as the Academic Director of the Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.

Marisa Beck has extensive experience conducting and managing research on climate and energy policy, clean growth, and evidence-based decision-making. She has worked in academia, with NGOs, and in the private sector.

Don Mann, Retired Business Owner, and life-long student of Canadian history, has been an avid researcher of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. The fact that his mother and grandmother were on board Titanic and survived its sinking, has driven Don’s quest for as much information as possible as to the details of what really happened that fateful night of April 14, 1912. Don has visited several historic sites, including the Belfast Museum, the Halifax Cemetery, and the Royal Naval Museum-on-Thames, to name a few. Don continues to discover more information to add to his Presentation.