Laura J. Cole has more than 15 years experience working in higher ed magazines. She has served as editor-in-chief of Pegasus magazine at the University of Central Florida, a large, public research university, and of Rollins magazine at Rollins College, a small liberal arts college. In July 2021, she joined "The Great Resignation," and has been freelancing and consulting full-time from her Airstream while trying to visit as many National Parks as possible.

Dan Morrell is the senior associate director of alumni communications and content manager at Harvard Business School in Boston and hosts HBS’s alumni podcast, Skydeck. He is a cofounder and partner at Dog Ear Consultants, a higher ed communications and design firm. His work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Slate, and Fast Company, as well as many alumni magazines. He has earned several awards from CASE, was part of The Penn Stater’s Sibley Award-winning editorial team and won the 2018 Sibley as editor of the HBS Alumni Bulletin.

Laura Demanski has been editor of the University of Chicago Magazine since 2012. Before that she established the Core, the university's magazine for undergraduate alumni, spending five years as its editor. During that time she also directed a staff of writers in UChicago's alumni relations and development department who were responsible for materials from direct response letters to donor proposals to divisional and departmental newsletters. Prior to joining the world of higher ed communications, Demanski studied English literature at the University of Chicago; wrote book reviews for the Baltimore Sun, Chicago Tribune, and other publications; and worked as an assistant editor at Simon & Schuster.

Steve Hawk is the editor of Stanford Business magazine and a senior editor on the marketing and communications content team at Stanford Graduate School of Business. He previously served as executive editor of Sierra, the magazine of the Sierra Club, as senior editor of Adventure Journal, and as editor of Surfer. Hawk has been at Stanford since 2016. In 2018, his article “Transforming Homes and Saving Lives” won gold for feature writing in the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards, and Stanford Business won gold for general interest magazines. He lives in Half Moon Bay, California, where he spends as much time as possible frolicking in the ocean.

Shannon O'Brien started her career as a photojournalist, working for newspapers in Ohio and South Florida. She returned to graduate school to earn an MFA in creative nonfiction and has been working in higher education ever since. She currently serves as an assistant editor and social media strategist at Williams College, where she takes an interdisciplinary approach to storytelling through a variety of digital and print platforms, and assists the editor in chief in producing the award-winning Williams Magazine. When she’s not working, she can be found at her home in southern Vermont, reading, hiking, enjoying time with her husband and rescue animals (two dogs, two guinea pigs, and one kitten), and trying to improve her vegan cooking and baking skills.

Lori Oliwenstein has been with Caltech's office of strategic communications since 2008. She oversees the production, design and content of Caltech's print and online flagship publications, including Caltech magazine and the institute's annual overview book, This is Caltech. She and her team are also responsible for the Caltech Catalog; the institute's weekly internal and external newsletters; its internally focused webpage, Caltech Today; the copyediting of news and other content; a variety of one-off online and print publications, including The Periodic Table of Caltech; and for Caltech's editorial and visual style guides. Oliwenstein has more than 30 years of experience as a writer and editor, and has written about everything from acupuncture to bacterial suicide for such outlets as TIME, Psychology Today, and Vegetarian Times. She is the author of Taming Bipolar Disorder (Alpha Books, 2004) and the coauthor of Superhuman: The Awesome Power Within (DK Publishing, 2001).

Savita Iyer, the Penn Stater magazine’s senior editor, grew up in Geneva, Switzerland. She attended the International School of Geneva and studied at the University of Geneva, before completing her post-graduate education at the University of London, U.K., and at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications. She worked as a business journalist in New York City for eight years, and, before joining the Penn Stater in February 2017, she freelanced for 13 years, writing on a wide range of topics for magazines and websites in New York, London and Mumbai, India.

During those 13 years, Savita was also lucky enough to live in and work from a few different countries, including India, The Netherlands—and Switzerland. She was lucky enough to spend a year (2005-2006) in Geneva with her parents in her childhood apartment with her two young children (who attended a neighborhood school), rekindling old friendships, making new ones, and strengthening an unbreakable bond with the city she grew up in. 

Savita is fluent in French and Spanish and she also speaks Italian and Hindi. She lives in State College with her husband, a research scientist in Penn State’s Forestry Resources department, and their two teenage children. She enjoys traveling, reading, art cinema and baking, and she has a keen interest in vintage fashion.

Kerry Temple joined the staff of Notre Dame Magazine in 1981 and has been its editor since 1995. He has written numerous articles and essays for this magazine and others on a wide range of topics, a dozen of which have been cited in Best American Essays. The author of Back to Earth: A Backpacker’s Journey into Self and Soul, he has also collaborated with senior university photographer Matt Cashore '94 on two books, Celebrating Notre Dame and This Place Called Notre Dame. After graduating from the university in 1974, he returned to his home state to earn a master’s in journalism from Louisiana State University, and has taught nonfiction writing at Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s College. Even though he’s been at the magazine a long time, he still feels like he did as an English major living in Farley Hall.