Senior Fellows

Neal A. Baer, M.D.
Senior Fellow
Institute for Photographic Empowerment

Neal Baer is a Harvard–trained physician, practicing pediatrician, and award winning television writer and producer. Since 2000 he has been the Showrunner and Executive Producer of the NBC series “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.” Before his tenure at Law and Order, he was Executive Producer of “ER.” He was also an adjunct professor (2001–2005) at the University of Southern California teaching in the area of health communications, health promotion and disease prevention, and sex education.

Dr. Baer's primary medical interests are in adolescent health and he has written extensively for teens on such topics as teen pregnancy, AIDS, drug and alcohol abuse and nutrition. He also serves on the boards of numerous health care organizations, including the Venice Family Clinic, Advocates for Youth, Children Now, and Physicians for Social Responsibility.

Dr. Baer has a unique ability to address the intersection between health, social issues, and media. As a television writer and producer, for example, Dr. Baer has developed public–health messages in conjunction with stories from the hit TV show ER, as well as after–school specials for teens on STDs. He also has presented locally and internationally to medical and public health students and faculty, television producers, and others on such topics as: Utilizing the Media to Effect Social Change; Storytelling and Social Change; Domestic and International Policies Affecting HIV and AIDS; Teens, Sex, and T.V.; and Health Messages in Prime Time Television. Read more

Adam Clayton Powell III
Senior Fellow
New Business Models for News

Adam Clayton Powell III is USC’s vice provost for Globalization, working closely with faculty and deans to advance the university's globalization initiative, expanding USC's international presence, increasing its leadership role in the Association of Pacific Rim Universities and promoting the university throughout the world.

Powell previously served as director of the USC Integrated Media Systems Center, the National Science Foundation's Research Center for multimedia research. He is also a senior fellow at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, which is housed in the Annenberg School for Communication.

Powell brings considerable international experience to his role in the Office of the Provost. He helped form and then run training programs and forums on digital media in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the United States and on new media for journalists, media managers, educators, policymakers and researchers for the Freedom Forum, first as a consultant, then as director, and finally as vice president. He worked on projects in South Africa for the Ford Foundation, as well as projects in Lagos, Nigeria for the Nigerian Television Authority. He also helped create the annual Highway Africa conference in South Africa, which has become the largest conference in communications and digital media on the African continent.

Powell is widely published, and many of his writings draw on his significant international experience. He recently contributed a chapter to America's Dialogue with the World (Public Diplomacy Council, 2007) and published a book entitled Reinventing Local News: Connecting with Communities Using New Technologies (Figueroa Press, 2006). He has also written for a number of publications, including The New York Times, Wired Magazine and Online Journalism Review.

Prior to joining the USC faculty in 2003, Powell was general manager of WHUT-TV, the nation's first African-American-owned public television station. He also was the founding general manager of KMTP-TV in San Francisco, the nation's second African-American-owned public television station, which he helped put on the air in 1991. He has also served as an executive producer at Quincy Jones Entertainment; vice president for news and information programming at National Public Radio; manager of network radio and television news for CBS News; and news director of all-news WINS in New York.

Powell has won numerous awards, including the 1999 World Technology Award for Media and Journalism, sponsored by The Economist, and the Overseas Press Club Award for international reporting for a series of broadcasts he produced on Iran for CBS News.

Richard Reeves
Senior Fellow
Journalism & Democracy

Richard Reeves, Senior Lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, is an author and syndicated columnist who has made a number of award-winning documentary films. His ninth book, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, was chosen by Time magazine as the Best Non-Fiction Book of 1993. His other best-selling books include Convention and American Journey: Traveling with Tocqueville in Search of Democracy in America. His twice-weekly column has appeared for the past nineteen years in more than 160 newspapers in the United States including The Los Angeles Times, Philadelphia Inquirer and Baltimore Sun.

Reeves' most recent books are A Force of Nature: The Frontier Genius of Ernest Rutherford (2007), President Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination (2006), President Nixon: Alone in the White House (2001). He is currently working on a book on the Berlin Airlift.  He is the 1998 recipient of the Carey McWilliams Award of the American Political Science Association for significant contributions to the understanding of American politics. Reeves is also the author of What the People Know: Freedom and the Press, 1998; Family Travels: Around the World in Thirty Days, 1997; The Reagan Detour, 1985; Passage to Peshawar, 1983; Jet Lag, 1981; and A Ford, not a Lincoln, 1975.

A former chief political correspondent of The New York Times, Reeves has been an editor and columnist for New York Magazine and Esquire. For six years, he wrote a column from Europe for Travel & Leisure magazine. He was named the Regents Professor of Political Science at UCLA in 1992. He has taught political writing at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Reeves has also made six television films and has won all of television's major documentary awards, the Emmy for "Lights,Camera...Politics!" for ABC News; the Columbia-DuPont Award for "Struggle for Birmingham" for PBS; and the George Foster Peabody Award for "Red Star Over Khyber" for PBS. He was the co-host of NBC magazine show "Sunday" from 1971 to 1976. He is married to Catherine O'Neill, director of the Washington office of the United Nations and founder of the Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children. They have five children.

Orville Schell
Senior Fellow
New Business Models for News

Orville Schell was born in New York City in 1940, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, in Chinese History where he earned a Ph.D. (Abd). He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and traveled widely in China.

He is also a contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The China Quarterly and The New York Review of Books.

Schell has been the recipient of several writing fellowships from the Alicia Patterson Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, and is the winner of numerous awards, including the Harvard/Stanford Shorenstein Award for Asian Journalism, Overseas Press Club of America’s Award for The Best Article on a Foreign Subject, a Mencken Award for the Best Feature and a Page One Award for the Best Investigative Story.

The author of 14 books, nine of them about China, and a contributor to numerous edited volumes, his most recent books are Virtual Tibet: Searching for Shangrila From the Himalayas To Hollywood, The China Reader: The Reform Years, and Mandate of Heaven: The Legacy of Tiananmen Square and the Next Generation of China’s Leaders. He has also served as a television commentator for several network news programs, has worked both as a correspondent and as a correspondent and consultant for a number of PBS “Frontline” documentaries, and been the correspondent for an Emmy award-winning program for “60 Minutes” segment.

Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Sundance Documentary Fund jury and the Social Science Research Council. He is also a member of the Pacific Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and a regular participant in the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Schell is currently the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and the incoming Arthur Ross Director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society.

Derek Shearer
Senior Fellow
Public Diplomacy

Ambassador Derek Shearer is currently Chevalier Professor of Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College in Los Angeles. He also serves as Director of Global Affairs, handling the college’s international relations and directing the expansion of its international affairs programs.

Derek Shearer served in the Clinton administration as an economics official in the Commerce Department, and then as Ambassador to Finland (1994-97). Among his many accomplishments were the creation of the administration’s coordinated strategy to the Nordic-Baltic region and the hosting of the Clinton-Yeltsin summit in Helsinki. After diplomatic service, Ambassador Shearer was a fellow at the Economic Strategy Institute and then at the Woodrow Wilson Scholars Center in Washington, DC. He also was a visiting Woodrow Wilson fellow and ambassador-in-residence at a number of colleges.  He served as a foreign policy advisor to Vice President Gore during the 2000 Presidential campaign and to Senator Hillary Clinton in the 2007-2008 Presidential primary contests. The report of his Occidental seminar on American Grand Strategy—titled “Rebranding America” is available online at: www.oxyworldwide.com.

Ambassador Shearer’s articles on foreign affairs and public policy have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and many weekly and monthly publications. He has authored numerous scholarly and policy articles in books and journals---and has lectured at leading universities in Europe, Asia, and Australia, including speaking tours for the US government in China, Japan, South Korea, Greece, Australia, the Baltic States, Chile, New Zealand and Kazakhstan, Syria, Peru and Bolivia—and taught at the University of Maryland, Tufts, and UCLA, as well as at Occidental. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an US-Japan Leadership Fellowship, and a Swedish Bicentennial Fellowship, among other honors—and he is listed in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America, and other such publications. He is also a senior fellow at the Center for Public Diplomacy located at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School. Earlier in his career, he was an official in state and local government in California. His public policy books include Economic Democracy ( co author Martin Carnoy), A New Social Contract (with Carnoy and Rumsberger), Putting People First- 1992 Program of Clinton-Gore Campaign (with Magaziner, Reich et al); and the Public Policy Reader, edited with Lee Webb.

Ambassador Shearer has also taught courses in business and entrepreneurship, served on the boards of media and food companies, and as an international advisor to Ziff Brothers Investment Co, and other firms. He serves on the board of the nonprofit relief group Operation USA, and is a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy. Ambassador Shearer has served as a political advisor to the US military and was a moderator of the Chiefs of Defense Conference for the US Pacific Command in Honolulu in 2005 and for the US Central Command in Tampa FL in 2008. He currently resides in Pacific Palisades, CA  with his wife, financial consultant  Sue Toigo and three dogs and one cat.

His executive assistant Adriana Lim in the Occidental College--Office of Global Affairs, Tel. 323-259-2681; email: lima@oxy.edu, handles his schedule.

David Westphal
Senior Fellow
New Business Models for News

David Westphal is an executive in residence at USC's Annenberg School for Communication.  Until this fall he was Washington editor of McClatchy Newspapers, the nation's third-largest newspaper company.  Among McClatchy's 30 newspapers are the Sacramento Bee, Miami Herald, Charlotte Observer, Kansas City Star and Fort Worth Star Telegram.  For the last two years he was co-chair of the Freedom of Information Committee for the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Westphal joined McClatchy in 1995 as deputy bureau chief and was named bureau chief in January 1998.  With McClatchy's purchase of Knight Ridder in 2006, he became editor of the combined Washington bureaus and the McClatchy Tribune News Service.  Previously, he was managing editor of The Des Moines Register in Iowa for almost 7 years. 

Westphal was a newspaper editor and reporter for nearly 40 years and has served in a variety of roles, including Washington correspondent, sports editor and projects reporter.  He has won the National Press Club's Washington Correspondence award and is two-time winner of the John Hancock Award for Business and Financial reporting.  While he was managing editor of The Des Moines Register, the newspaper won the Pulitzer Prize for public service.