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Kimberly Dozier, a CBS News Middle East correspondent who nearly died in a Baghdad car bombing on Memorial Day in 2006, said during a speech at Stony Brook University that she “went from being a reporter under siege” to becoming the story that she had been covering. Dozier was on a routine assignment in Baghdad with her crew, cameraman Paul Douglas and soundman James Broman, and her military escort, Army Capt. James Alex Funkhouser when a car bomb exploded, shooting tons of shrapnel into the air. Both crew members and Funkhouser were killed. Dozier was left struggling for life, she said, and most doctors on the scene did not think she would survive. She had shrapnel in her brain and both of her femurs were shattered. After a long, complicated recovery, Dozier is back on her feet, telling people about her journey and how she managed to avoid post-traumatic stress disorder.

For 13 years, Matt McAllester was a reporter and foreign correspondent for Newsday. He covered conflicts in Kosovo, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Afghanistan and Macedonia. He also reported from Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey and Nigeria. In 2003, he was imprisoned for eight days by Saddam Hussein’s secret police in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.
He has written two books - on the wars in Kosovo and Iraq - and is working on a third, a memoir of his mother. He has made two documentaries for British television. McAllester left Newsday at the end of 2007 and now is a contributing editor at Details magazine. He is joining Global News Enterprises, an online foreign news venture that will launch early next year.

Dave Marash joined Al Jazeera English from ABC News Nightline where from 1989 he was an award-winning correspondent covering global as well as domestic stories. He is its Washington-based anchor.
Marash's coverage of world events has been highly acclaimed, winning him an Emmy Award in 1980 for coverage of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, in 1994 for coverage of the war in Bosnia, in 1996 for coverage of domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City and in 1996 for covering the explosion of TWA flight 800 off the coast of Long Island. He was nominated for an Emmy in 2005 for coverage of the effects of the tsunami in Sri Lanka.

Walt Handelsman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for Newsday. His work is nationally syndicated by Tribune Media Services to more than 200 newspapers around the world. The work of Handelsman, one of the mostly widely reprinted cartoonists in America, frequently runs in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune.

Scott Higham is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter at the Washington Post. He was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for an investigation into the deaths of children who were supposed to be under the supervision of the Washington, D.C., child protection system. The series also won the 2002 Robert F. Kennedy grand prize for reporting on the disadvantaged. Higham was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer for a series on the treatment of detainees held at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Before joining the Washington Post, Higham was a reporter at The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and The Allentown Morning Call.

Higham is a graduate of Stony Brook University, where he was executive editor of The Stony Brook Press. He holds a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Aparisim "Bobby" Ghosh is Time magazine's new World editor, the first non-American to hold that position. Until recently, he was Time's bureau chief in Baghdad, where he spent 4½ years covering the Iraq war.

Ghosh has been with Time since 1998, and in addition to reporting from Baghdad, he has been assigned to Hong Kong and London. He now works from Time's New York City headquarters. Some of his most notable journalism has been in conflict zones such as Iraq, Palestine and Kashmir.

Ghosh began his career in India with the Deccan Chronicle in his hometown, Visakhapatnam.

Wen Huang studied photojournalism in Beijing, where she was born in 1966. In 1989, she joined China's national Xinhua News Agency as picture editor. Today, she is deputy editor-in-chief of Photomall, China's biggest online image bank, and senior editor of its photo department. Photomall is a division of Xinhua. In the late 1990s, the agency sent her to Germany. She went on to cover the war in Kosovo. Her book about that conflict, Target, was published in 2000. In recent years, she hosted a TV program on photography for China Central TV Station for two years and worked on her doctorate in communication studies. In 2002-2003, she was based at Stanford University as a Knight Fellow. She has a Ph.D in communications from Renmin University in Beijing.

Soledad O'Brien is an anchor and special correspondent for CNN’s Special Investigations Unit, reporting documentaries and in-depth stories for all major CNN programs. O'Brien joined CNN in July 2003 as co-anchor of the network's flagship morning program, American Morning, and distinguished herself by reporting from the scene of such stories as Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami in Thailand. O'Brien served as CNN's point person for President George W. Bush's visit to Mexico, delivering a series of reports on conditions that fuel illegal immigration to the United States. She also anchored and reported a Special Investigations Unit documentary about Martin Luther King Jr.'s private writings, notes and teachings. She champions "Children of the Storm," an initiative that provides video cameras to young Hurricane Katrina survivors, enabling them to tell their stories of trial and triumph in their own words and images.

Norman Pearlstine served for 11 years as editor-in-chief of Time Inc. As editor-in-chief, Pearlstine oversaw the editorial content of Time Inc.’s 154 magazines, including Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, In Style, Money, People, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated and Time. Prior to joining Time Inc., Pearlstine was managing editor of the Wall Street Journal for eight years. After resigning from the Journal in June 1992, Pearlstine spent a year launching Smart Money magazine. In January 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors named Pearlstine the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted him into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. He was honored with the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 2000. He received the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1989. Pearlstine is the author of “Off The Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources,” which was published in June 2007.

Kinsey Wilson is executive editor of USA Today, with shared responsibility for strategic planning and day-to-day editorial management of one of the nation’s most widely read print and online news publications. He was named to his current position in December 2005 upon the merger of USA Today’s print and online newsrooms. Prior to the merger, he was vice president and editor-in-chief of USAToday.com, overseeing the editorial operations and strategic development of a news and information Web site that reaches more than 1.5 million readers a day. For the last 10 years he has been a leader in online journalism, first at Congressional Quarterly, where he helped spearhead that company’s digital publishing strategy, and since April 2000 at USATODAY. He is president of the Online News Association.

Meet Randall Pinkston as he tells the story of his rise from local news in Jackson, Miss., to CBS network news at the White House and in New York. He'll share his experiences from two decades of reporting around the globe. During the past decade, Pinkston has covered the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq from the front lines. He reported on the Albanian refugee crisis in Kosovo, the United States’ intervention in Haiti, the Unabomber story and "cold" civil rights cases, to name a few. Pinkston is the recipient of two Emmy Awards for local news coverage at WCBS-TV in New York and three for network news coverage: Outstanding Coverage of a Breaking News Story (“Death of Princess Diana”), Outstanding General Coverage (“TWA 800 Disaster”), and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Outstanding Investigative Reporting (“CBS Reports: Legacy of Shame”).

The School of Journalism presents a duo at this “My Life As…,” featuring Dan Slepian, a Stony Brook University alum (’92) and former president of SBU’s student government. Slepian is an award-winning investigative producer for “Dateline” on NBC News. Accompanying Dan will be retired New York Police Department homicide detective Bobby Addolorato. Slepian and Addolorato will discuss “Murder at the Palladium,” the riveting story of a television investigation that led to the release of two men wrongly convicted of murder after they spent14 years in prison. Watch the “Dateline” story and hear from Slepian about his experience producing the project. And what’s it like from the other side? Addolorato talks about dealing with the press on a big case.

Doug Geed is a veteran of both television news and the Long Island news scene. In 1981, he joined WALK Radio as an anchor and reporter, and in 1986, he became one of the original reporters on News 12 Long Island -- the country's first regional 24-hour news network. Geed became chief of News 12's East End Bureau in 1991 and anchor of the Morning News in 1997. He currently serves as anchor, reporter and producer/host of the Emmy Award-winning weekend feature program, "The East End Show." Geed was named Journalist of the Year in 2004 by the Long Island Press Club. He has won eight Emmy awards and is the recipient of dozens of national, regional and state awards.

Walt Handelsman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist for Newsday. His work is nationally syndicated by Tribune Media Services to more than 200 newspapers around the world. The work of Handelsman, one of the mostly widely reprinted cartoonists in America, frequently runs in Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, USA Today, The Washington Post and The Chicago Tribune. Check out Walt’s website at www.newsday.com/walt

The award-winning Newsday photojournalist Moises Saman was captured by Iraqi intelligence forces and imprisoned for a week in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison during the early days of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He will describe his experiences, show photos of his work in Iraq, Afghanistan and other troubled parts of the world, and take questions.

Marcy McGinnis joined Stony Brook’s brand-new journalism school in September 2006 as interim director of broadcast after a career at CBS News that spanned more than three decades. McGinnis was senior vice president, news coverage, at CBS News from June 2001 through December 2005 and vice president, news coverage from 1997-2001. She managed CBS News’ worldwide newsgathering operation, hard news broadcasts, special events coverage and breaking news as well as the operation and staffing of all domestic and overseas bureaus. McGinnis was at the helm of the newsgathering operation during coverage of 9/11, the war in Afghanistan and Hurricane Katrina. She was one of the primary architects of CBS News' award-winning coverage of the war in Iraq. Previously, she was vice president, Europe and London bureau chief for CBS News (1995-97), running its day-to-day newsgathering and news coverage in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. She received three Emmys Awards for coverage of the death of Princess Diana in 1997. While in Europe, she formed and managed CBS News' newsgathering consortium of international news broadcasters. Before she was assigned to London, McGinnis held a variety of positions with CBS News. [In September 2007, McGinnis was named associate dean at Stony Brook University's School of Journalism.]