Susan E. Tifft

Susan Tifft "is the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. She is the co-author, with Alex Jones, of The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times (Little Brown, 1999), which won the A.M. Sperber Award for Exceptional Achievement in Writing and Research and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. Her first biography, also co-authored with Jones, was The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty, an acclaimed biography of the family behind the Louisville newspapers (Summit Books, 1991). She is currently at work on a book, for Penguin Press, about the longevity revolution and women's unique place in it.

"Before becoming a journalist, Tifft was a press secretary for the Federal Election Commission and the 1980 Democratic National Convention, and a speechwriter for the Carter-Mondale campaign. She also served as director of public affairs for the Urban Institute. From 1982 to 1991 she was a national writer and associate editor for TIME Magazine, where she wrote major articles on politics, economics, foreign affairs and education. She has a master's degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She divides her time between Durham, N.C., and her home in Cambridge, Mass."

• Press Commission, American Institutions of Democracy