Speakers
Photo of Heather Long in black dress with grey solid background
Heather Long
Washington Post Economic Columnist

Heather Long is a Washington Post columnist and former editorial board member. An expert on the economy, Heather appears regularly on MSNBC, Fox Business and Marketplace Radio to break down the numbers. Heather joined The Post in 2017 as the lead U.S. economic correspondent. She led coverage of the Trump tax cuts and trade wars, the Federal Reserve, and the pandemic recession. She was among the first to identify the "K shaped" recovery and Great Reassessment of work. She joined the editorial board in 2021. Heather is a former CNN reporter and opinion editor of her hometown paper, The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, Pa. She is a graduate of Wellesley College and Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. Heather has served on the boards of Wellesley College and Wilson College in Chambersburg, Pa. 

Twitter/X: @byHeatherLong 

Bluesky: @byheatherlong.bsky.social

 

Congressman Burgess Owens
Representative for Utah's 4th Congressional District

Burgess Owens is the Congressman from Utah’s Fourth Congressional District. Raised in the segregated South, he saw people of all backgrounds come together to work tirelessly against adversity.

As a young man, Burgess was one of the first four black athletes recruited to play football at the University of Miami and the third black student there to receive a scholarship, ultimately earning BS in biology and chemistry. He was the 13th pick in the first round of the 1973 NFL draft and joined the New York Jets, later playing safety for ten seasons in the NFL for the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders, winning the Superbowl with the 1980 Raiders’ team.

After retiring from the NFL, Burgess worked in the corporate sales world and eventually moved the Owens family to beautiful Utah. Before being elected to Congress, he started Second Chance 4 Youth, a non-profit dedicated to helping troubled and incarcerated youth.

Burgess now serves as a member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee and House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Burgess believes in dreaming big and follows the four guiding principles of faith, family, free markets, and education.

Doug Shapiro
Vice President for Research and Executive Director of the Research Center at the National Student Clearinghouse

Doug Shapiro, Ph.D., is Vice President for Research and Executive Director of the Research Center at the National Student Clearinghouse, where he works to advance student success by providing the education community with research, data and insights from the nation’s largest student-level dataset of college enrollment and degree information. Since joining NSC at the founding of the Research Center in 2010, he has established critical new metrics and reports on student access, persistence, transfer and completion, and developed research services to help high schools, states, and colleges to measure and benchmark their students’ educational outcomes. 

 

Shapiro has been conducting research on higher education for 25 years. He has been quoted in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, NPR, CBS and The Washington Post, among others. Prior to joining the Clearinghouse, he was the Director of Institutional Research at The New School, and before that, the Vice President for Research and Policy at the Minnesota Private College Council. He has a B.A. in History from the University of Chicago, as well as an M.A. in Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Education, both from the University of Michigan. Shapiro lives in Brooklyn, NY and enjoys reading, hiking and bicycling in his spare time. 

Nathan Gonzalez
Editor and Publisher of Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales | Elections Analyst for CQ Roll Call

Nathan Gonzales is Editor & Publisher of Inside Elections, which provides nonpartisan analysis of campaigns for Senate, House, governor, and president. He's also co-host of the Inside Elections Podcast and an Elections Analyst for CQ Roll Call. He tackles elections in a nonpartisan, data-driven, and accessible way and offers audiences some of the most detailed electoral forecasting in the business.

Gonzales is full of enthusiasm and thought-provoking insights about politics. His recall of facts and figures is incredible, and he is natural, energetic, and engaging on stage. With a combination of reporting and data, Gonzales breaks down the key races and brings valuable context to complex elections. Drawing from personal candidate interviews and more than 20 years covering campaigns, Gonzales combines entertaining anecdotes with historical trends and current polling data to project which candidates are best-positioned to win and which party is most likely to gain control. Gonzales’ winsome approach to politics is refreshing at a time when the country is divided, and he can reliably navigate audiences with differing partisan views.

On Election Night 2016, Nathan was an on-air analyst for Newshour on PBS after working as an off-air consultant for ABC News on their Election Night Decision Desk for 14 years. Previously, he was an editor, analyst, and writer for The Rothenberg Political Report, and worked for CNN as a political analyst and as an associate producer for Capital Gang.

Gonzales has appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press and NBC Nightly News, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, NPR’s All Things Considered, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC, and has been quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. His work has also appeared on FiveThirtyEight, NBCLatino.com, and in Campaigns & Elections magazine.

Gonzales grew up in Oregon, earned his Master of Arts from The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management (Washington, DC) and his bachelor of arts from Vanguard University (Costa Mesa, California). He first came to Washington, D.C. as an intern in the White House Press Office and lives in the city with his wife and four children.