About the Producers Noel Schwerin Backbone Media Producer, Director, Writer A Question of Genes: Inherited Risks Noel Schwerin has been making documentary films for 15 years. For the award-winning PBS series NOVA, she co-directed "Yellowstone's Burning Question," and as the series' associate producer, she produced and directed sequences for award-winning films such as "So You Want to Be a Doctor," "The Big Spill" and "Freud Under Analysis." Schwerin was also associate producer in pre-production for the eight-hour PBS series "The Secret of Life." When a series of spinal surgeries interrupted Schwerin's PBS work, she created "X-Ray Visions," a groundbreaking art installation that incorporated photographs she made from her actual x-rays with excerpts from her medical record. Designed for hospitals, "X-Ray Visions" opened at Massachusetts General Hospital and received extensive national press coverage. In 1985, Schwerin wrote, produced and directed "Just Passing Through," a PBS documentary film that profiled juvenile delinquents in a wilderness rehabilitation program. A graduate of Yale University, Schwerin worked in news production for WFSB in New Haven, Conn., and for ABC Network News. She was the coordinating and associate producer for a number of independent production companies and has served as film consultant and series producer for the Carnegie Corporation. Visit Backbone Media's Web site Graham Chedd The Chedd-Angier Production Company Executive Producer A Question of Genes: Inherited Risks Graham Chedd is a graduate of Cambridge University. After several years on the editorial staff of the British magazine New Scientist, Chedd moved to the U.S. in 1972 and became a consultant to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In that capacity, he helped found the weekly science television series NOVA and became its first science editor. After producing several award-winning NOVA episodes in the 1970s, Chedd helped create the PBS series "Odyssey." In 1981, he founded Chedd-Angier with John Angier, then executive producer of NOVA. Chedd-Angier devised the PBS science magazine series Discover: The World of Science, which became Scientific American Frontiers. Chedd has produced programs for the PBS series "The Nuclear Age" and "Columbus and the Age of Discovery." In 1993 he was the executive producer of the PBS/BBC series "The Secret of Life." Currently, Chedd is the executive producer of the PBS series Anyplace Wild, as well as Scientific American Frontiers, now hosted by Alan Alda and one of the highest-rated shows on PBS. Stephen Segaller Oregon Public Broadcasting Executive Producer A Question of Genes: Inherited Risks Stephen Segaller is an award-winning television producer, director and writer specializing in international documentary series. For OPB he was executive producer of "Running Out of Time" and producer/writer of "Rain of Ruin: The Bombing of Nagasaki," a co-production with Nagasaki Broadcasting that won the Japan Prize, Abe Award for 1995, plus a Golden Apple award. He was the PBS senior producer for Eyewitness, a co-production with Dorling Kindersley and the BBC Worldwide. Segaller was executive and series producer of "Triumph of the Nerds," a co-production with John Gau Productions for PBS, described by The Independent as "one of the best documentary series so far this year" and by Time Out as "a triumph in itself." Segaller has also served as director of production and development for BBC Worldwide Americas in New York. There he was supervising producer of "Predators and Prey" and for The Discovery Channel's "Mother Nature/Fathers in the Wild." He also served as supervising producer of the second season of Eyewitness. Visit Oregon Public Broadcasting's Web site: www.opb.org John Lindsay Oregon Public Broadcasting Executive in Charge of Production A Question of Genes: Inherited Risks John Lindsay is the winner of more than 30 national and international awards, including three national Emmys, three Japan Prize awards, three George Foster Peabody awards and two Alfred L. DuPont/Columbia University awards. Linsay has served as OPB's vice president of production since 1988. Among his major achievements are his work as OPB's executive in charge of production for "Triumph of the Nerds," co-produced with John Gau Productions. The series became one of the ten most watched PBS programs of 1996. He was also executive in charge of production for CNN's first-ever external documentary commission, "Return of the Lion's Den" and also for HBO's first documentary commission to a PBS station, "Kids Who Kill." Lindsay broke new ground in the distribution world by establishing an international market for "Oregon Field Guide," a highly rated ongoing outdoor program produced for OPB's local market. This series now has one of the widest international distributions of any local program produced by a PBS station. Since 1995, Lindsay has served as the co-moderator for the annual U.S./ Japan Producers Seminar co-sponsored by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Japan's NHK network. The seminar is a week-long event that brings top producers from the U.S. and Japan together to talk about potential co-productions. Lindsay is also the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) immediate past-president and now serves as IRE's chairman of the board. Visit Oregon Public Broadcasting's Web site: www.opb.org