>> Click here to listen to excerpts from the IDEAS Boston 2007 conference which Tom Ashbrook moderated

Tom Ashbrook

Tom Ashbrook is host of On Point. He's an award-winning journalist brought to public radio by the attacks of September 11, 2001 after a distinguished career in newspaper reporting and editing.

Ashbrook was raised on an Illinois farm, attended Yale University and worked as a surveyor and dynamiter in Alaska's oil fields before turning foreign correspondent.

He spent ten years in Asia, based in India, Hong Kong and Tokyo. At the Boston Globe, he directed coverage of the end of the Cold War and of the Gulf War, serving as deputy managing editor until 1996.

He was awarded the Livingston Prize for National Reporting and named a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University before taking a four-year plunge into Internet entrepreneurship, chronicled in his book The Leap.

Ashbrook was enlisted to host emergency coverage of the 9/11 attacks and world response for National Public Radio through WBUR in Boston, Mass., which now produces On Point.