MIT World Speakers

Tom Ashbrook

Tom 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 10 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 for National Public Radio.