Maria Balinska is the Editor and co-CEO of The Conversation US. She is an award winning journalist who worked for most of her career at the BBC in London where for her last 10 years she led the World Current Affairs Radio unit, overseeing specialist programming on international affairs for six radio networks and the web. She returned to the US on a Nieman Fellowship and before joining the Conversation she ran her own digital journalism startup looking to pioneer different ways of covering the world for American audiences. She is also the author of The Bagel: the history of a modest bread (Yale University Press 2008).