Tom Ashbrook is an award-winning journalist brought to public radio by the attacks of September 11, 2001, when he was enlisted by NPR and WBUR-Boston for special coverage, after a distinguished career in newspaper reporting and editing. He is the host of On Point. Ashbrook’s journalism career spans twenty years as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, and author.

Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of WNYC/NPR’s award-winning radio series Radio Lab, which reaches nearly 4 million people per month and describes itself as believing “your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience.”

Faith Salie is a three-time Emmy-winning contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and a regular on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! She’s hosted five seasons of PBS’s Science Goes to the Movies and is a storyteller for The Moth. She hosts the new podcast “One Plus One,” from Wondery.

Marin Alsop made history with her appointment in 2007 as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the first woman to head a major American orchestra. This mirrored her ongoing success in the United Kingdom where she was Principal Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony from 2002- 2008 and is now Conductor Emeritus.

Brooke Gladstone is the Host and Managing Editor of NPR’s On the Media from WNYC. She’s also an accomplished print journalist with works appearing in the London Observer, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and many other leading publications.

Playwright, storyteller, musician, poet, and actor, David Gonzalez was nominated for a 2006 Drama Desk Award for his original production The Frog Bride at Broadway’s New Victory Theater.

Paul Hoffman is the author of a memoir called King’s Gambit and two biographies, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and Wings of Madness. Formerly the publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica and the long-time editor in chief of Discover magazine, Paul has performed mathematical paper-folding tricks on David Letterman and strapped Oprah into a virtual hang-glider while she accused him of ogling her butt.

Jonah Lehrer is contributing editor at Wired and the author of the bestselling books How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. His articles regularly appear in The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times Magazine, Seed, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is also a contributing editor at Scientific American Mind and NPR’s Radio Lab.

Mike Daisey has been called “the master storyteller” and “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” by The New York Times for his groundbreaking monologs, gonzo journalism, and unscripted performance to tell hilarious and heartbreaking stories that cut to the bone.

David Kestenbaum is a correspondent for NPR, covering science, energy issues and, most recently, the global economy for NPR’s multimedia project Planet Money. David has been a science correspondent for NPR since 1999. He came to journalism the usual way—by getting a Ph.D. in physics first.

One of the strongest, most expressive voices to have come out of Ireland belongs to Dublin native Susan McKeown. Her 2010 album Singing in the Dark explores creativity and madness with lyrics from poets such as Anne Sexton and Theodore Roethke, who were writing through the lens of depression, mania, and addiction.

Katherine Isbister has a joint appointment between the NYU-Poly computer science department and the NYU Game Center. Isbister is research director of the Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly, and an investigator in the NYU Games for Learning Institute.

John Rennie is a deputy editor at Quanta Magazine, overseeing its coverage of biology topics. Previously, he was the editor in chief of Scientific American for 15 years and the editorial director of McGraw-Hill’s AccessScience.

Sandro Galea is a physician and an epidemiologist. He is the Anna Cheskis Gelman and Murray Charles Gelman Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.

Jay Allison is an independent journalist, documentary maker, and leader in public broadcasting. He is a frequent producer for NPR news programs and This American Life, and a six-time Peabody Award winner.

Peter Staley has been a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of TAG, the Treatment Action Group. He served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) for 13 years.

Rachel Dutton, Ph.D. is a Bauer fellow at the Harvard University Center for Systems Biology. After receiving her Ph.D. in microbiology from Harvard Medical School, she founded her own lab with the mission of using cheese as a way to understand microbial ecosystems.

Ophira Eisenberg is a comedian, writer, and host of NPR’s new weekly trivia comedy show, Ask Me Another. Her writing has been published in five anthologies and she is a regular host and teller with The Moth.

20ll marked Alison Stewart’s twentieth year as a professional journalist. In 2010-2011 she hosted the PBS news magazine Need to Know. In 2007 Stewart was the founding host of NPR’s breakthrough multiplatform news program, The Bryant Park Project, the first public radio news program to seamlessly incorporate audio, video, and social media.

Dean Buonomano is a neuroscientist in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology, and a member of the Brain Research Institute and the Integrative Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA. He is a leading researcher on how the brain tells time and neurocomputation.

Ted Williams is a planetarium professional who brings stars down to earth. He presents regularly at the Hayden Planetarium and Fels Planetarium, and serves as educator for the Franklin Institute for the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society in Philadelphia.

A.J. Jacobs is the author of four New York Times bestsellers about self-experimentation, including Drop Dead Healthy, The Year of Living Biblically, My Life as an Experiment and The Know-It-All. He is the editor at large at Esquire magazine and a correspondent for NPR.

Rick Karr’s been reporting for NPR’s news magazines for more than 20 years and for various PBS shows for more than a decade. Much of his work examines the intersection of technology, culture, and law.

Rebecca Skloot is an award-winning science writer who contributes to The New York Times Magazine; O, the Oprah Magazine; NPR’s RadioLab; and others. Her debut book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, took more than a decade to research and write, then instantly hit The New York Times Best Seller list, where it has remained for four years.

Richard J. Haier is professor emeritus at the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. Haier is also the associate editor of the Intelligence journal and the president-elect of the International Society for Intelligence Research.

James B. McClintock is the Endowed University Professor of Polar and Marine Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is an expert on invertebrate nutrition, reproduction, and primarily, Antarctic marine chemical ecology, climate change, and ocean acidification.

Nina Strohminger is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, with appointments at the School of Management and the Cognitive Science program. She conducts research on moral psychology, personal identity, and emotion.

Dr. Joanna Kaczorowska, internationally acclaimed for her virtuosity and artistry, has performed as a soloist and in combination with such artists as Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and the Emerson String Quartet.

Jennifer M. Zosh, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Pennsylvania State University. Her areas of expertise include cognitive development, playful learning, and the impact of technology on families.

A four-time Emmy Award-winning writer for Bill Nye the Science Guy, Lynn Brunelle has over 25 years experience writing for people of all ages, across all manner of media. Brunelle has created, developed and written projects for National Geographic, Scholastic, Random House, Penguin, A&E, The Discovery Channel, Disney, ABC TV, NBC, NPR, World Almanac, Cranium, and PBS.

Lauren Sherman is a psychology and neuroscience researcher who studies social media use in adolescence and across the lifespan. Her research investigates the role of new media and digital communication in shaping social and brain development, particularly during adolescence.

David Baron is a journalist, author, and broadcaster who has spent his thirty-year career largely in public radio. He has worked as a science correspondent for NPR, a science reporter for Boston’s WBUR, and science editor for PRI’s The World. An avid umbraphile, Baron has traveled the world to witness nature’s grandest spectacle, a total solar eclipse.

Seth Fletcher is chief features editor at Scientific American. His first book, Bottled Lightning, on the lithium-ion battery and the rebirth of the electric car, was published in 2011 by Hill & Wang/FSG. His next book, currently in progress, is about a group of astronomers and their quest to take the first picture of a black hole.

Barbara J. King is an anthropologist and author. For 28 years she taught biological anthropology, primate behavior, and human evolution at the College of William and Mary. She is the author of six books and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Sara Walker is an astrobiologist and theoretical physicist, researching the origin of life and how to discover life on other worlds. She is developing new theory to understand life, based on the fundamental role information plays in living matter. Her goal is to develop quantitative criteria for the origin of life and for identifying life on other worlds.

Adam Alter is an associate professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business with an affiliated appointment at the NYU Psychology Department where he studies human judgment and decision-making.

Jay Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University. He conducts research on how group identities’ moral values and political beliefs shape the mind and brain.

Meagan Curtis is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Purchase College SUNY. Her research explores the evolutionary origins of music, its links with language, and the multitude of ways in which music can be utilized as a tool.

Marcelo Gleiser is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He obtained his PhD from King’s College London and received the 1994 Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House.

Abigail Marsh is an associate professor of psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science at Georgetown University. She received her PhD from Harvard University and conducted her post-doctoral research at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Jens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.