Alan Alda, a seven-time Emmy® Award winner, played Hawkeye Pierce and wrote many of the episodes on the classic TV series M*A*S*H. He has starred in, written, and directed many films, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Aviator.

David Charbonneau has been called a “celestial detective” for his systematic search for planets orbiting nearby sun-like stars. Uncovering the secrets of these exoplanets, as they’re called, could conceivably lead to the first direct evidence of life beyond Earth.

Since 2001 AL Holmes and AL Taylor have created an award winning body of films commissioned by Animate, Arts Council England, BFI, Channel 4 television, Cornerhouse Cinema, FACT gallery, Film London, MuHKA, Southbank Centre and the World Science Festival, exhibiting internationally in galleries, site specific installations, film festivals, television and concert halls.

Alan Guth is a professor of physics at MIT, and world-renowned for his discovery of inflationary cosmology, the dominant cosmological paradigm for over two decades. His current research focuses on developing mathematical tools for quantitatively analyzing inflation’s suggestion that there are an infinite number of universes.

At Duke University, neurobiologist Erich Jarvis leads a team that studies the abilities of songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds to learn new sounds and pass along a vocal repertoire in to the next generation.

Alan McDonald is Head, Programme Coordination Group, Department of Nuclear Energy, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Department of Nuclear Energy supports interested Member States in improving the performance of nuclear power plants and the nuclear fuel cycle.

Alan Friedman is a consultant in the areas of museum development and science communication. He has consulted for over sixty institutions around the world. From 1984 to 2006, Friedman was the Director and CEO of the New York Hall of Science. He is co-author of the book, Einstein as Myth and Muse.

Alan Lightman is a writer, astrophysicist, and educator. He is professor of the practice of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a theoretical physicist, he has contributed to the understanding of the unusual radiation processes, black holes, and stellar dynamics.

Mathematician, researcher, writer and radio presenter Marcus du Sautoy has contributed to the Times, Daily Telegraph, Independent and the Guardian. For several years, he wrote a regular column in the Times called Sexy Science. He is also a frequent commentator on BBC radio and television.

Bob Balaban recently received an Emmy nomination for directing Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons in Georgia O’Keeffe (Lifetime). He received three 2008 Emmy Award nominations, two for directing and producing the HBO film Bernard and Doris, and the third for his performance in Recount.

In 1998, Julie Taymor became the first woman to win the Tony® Award for Best Direction of a Musical, and also won a Tony® for Best Costumes, for her landmark production of The Lion King. The musical has won three Molière Awards including Best Musical and Best Costumes, garnered Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Drama League awards for Taymor’s direction.

Vinton Cerf, a vice president and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, is widely known as one of the founding fathers of the Internet. In the 1970s, Cerf co-designed the network’s architecture and the protocols it uses to communicate, and he has been instrumental in shaping its direction in the decades since.

For the past sixteen years, American composer Tyondai Braxton has been actively involved in music composition and performance. His music has received critical acclaim from an extraordinarily diverse expanse of the music world.

Alan Jacobsen is a senior scientist at HRL Laboratories in Malibu, CA. He is the inventor and lead developer of a new technique to fabricate microlattice materials based on a self-propagating optical waveguide phenomenon.

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.

Jim Ottaviani is the author of many graphic novels about scientists, ranging from physicists to paleontologists to behaviorists. His most recent are The New York Times bestselling Primates, about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas and Feynman, a book about the Nobel-prize winning physicist, bongo-playing artist, and best-selling author Richard Feynman.

Jennifer Ouellette is a science writer and the author of four popular science books, most recently Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Her work has appeared in Discover, Slate, New Scientist, Salon, Smithsonian, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and Quanta.

Graham Moore is a screenwriter and author, best known for his New York Times best-selling debut novel The Sherlockian, published in 2010. The Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and based upon an adapted screenplay by Moore was released in November 2014.

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.

Alan Peters is the principal architect of Neocortex. He’s also an associate professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University where he supervises research on a humanoid robot, ISAC, in the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. He has over fifty publications and has secured research funding in excess of $4 million.

Peter Parnell’s most recent play Dada Woof Papa Hot was produced by the Lincoln Center Theater Company in 2015. He wrote the new books for Disney Theatrical’s production of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (music and lyrics Menken-Schwartz), and the Broadway revival of Lerner and Lane’s On a Clear Day You Can See Forever starring Harry Connick, Jr. and Jessie Mueller.

Carl Safina’s work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals.

Budd Mishkin is a broadcast journalist in New York City. As correspondent and host for NY1’s weekly profile series, One on 1 with Budd Mishkin, Mishkin profiled almost 400 influential New Yorkers with significant personal and professional ties to the city.

Dalton Conley is the Henry Putnam University Professor in Sociology at Princeton University. He earned a PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 1996 and a PhD in Biology (Genomics) from NYU in 2014. His research focuses on how socioeconomic status and health are transmitted across generations and on the public policies that affect those processes.

Scott Aaronson is the Schlumberger Centennial Chair of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin and the founding director of UT’s Quantum Information Center. He has made significant …