Jesse Flores, a senior at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, first developed a love for science when he picked up The Anatomy of the Human Body. He’s since worked with lasers and with the bacteria staphylococcus, and is currently researching weather tracking systems. He can often be found playing handball or embarking on culinary and scenic adventures around town.

Mary McDonnell is an academy award nominated actress. She plays President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica and more recently Dr. Virginia Dixon in Grey’s Anatomy. Her other screen credits include Grand Canyon, Sneakers, Independence Day and Donnie Darko. McDonnell’s stage credits include Broadway productions of Execution of Justice, The Heidi Chronicles, and Summer and Smoke.

Kate Burton is a Tony and Emmy Award-nominated actress. Currently on Broadway in the hit musical Spring Awakening, her other stage and screen credits include Hedda Gabler, The Elephant Man, The First Wives Club and The Ice Storm. Her television work includes recurring roles on The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy.

Internationally renowned neurobiologist James Fallon has made major scientific breakthroughs in the basic and clinical brain sciences. He was the first to describe a characterized growth factor in the central nervous system and the first to show how to stimulate the mass production and mobilization of adult stem cells in the adult brain.

Debra Monk has starred on Broadway in Curtains, Chicago; Reckless; Thou Shalt Not; Ah, Wilderness!; Steel Pier; Company; Picnic; Redwood Curtain; Nick and Nora; Pump Boys and Dinettes. Off-Broadway, she has appeared in Love, Loss, and What I Wore; Show People; The Seagull; The Time of the Cuckoo; Death-Defying Acts; Three Hotels; Assassins; and Oil City Symphony.

Helen Fisher is a biological anthropologist at Rutgers University. She studies the evolution, brain systems (fMRI) and biological patterns of romantic love, mate choice, marriage, gender differences, personality, and the biology of leadership styles.

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.

Professor Lee R. Berger is an award-winning researcher, author, paleoanthropologist, and speaker. His explorations into human origins on the African continent, Asia, and Micronesia for the past two and a half decades have resulted in many new discoveries.

Michael Stone is professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. From 2006 to 2008, Stone hosted the series Most Evil on the Discovery Channel, for which he developed a “Gradations of Evil Scale” to rank homicides from 1 to 22 based on their level of evil.

Paul Shaw received his Ph.D. working with Allan Rechtschaffen at the University of Chicago investigating the effects of chronic total sleep deprivation in the rat. He subsequently joined the Neurosciences Institute as a postdoctoral fellow with Giulio Tononi where they began using the fruit fly as a model system to identify molecules that play critical roles in regulating sleep homeostasis.

Scott Atran is currently Research Professor and Presidential Scholar at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and Visiting Professor of Psychology and Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, came out in 2016.

Viviane Slon has done groundbreaking work in the relatively new field of Paleogenetics.  She is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy and Anthropology, and the Department of Human Molecular …

Sheela Athreya publishes on critical issues of race, colonialism, and representation in biological anthropology, and does extensive fieldwork in India and China. She is a Professor of Anthropology at Texas …