Lawrence Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist and best-selling author. His research focuses on the intersection of cosmology and elementary particle physics. Krauss’s work addresses questions about the origin of matter in the universe.

Polygraph Lounge is the virtuosic duo of Mark Stewart and Rob Schwimmer, a multi-instrumentalist song and comedy team who specialize in musical mayhem. The New York Times has said “mad genius should always be this much fun.”

John Barrow is a research professor of mathematical sciences in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in England. He is also the author of nearly twenty books for a general audience, including The Book of Nothing.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, including The End of Nature. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is also the founder of the first global scale grassroots campaign to fight climate change, 350.org.

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist. In several books for a general audience, he has laid out his vision of a merger of man and machine that he contends will shape the future of humankind.

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.

David Bodanis is known to a wide audience as an author of popular science books such as the highly acclaimed E=mc²: A Biography of the World’s Most Famous Equation and Electric Universe, which won the 2006 Royal Society Aventis Prize for Science Books.

Jakob Trollbäck is the designer and creative director of Trollbäck + Company. A self-taught designer from Sweden, Trollbäck began his artistic career as a DJ in his native Stockholm. Having found a commonality in music and design, he creates pieces that transport his audience to planes of sensorial experience.

Pat Metheny was born in Kansas City into a musical family. Starting on trumpet at the age of 8, Metheny switched to guitar at age 12. By the age of 15, he was working regularly with the best jazz musicians in Kansas City, receiving valuable on-the-bandstand experience at an unusually young age.

Stuart Firestein is the chair of Columbia University’s department of biological sciences where, along with his colleagues, he studies the vertebrate olfactory system, possibly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet.

Tomás Saraceno’s work defies traditional notions of space, time, gravity, consciousness and perception through architectural, social and communitarian means that are utopian and participatory. His installations blend the boundary between sky and the earth, creating the sensation of flight.

LeVar Burton has been capturing the admiring attention of both audiences and his industry peers for three decades and continues to enjoy longevity truly rare within the industry. His deftness in avoiding stereotype continues to be a hallmark of an incredibly diverse career.

Musa Syeed is a writer and director. His first feature, Valley of Saints won the World Cinema: Dramatic Audience Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Film Prize at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film will have a theatrical release later this summer. He previously co-produced the award-winning documentaries, Bronx Princess and A Son’s Sacrifice.

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.

Jay N. Giedd is a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist, chief of brain imaging at the child psychiatry branch of the National Institute of Mental Health, and an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the department of population, family and reproductive health.

Amy Rowat is an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Originally from Canada, she studied physics and various other subjects at Mount Allison University and completed her graduate work in Denmark.

DOWNTOWN Magazine Editor-in-Chief Mike Hammer is a veteran media consultant, marketing veteran, and journalist with a long track record of accomplishments as at a wide variety of publications and online products.

Brian Lehrer is host of the Peabody Award–winning program The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC New York Public Radio, 93.9 FM, AM 820, and wnyc.org. From scientists to heads of state, Lehrer hosts major thinkers and major newsmakers and involves the audience through phone calls and social media.

Artie Bennett is the executive copy editor for a children’s book publisher. Hailed as “the Dr. Seuss of your caboose” for his much-acclaimed The Butt Book, his first “mature” work, he followed it with Poopendous!, his “number two” picture book.

Colonel Linell Letendre is the permanent professor and Head of the Department of Law at the United States Air Force Academy.

Renée Fleming is one of the most acclaimed singers of our time. In 2013, President Obama awarded her America’s highest honor for an artist, the National Medal of Arts. Winner of the 2013 Grammy Award (her 4th) for Best Classical Vocal Solo, she brought her voice to a vast new audience in 2014, as the first classical artist ever to sing the National Anthem at the Super Bowl.

Dr. John R. Smith is an IBM Fellow and Manager of Multimedia and Vision at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. He leads IBM’s Research & Development on Visual Comprehension including IBM Watson Developer Cloud Visual Recognition, Intelligent Video Analytics, and Video Understanding for Augmented Creativity.

Sev Ohanian is a screenwriter and producer native to Los Angeles. Since graduating from USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, he has been a producer on over a dozen feature films. Four of his films have been Sundance Film Festival Official Selection.

Drew Dollaz is a pioneer of flexing, a Brooklyn-based genre of street dance also referred to as bone breaking, which is characterized by rhythmic contortionist movements. A self-taught dancer, Dollaz is known for blending flexing with other styles including ballet to create a transcendent hybrid of movement artistry.

Cynthia Thomson completed her PhD in Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia. Her graduate research centered on gaining a better understanding of high-risk sport participation, a topic largely inspired by time spent between degrees living in the Canadian Rockies.

Dr. Sarah Pearson is a Danish astrophysicist who received her PhD from Columbia University in New York City, where she specialized in colliding galaxies and dark matter.

Kimberly Arcand is one of the world’s preeminent experts in astronomy visualization and has been a pioneer in 3D imaging and printing in this field. Arcand began her career in molecular biology and public health.

Lenore Blum (PhD, MIT) is Distinguished Career Professor Emerita of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Lenore’s research, from her early work in model theory and differential algebra has focused …

Toby Walsh is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at University of New South Wales Sydney, where he is also the Chief Scientist at the …

Dr. Lauren Edgar is a Research Geologist studying the Earth, Moon, and Mars through a combination of remote sensing and field techniques, to support robotic and human exploration of the …