Giulio Tononi is an award-winning psychiatrist and neuroscientist whose main focus has been the scientific understanding of consciousness. His integrated information theory is a comprehensive theory of what consciousness is, how it can be measured, and how it is realized in the brain.

Tracy Day is the co-founder of the World Science Festival. She serves as CEO, overseeing the creative and programmatic offerings of the Festival and producing original theatrical, musical and multimedia works at the intersection of science and art.

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.

Richard Besser is ABC News’ chief health and medical editor. In this role, he provides medical analysis and commentary for all ABC News broadcasts and platforms, including World News with David Muir, Good Morning America, and Nightline.

David Gallo was one of the first oceanographers to use a combination of submarines and robots to map the undersea world. The Director of Special Projects at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he has taken part in an exploration of RMS Titanic and the German battleship Bismarck using the Russian MIR submarines, as well as a recent expedition to find the lost WWII submarine USS Grunion.

Award-winning physicist Shamit Kachru is an expert in string theory and quantum field theory, and their applications in cosmology, condensed matter physics, and elementary particle theory.

Linda Dalrymple Henderson is the acknowledged expert on the history of modern artists’ engagement with a possible fourth dimension of space, a widespread cultural preoccupation in the early 20th century before the popularization of the temporal fourth dimension of Einstein’s Relativity Theory.

Antonio Damasio is one of the world’s leading neurologists and neuroscientists and has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how the brain processes emotion, decision, and consciousness.

Bevil Conway, originally from Zimbabwe, is an artist and neuroscientist who researches the neural basis for visual behavior, with a focus on color vision, and investigates the relationship between visual processing and visual art.

The Escher String Quartet has received acclaim for its individual sound and unique cohesiveness. The quartet takes its name from Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher; the members were inspired by Escher’s method of interplay between individual components working together to form a whole.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Philip Glass is a graduate of the University of Chicago and the Juilliard School. In the early 1960s, Glass spent two years of intensive study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and while there, earned money by transcribing Ravi Shankar’s Indian music into Western notation.

David E. Guggenheim, also known as the “Ocean Doctor,” is a marine scientist, conservation policy specialist, submarine pilot and ocean explorer.

David Henry Hwang is a playwright, librettist and screenwriter. He is best known as the author of M. Butterfly, which won the 1988 Tony, Drama Desk, John Gassner, and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and was also a finalist for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize.

The many-faceted career of cellist Yo-Yo Ma is testament to his continual search for new ways to communicate with audiences, and to his personal desire for artistic growth and renewal. In 1998 Mr. Ma established the Silk Road Project to promote the study of the cultural, artistic and intellectual traditions along the ancient Silk Road trade route that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Pacific Ocean.

David Hallberg has danced the title role in Apollo, Solor in La Bayadère, Albrecht in Giselle, Romeo in Romeo and Juliet and George Balanchine’s Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux, among many others, for the American Ballet Theatre.

Tod Machover, called “America’s Most Wired Composer” by the Los Angeles Times, is celebrated for creating music that breaks traditional artistic and cultural boundaries.

Liev Schreiber is considered one of the finest actors of his generation with a repertoire of resonant, humanistic and often-times gritty portrayals that have garnered him with praise in film, theater, and television. He most recently appeared in the contemporary action thriller Salt with Angelina Jolie from director Phillip Noyce.

Daniel J. Levitin is the James McGill Professor of Psychology and Neurosciences at McGill University, where he holds associate appointments in the Department of Neurology & Neurosurgery, the Faculty of Education, School of Computer Science, and in the Schulich School of Music.

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.

David Albert is the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University in New York where he directs the MA Program in the philosophical Foundations of Physics. He received …

David Battisti is The Tamaki Chair of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Washington. His research is focused on understanding the natural variability in climate that stems from the interaction between the ocean, atmosphere, land and sea ice. He is also studying the impacts of natural climate variability and climate change on global food security.

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.

David Gross is the Chancellor’s Chair professor of theoretical physics and the former director of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received …

Dr. James Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute. An active researcher in planetary atmospheres and climate science for nearly 40 years, Hansen is best known for his Congressional testimonies on climate change that widely elevated the awareness of global warming.

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.

Musician and philosopher, David Rothenberg, is the author of Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science, and Evolution, Bug Music, and a CD of the same name featuring music made out of encounters with the entomological world.

After serving as President of Caltech for nine years, David Baltimore was appointed President Emeritus and the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Biology (2006). Baltimore was awarded the Nobel Prize at the age of 37 for research in virology.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist, best-selling author, and Guggenheim Fellow who holds joint appointments in the Departments of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

A leading thinker on geoengineering and a prize-winning physicist, David Keith works at the interface between climate science, energy technology and public policy. He is particularly interested in finding viable ways to capture and store CO2 including the direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere.

David Thoreson is an adventurer, photographer, and sailor who has bicycled 10,000 miles around North America; sailed 36,000 miles around the planet; and crossed the Atlantic three times by sail. In the summer of 2007, he completed the Northwest Passage.

David Sinclair’s research focuses on the search for genes and small molecules capable of slowing the pace of aging in cells and on preventing diseases associated with old age. He is an associate professor of pathology at Harvard Medical School and an associate member of the Harvard-MIT Broad Institute for Bioinformatics.

Daniel Sullivan is one of New York’s most prolific directors. He most recently directed the Broadway revival of The Homecoming. He has been nominated for six Tony Awards for Direction of a Play and won for David Auburn’s Proof in 2001.

David Ferrucci is the lead researcher and principal investigator for the Watson/Jeopardy! project. He has been a Research Staff Member at IBM’s T.J. Watson’s Research Center since 1995 where he heads up the Semantic Analysis and Integration department.

Kathryn Calley Galitz is a scholar of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French art. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Galitz has organized international exhibitions on artists including Chassériau, Girodet, and Turner.

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.

Charles Limb is an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery, where he specializes in neurotology and skull base surgery.

Kodi Azari, MD, FACS is an internationally known plastic surgeon and hand surgeon. His clinical areas of interest include hand, microvascular, peripheral nerve surgery, and hand transplantation.

David Morse has long been recognized as an actor of great talent and versatility in film, television, and theater. His most recent film credits include Drive Angry opposite Nicholas Cage, Passengers with Anne Hathaway and the Oscar-winning film The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow.

John Leventhal is a Grammy-winning musician, producer, songwriter, and recording engineer who has produced albums for Michelle Branch, Rosanne Cash, Marc Cohn, Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell, Jim Lauderdale, Joan Osborne, Loudon Wainwright, The Wreckers, and many others.

Any gallery needs a chair, but beware of this one. This original 1920s chair has been reconstructed full of sonic charges.

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.

Tony-nominated Mireille Enos is currently starring in the critically acclaimed AMC drama series, The Killing. Enos will star opposite Brad Pitt in the Marc Forster-directed zombie extravaganza World War Z, which is based on the novel by Max Brooks and goes into production this summer. For the past three seasons, Enos starred in the HBO drama Big Love.

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.

Raja Burrows graduated from Northwestern University. He most recently appeared in the city as Neel in Making Books Sing’s Tea With Chachaji. He’s also participated in several readings with the New York University Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

Jonathan Gottschall writes books about the intersection of science and art. He is one of the leading figures in a new movement that is trying to bridge the humanities-sciences divide.

David Ng is a faculty researcher at the University of British Columbia’s Michael Smith Laboratories, where he heads a science education lab aimed at training researchers, engaging students in the life sciences, and informing the public on the societal, political, economic and ethical nuances of the sciences.

David Spergel studies the big questions in cosmology and astrophysics: How large is the universe, and what is its shape? Is it finite? What are the dark matter and dark …

Tim McHenry, the program producer at New York City’s Rubin Museum of Art, presents theater-going audiences with what the Huffington Post has called “some of the most original and inspired programs on the arts and consciousness in New York City.”

David Brancaccio is a correspondent for the radio program Marketplace produced by American Public Media. He hosted Marketplace for ten years after serving as a London-based correspondent for the program.

David Hibbard most recently was in the 10 time Tony Award winning production of Billy Elliot, both on Broadway and in the second national tour. His mark on ‘the Great White Way’ is completing 2,197 performances in Broadway’s CATS, in the coveted role of the Rum Tum Tugger. Other Broadway credits include Spamalot, Once Upon A Mattress, and A Class Act.

David Kuhn, a musician, singer, songwriter, performer was one of the original musicians chosen for both the development and Broadway productions of Pete Townshend’s Tony Award-winning rock opera The Who’s Tommy.

Abbey O’Brien can be seen on stage and film alike, appearing in Pal Joey and TV’s SMASH. She was notably part of the original, Tony Award winning cast of Spamalot.

Dr. David Gruber is a marine biologist who uses extended-range SCUBA and Remote Operated Vehicle technologies to explore the deeper portion of the world’s coral reefs. His research focuses on photosynthesis and biofluorescence and his research team has discovered over 30 novel fluorescent proteins from coral reefs, including one that is responsive to phosphorylation.

David Chase has been a Music Director, Supervisor and/or Arranger for over 25 Broadway productions, including Cinderella, Nice Work If You Can Get It, How To Succeed In Business…, Anything Goes, Billy Elliot, Evita, Elf, Promises, Promises, The Little Mermaid, Curtains, and The Pajama Game.

C. David Allis received his Ph.D. from Indiana University and performed postdoctoral work with Martin Gorovsky at the University of Rochester. Allis held several academic positions, including ones at the Baylor College of Medicine and the University of Virginia Health System.

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.

Ronald Hoy is the David and Dorothy Merksamer Professor in biology at Cornell University. Besides teaching at Cornell, he has taught neuroscience and behavior at Cold Spring Harbor Labs and at the marine biological laboratory in Woods Hole, where he was a director of the neural systems and behavior course and, later, director of the Grass Foundation summer fellows program.

David Freedberg, the Pierre Matisse Professor of the history of art at Columbia University, is best known for his work related to psychological responses to art—particularly for his studies of iconoclasm and censorship. He is now devoting a substantial portion of his attention to collaborations with neuroscientists working in the fields of vision, movement, and emotion.

Beth Simone Noveck served in the White House as the first United States deputy chief technology officer and founder and director of the White House Open Government Initiative.

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.

Emmy Award-winning journalist David Novarro is co-anchor of Eyewitness News First on Channel 7 WABC-TV in New York. A native of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Queens, Novarro started his career with Eyewitness News as a college intern and rose through the ranks to become a reporter.

Rafael Yuste is professor of biological sciences and neuroscience at Columbia University. He was born in Madrid, where he obtained his M.D. at the Universidad Autónoma. He performed Ph.D. studies with Larry Katz in Torsten Wiesel’s laboratory at Rockefeller University and was a postdoctoral student of David Tank at Bell Labs.

Joel David Hamkins conducts research in mathematical and philosophical logic, particularly set theory, with a focus on the mathematics and philosophy of the infinite.

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.

Alec Baldwin has appeared in more than 40 films, including Beetlejuice, Working Girl, Miami Blues, The Hunt for Red October, Glengarry Glen Ross, Malice, The Juror, The Edge, Ghosts of Mississippi, State and Main, The Cat in the Hat, The Cooler, The Aviator, The Departed, and It’s Complicated.

David Brenner is the Director of the Columbia University Center for Radiological Research, which is the oldest and largest radiological research laboratory, worldwide. He is also the Principal Investigator of the Center for High-Throughput Minimally-Invasive Radiation Biodosimetry.

David Grier is a physicist specializing in soft condensed matter physics. He is a professor of physics at NYU and has worked on new techniques to probe and manipulate the microscopic world—including using single beams of light imprinted with computer-designed holograms and developing methods of particle tracking.

David Kaplan is a theoretical particle physicist who explores supersymmetry, extra dimensions, dark matter, cosmology, and particles such as the Higgs boson. He is developing new techniques to discover physics beyond the standard model using particle colliders.

David Holland is a physical climate scientist who studies phenomena relating to the polar regions and their impacts on global climate. His current research focuses on the computer modeling of the interaction of the Earth’s ice sheets with ocean waters.

Denise Holland works as the Field and Logistical Co-coordinator for David Holland’s research team in New York and Abu Dhabi. She has been organizing and participating in Greenland expeditions for seven years, both at east and west coast locations.

Dr. Xichen Li works on climate modeling and climate changes in David Holland’s research group at New York University (NYU). He uses different diagnostic tools and numerical models to analyze and simulate the atmospheric circulations of the earth system, in order to study the natural variability and anthropogenic forcing to the present climate systems.

Before embarking on his film career, Mark Levinson earned a doctoral degree in particle physics from the University of California at Berkeley. In the film world, he became a specialist in the post-production writing and recording of dialogue known as ADR (Automated Dialog Replacement).

Mark Brokaw’s work on Broadway includes Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, The Lyons, After Miss Julie, Cry-Baby, The Constant Wife, Reckless. He has directed at London’s Donmar Warehouse and Menier Chocolate Factory, Dublin’s Gate Theatre, and the Sydney Opera House. Brokaw is the Artistic Director of the Yale Institute for Music Theatre.

David Quammen is an author and journalist whose 12 books include The Song of the Dodo, The Reluctant Mr. Darwin, and Spillover, a work on the science, history, and human impacts of emerging diseases. Quammen is a contributing writer for National Geographic and a three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Diane Ackerman is the author of 24 works of nonfiction and poetry. Her works include the New York Times best sellers The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, which received the PEN Henry David Thoreau Award and One Hundred Names for Love, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Circle Critics Award.

Marco Leona is the David H. Koch Scientist in Charge of the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He studied in Italy where he obtained a Laurea in Chimica (M.Sc., Chemistry), and a Ph.D. in Crystallography and Mineralogy from the Universita’ degli Studi di Pavia.

Steve Wolf has been producing film, TV and live events for 25 years. He is the President of Special FX International, and founder of Science in the Movies Inc., an organization that teaches physics and chemistry through stunt demonstrations.

Kyle Patrick Alvarez is a Los Angeles–based director, writer, producer, and editor. The Stanford Prison Experiment marks his third film as a director. It premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival where it won two awards and will be released in theaters this summer through IFC Films.

59 Productions is a multi-award-winning design studio and production company based in London and New York. Whether creating stage productions, museum installations, live music shows, large-scale events, or films, 59’s team generates creative and technical ideas to help realize ambitious artistic projects.

David Shoemaker is the Director of the MIT LIGO Lab and the Leader of the Advanced LIGO Project to build the detectors used in the discovery of gravitational waves.

Leon Wieseltier is the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy at the Brookings Institution. He is the author, among other books, of the acclaimed Kaddish. He was the literary editor of The New Republic from 1983 to 2014, and is now contributing editor and critic at The Atlantic.

Adam Gopnik, New Yorker staff writer, has been contributing to the magazine since 1986. During his tenure at the magazine, he has written fiction, humor, book reviews, and profiles, and reported pieces from abroad. Gopnik has engaged in many musical projects, working both as a lyricist and librettist.

Annabelle Selldorf is principal of Selldorf Architects, a 65-person architectural design practice founded in New York City in 1988. The firm creates public and private spaces that manifest a clear and modern sensibility to enduring impact.

David Van Essen is the Alumni Endowed Professor of Neurobiology at Washington University in St Louis. He is internationally known for his research on the structure, function, connectivity, evolution, and development of cerebral cortex in humans and nonhuman primates.

David Wallace is a philosopher of physics. In 2016, he arrived at the Philosophy School of the University of Southern California, after twenty-two years at the University of Oxford as a student, a researcher, and faculty member. Wallace’s original training was in theoretical physics.

Sarah Tishkoff is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, holding appointments in the School of Medicine and the School of Arts and Sciences. She studies genomic and phenotypic variation in ethnically diverse Africans.

Fronting GRAMMY® Award-nominated multiplatinum rock leviathan Disturbed and industrial disruptor Device, vocalist, songwriter, and producer David Draiman casts an inescapable shadow over modern rock.

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.

In 2001, Dayu Lin received a B.S. in biological sciences from Fudan University in China. In 2006, she received her Ph.D. in Neurobiology from Duke University, working with Larry Katz. She studied as a postdoctoral fellow with David Anderson at California Institute of Technology.

Dubbed “The Last Leading Man” by the New York Times, Brian Stokes Mitchell has enjoyed a rich and varied career on Broadway, television, film and recordings, along with appearances in the great American concert halls.

Anna Gunn starred as “Skyler White” on the Emmy Award-winning series Breaking Bad on AMC, earning an Emmy Award, an AFI Award, and the prestigious Peabody Award. She previously starred in the role of “Martha Bullock” in the iconic HBO series Deadwood.

David A. Relman, M.D., is the Thomas C. and Joan M. Merigan Professor in the Departments of Medicine, and of Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University, and Chief of Infectious Diseases at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System in Palo Alto, California.

Stephen Macknik is currently an Empire Innovator Scholar and a professor of Ophthalmology, Neurology, and Physiology/Pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. Macknik received his PhD at Harvard University.

David Kipping is a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University where he leads the Cool Worlds Lab – a research team primarily focussed on discovering new planets and moons. Kipping’s …

Tony Award winner, Alice Ripley is an actor, singer, songwriter, and mixed media artist. She is best known for her roles on Broadway musicals, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Next to …

David Poeppel is the Director of the Department of Neuroscience at the Max-Planck-Institute (MPIEA) in Frankfurt, Germany and a Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at NYU. Trained at MIT in cognitive science, linguistics, and neuroscience, Poeppel did his post-doctoral training at the University of California San Francisco, where he focused on functional brain imaging.

David Chalmers is University Professor of Philosophy and Neural Science and co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness at New York University. He is the author of The …

David Sloan Wilson is one of the world’s foremost evolutionary thinkers and a gifted communicator about evolution to the general public. He is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York and President of the Evolution Institute.

David Pogue is a four-time Emmy winner for his stories on CBS Sunday Morning, host of 17 science specials on NOVA on PBS, and the “Crowdwise” columnist for The New York Times.

David Julius, PhD, is professor and chair of the Department of Physiology at UC San Francisco and holds the Morris Herzstein Chair in Molecular Biology and Medicine. He is a …

Ralph Nuzzo is the G.L. Clark Professor Emeritus of Analytical Chemistry, and Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a recipient of the 2022 …

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 …

Heidi Boisvert (PhD) Boisvert is an Assistant Professor of AI & the Arts at the University of Florida, where she has been tasked with establishing the nation’s first AI and …

David Flannery in an astrobiologist at the Queensland University of Technology whose research focuses on the life and environments preserved in Earth’s early geological record. He is also a long-term …

Hiranya Peiris is the 1909 Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, the first woman to hold this prestigious chair in its 115-year history. She is a leading cosmologist …

David Baker is the director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington, where he is also the Henrietta and Aubrey Davis endowed professor in biochemistry, and …