Brian Greene is a professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University, and is recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in his field of superstring theory. His books, The Elegant Universe, The Fabric of the Cosmos, and The Hidden Reality, have collectively spent 65 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list.

Bill Blakemore became a reporter for ABC News 46 years ago, covering a wide variety of stories. He spearheaded ABC’s coverage of global warming, traveling from the tropics to polar regions to report on its impacts, dangers, and possible remedies.

John Schaefer is the host and producer of WNYC’s long-running new music show New Sounds, which Billboard magazine has called “the #1 radio show for the Global Village,” founded in 1982, and its innovative Soundcheck podcast, which features live performances and interviews with a variety of guests.

Bill Weir is an award-winning broadcast journalist, anchor and special correspondent for CNN. With a focus on our connected planet, he created and hosted The Wonder List with Bill Weir.

Majora Carter is a green economic consultant who combines social, economic development, and region wide infrastructure needs into positive feedback systems. She has been a driving force behind some of NYC’s most progressive environmental legislation, as well as cultural acceptance of sustainable practices.

Femi Oke is an international broadcaster and a special correspondent for the syndicated national news radio show The Takeaway broadcast from WNYC Radio in New York. Oke became known around the world for her reporting on Africa after joining CNN International in 1999. She also hosted CNN’s award-winning African affairs program “Inside Africa.”

Paula S. Apsell heads the flagship PBS science series, NOVA, now in its 35th year. Under Apsell’s leadership, NOVA has won every major broadcast award and is the most popular science series on television. In 2005, Apsell introduced NOVA scienceNOW, a critically acclaimed science newsmagazine dedicated to covering the latest developments in science and technology.

Garrick Utley served as founding president of the Levin Institute of the State University of New York from 2003 to 2011. He was a senior fellow and the director of New York in the World, an initiative of the Institute.

Combining elements of computer science, anthropology, visual art and storytelling, Jonathan Harris designs systems to explore and explain the human world. He has made projects about human emotion, human desire, modern mythology, science, news, anonymity, and language.

Consuelo De Moraes is an internationally known biologist and ecologist who studies the complex role of chemistry in interactions among plants and other organisms.

Heather Knight is an electrical engineer and social roboticist who runs Marilyn Monrobot in New York, where she and her cohort create “charismatic machine performances,” as well as founding the world’s first Robot Film Festival. Knight is currently conducting her doctoral research at the intersection of robotics and entertainment at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute.

Marc Breedlove has written over 100 scientific articles investigating the role of hormones in shaping the developing and adult nervous system, publishing in journals including Science, Nature, and Nature Neuroscience, as well as two textbooks, Biological Psychology and Behavioral Endocrinology.

Carl Wieman was a Distinguished Professor of Physics and Presidential Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado at Boulder from 1984 to 2006 and still retains a part-time appointment at that institution as Director of the Colorado Science Education Initiative.

As the director of astrovisualization at the American Museum of Natural History, Carter Emmart directs the museum’s groundbreaking space shows and heads up development of an interactive 3D atlas called The Digital Universe.

Jean Berko Gleason is one of the world’s leading experts on children’s language and one of the founding mothers of the field of psycholinguistics. She created the famous Wug Test, which reveals how children learn the rules of language, such as how to make singular words plural.

Award-winning broadcaster and author Lynn Sherr spent more than thirty years with ABC News, covering a wide range of stories—from women’s issues and social change to investigative reports, politics and the space program—at 20/20 and World News.

Emily Senay is a physician, medical and public health educator, broadcast journalist, and author. She is an assistant professor of Medicine in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a clinician in the World Trade Center Health Program in New York City.

Peter Lovatt was a professional dancer who performed on the international circuit before switching gears and embarking on an academic career, earning degrees in psychology, computational neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

Lynette Wallworth is an Australian artist whose immersive video installations reflect on the connections between people and the natural world.

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.

Ralph Borland is a South African artist, designer, and technologist. With an undergraduate degree in fine art from the University of Cape Town and a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University, he recently completed his Ph.D. in the School of Engineering at Trinity College, Dublin.

Lesley Stahl is one of America’s most honored and experienced broadcast journalists, her five-decade career marked by political scoops, surprising features and award-winning foreign reporting. She was CBS’ first female White House correspondent and moderator of Face The Nation.

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.

Francois Grey is a physicist and the head of Citizen Science at NYU’s Center for Urban Science and Progress. He launched the popular Science and the City hackfest series at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Tom Igoe is an associate arts professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). Coming from a background in theatre lighting design, Igoe makes tools that sense and respond to a wide range of human physical expression.

Clay Shirky is a leading voice on the social and economic impact of Internet technologies. Considered one of the finest thinkers on the Internet revolution, Shirky provides an insightful and optimistic view of networks, social software, and technology’s effects on society.

The Metropole Orchestra is the world’s largest professional pop and jazz orchestra. Renowned for its wide-ranging abilities, the Metropole Orchestra performs anything from chansons to World-music, film-scores, Rock- or Pop-tunes as well as high-octane jazz.

Siu-Lan Tan is Professor of Psychology at Kalamazoo College. She served as primary editor of The Psychology of Music in Multimedia published by Oxford University Press 2013.

Luis Daniel is a Research Fellow at The Governance Lab at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Policy and a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Previously, he worked as a Solomon Fellow at NYC Digital where among other things, he created and ran New York City government’s first official Spanish Twitter account.

Dana Karwas is a media artist and educator working in video installation, architecture, live data visualization, and experimental film. She is an Instructor of Integrated Digital Media at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering.

Nancy Hechinger is a faculty member at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunication Program and has a diverse background in education, which includes interactive multimedia production, the development of interactive museum exhibits, and publishing.

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.

Jared Lamenzo is the founder of Mediated Spaces, Inc., an award-winning development lab that uses mobile technology to spur citizen science. He also founded the WildLab, a program that facilitates data collection about the environment and enhances STEM education.

R. Luke DuBois is the director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, and is on the Board of Directors of the ISSUE Project Room. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance.

Dr. John Krasting is a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (NOAA-GFDL) located in Princeton, NJ. Dr. Krasting earned his doctorate in atmospheric science from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

Randall Pinkston was a CBS News correspondent for more than 30 years, including two years covering the White House. Among his many awards are three Emmys, including one for Outstanding Investigative Reporting for CBS Reports: Legacy of Shame about migrant farm workers in the USA.

Jim Dwyer is a columnist with The New York Times, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and a finalist for the National Book Award. He is the author or co-author of six books. His latest, False Conviction: Innocence, Guilt & Science is an electronic book using video, animations, and text to explore the science behind errors in criminal investigations.

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.

Pilobolus has created and toured over 120 pieces of repertory to more than 65 countries and currently performs its work each year for over 300,000 people across the U.S. and around the world. In 2015, Pilobolus was named one of the Dance Heritage Coalition’s “Irreplaceable Dance Treasures.”

Jan L. Plass, Ph.D., is the Paulette Goddard Chair of Digital Media and Learning Sciences, Professor in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University, and he co-directs the Games for Learning Institute.

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.

Trey Taylor co-founded Verdant Power, a New York-based company. He is a founding member of the American Council on Renewable Energy and recently founded Anchor Coalition – a project of The Ocean Foundation, a non-profit organization – dedicated to securing water and energy for our communities.

Mari Kimura is a Violinist/Composer, and a leading figure in the field of interactive computer music. She received numerous awards including Guggenheim Fellowship Fromm Award residency at IRCAM in Paris and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Wendy Ju is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute, where she leads the Future Autonomy Research (FAR) Lab. Her work focuses on ways that interactive devices like robots can communicate with people without interrupting or intruding.

Nuria Lloret Romero PhD, is a professor of Digital Communication and collaborative online projects at Universitat Politècnica de València. Her research focuses on the use of technology to create and enable online collaborative projects.

Daphne Koller is CEO and founder of Insitro, a machine learning-driven drug discovery and development company transforming the way drugs are discovered and delivered to patients. She was the co-founder, …

Manuel Blum (PhD, MIT) is Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon and at UC Berkeley. Manuel has been motivated to understand the mind since he was in second …