Vilayanur Ramachandran investigates the nature of self and human consciousness. His work spans the causes and effects of synesthesia and phantom limb pain to questions about visual perception and the brain. He is Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego.

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.

Frederick E. Lepore is Professor of Neurology and Ophthalmology at Rutgers University/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He was formerly Chief of the Neurology Service at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital and Acting Chairman of the medical school’s Department of Neurology.

Mandë Holford is as an Associate Professor in Chemistry at Hunter College and CUNY-Graduate Center, with scientific appointments at the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medical College.

Alvaro Pascual-Leone is Director of the Berenson-Allen Center for Noninvasive Brain Stimulation and chief of the Division of Cognitive Neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He is an associate dean for clinical and translational research and a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School.

Sridevi Sarma received her B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University; and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is now an assistant professor in the Institute for Computational Medicine, Department of Biomedical Engineering, at Johns Hopkins University.

Meagan Curtis is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Purchase College SUNY. Her research explores the evolutionary origins of music, its links with language, and the multitude of ways in which music can be utilized as a tool.

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 …