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.

Jake Hofman is a Researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City, where his work in computational social science involves applications of statistics and machine learning to large-scale social data. Prior to joining Microsoft, he was a member of the Microeconomics and Social Systems group at Yahoo! Research.

Chris Wiggins is an associate professor of applied mathematics at Columbia University and the Chief Data Scientist at The New York Times. At Columbia he is a founding member of the Department of Systems Biology, the executive committee of the Data Science Institute, and the Institute’s education and entrepreneurship committees.

A Mississippi to NYC transplant, Joshua Winter has been teaching physics for over 15 years to students of all age levels. Whether kindergartners or college students, his engaging teaching style and exciting demonstrations make even the most complex concepts accessible.

Vicky Kalogera directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA), and is the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Northwestern. Kalogera is lead astrophysicist in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC)