Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at the California Institute of Technology. He is a popular international speaker and the author of numerous academic papers in physics and eight popular science books, including four best sellers.

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.

Professor Frank Wilczek is considered one of the world’s eminent theoretical physicists. He received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction—key to several major problems in particle physics and beyond. 

Kelli O’Hara recently starred in the Tony Award-winning revival of South Pacific at Lincoln Center, enrapturing audiences and critics alike with her interpretation of Nellie Forbush, garnering a third Tony-nomination in the process.

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid is a composer, multimedia artist and writer. His written work has appeared in The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, and Rapgun among other publications.

Alexandra Lynch paints portraits and still lifes in acrylic, watercolor, and collage. She also writes a motherhood diary at AlexandraLynch.com and lives in Hatfield, Massachusetts. Lynch is a former writer and editor for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.

Emily Levine has recently upgraded herself to Emily 3.0. Emily 1.0 was a stand-up comedian, appearing in comedy clubs and on Dave Letterman’s Late Night TV show, among others. Emily 2.0 was a television writer/producer, working on shows such as Designing Women, Love and War, and Dangerous Minds. She has created and produced pilots for ABC, NBC, CBS, and HBO.

Kurt Andersen is the author of two novels, the critically acclaimed bestsellers Heyday and Turn of the Century. His forthcoming book is called Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America. He is also host and co-creator of the Peabody Award-winning public radio program Studio 360.

Roald Hoffmann is a professor of chemistry and the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters Emeritus at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He is a graduate of both Columbia and Harvard Universities.

Seth Mnookin’s most recent book, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear, uses a combination of investigative reporting, intellectual and scientific history, and sociological analysis to explore the controversies over vaccines and their rumored connection to developmental disorders. The New York Times said it was “just what the public needs…a tour-de-force.”

Smell scientist, entrepreneur, and author Avery N. Gilbert is a fragrance industry innovator and pioneer in the areas of olfactory mental imagery, multisensory correlates of odor perception, and the psychological factors that bias odor judgments.

Rob Morrow is an actor, writer, and restaurant owner who is best known for his portrayal of Joel Fleishman in the hit TV series Northern Exposure. In the course of his career, he has been nominated multiple times for Golden Globe and Emmy Awards; he was most recently seen in the Rob Reiner film The Bucket List.

Robert Shaye is a businessman, film producer, and director. He is also the founder of New Line Cinema that, following an early success with the classic horror movie A Nightmare on Elm Street, went on to back numerous highly successful films.

Adam Kolber is a professor at Brooklyn Law School where he writes and teaches in the areas of criminal law, health law, bioethics, and neuroethics. He created the Neuroethics & Law Blog in 2005 and taught the first law school course devoted to law and neuroscience in 2006.

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.

Kevin Temmer is an independent artist, animator, composer, singer, and songwriter. Along with expressing himself through drawing, he began teaching himself animation, and also enjoys composing and performing his own original songs.

Television personality, filmmaker and philosopher, Jason Silva was recently described as “part Timothy Leary, part Ray Kurzweil, and part Neo from The Matrix.”

From Broadway and regional theatre to television and films, James Naughton has won critical acclaim in dramas, comedies, and musicals. Naughton has appeared on-screen in The Devil Wears Prada, Childless, Factory Girl, and Suburban Girl.

Todd Ellison is one of the most accomplished music directors on Broadway, having worked on productions of Annie, Spamalot, Cats, and more. His international credits include directing Jerry Hadley, Dawn Upshaw, and the Dublin Film Orchestra.

Tristan Perich’s work is inspired by the aesthetic simplicity of math, physics and code. WIRE magazine describes his compositions as “an austere meeting of electronic and organic.”

The Babycastles story has been one of opening new cultural territory for independent video games by inserting them aggressively into new spaces. This includes DIY punk-houses, Brooklyn music culture, art galleries, wearable games dance parties, and the Museum of Modern Art.

T. Oliver Reid was the recipient of the 2012 MAC Award for Debut Artist-Male and the 2011 Julie Wilson Award from the Mabel Mercer Foundation, Reid has spent the last 18 months singing and records the songs of the American Songbook across the country.

Ethan Brown is a 12-year-old “Mathemagician.” After watching an online video of Arthur Benjamin’s performance at TED, Ethan was inspired to learn the art and science of performing Mental Mathematics on stage. He began with a 5th-grade talent show in May 2010 and only 1 month later joined Benjamin onstage at The World Science Festival in NYC.

Teal Wicks is best known for her critically acclaimed performance as Elphaba in the Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Broadway companies of Wicked. She was last seen making her TV debut on an episode of The Good Wife.

Gregory Hildreth has appeared in Broadway shows such as Cinderella, Peter and the Starcatcher, and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. His Off-Broadway credits include roles in Peter and the Starcatcher (New York Theatre Workshop), and Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson (The Public Theatre).

Peter Benson is a Broadway performer, with roles in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Harvey, Promises, Promises, To Be or Not To Be, Boeing-Boeing, The Pajama Game, Wonderful Town, Cabaret, Little Me, American Daughter, and State Fair.

Beth Nicely has traveled the country with the National Tour of 42nd Street. She then moved to NYC and performed as a Rockette at Radio City Music Hall. She has been in the Broadway shows Spamalot, Young Frankenstein, and White Christmas. She has also been seen in numerous Saturday Night Live skits and recently on 30 Rock.

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.

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.

Sarah Elizabeth Richards is a journalist specializing in health, medicine, psychology, and social issues. She has written for more than two dozen newspapers, magazines, and websites.

Michael Moss is the author of the No. 1 New York Times bestseller Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (Random House, 2013). He has been an investigative reporter with The New York Times since 2000.

Amir Levine is an adult, adolescent, and child psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York and The Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

Andrew W. Lo is a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, the director of MIT’s Laboratory for Financial Engineering, a principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, and an affiliated faculty member of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Dean Buonomano is a neuroscientist in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology, and a member of the Brain Research Institute and the Integrative Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA. He is a leading researcher on how the brain tells time and neurocomputation.

CeCe Moore is a professional genetic genealogist who is considered an innovator in the use of DNA for genealogical purposes. Currently, she is working as the genetic genealogy consultant and scriptwriter for PBS’ Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Jennifer Ouellette is a science writer and the author of four popular science books, most recently Me, Myself and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Her work has appeared in Discover, Slate, New Scientist, Salon, Smithsonian, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and Quanta.

E.L. Doctorow’s works of fiction include Homer & Langley, The March, Billy Bathgate, Ragtime, the Book of Daniel, City of God, Welcome to Hard Times, Loon Lake, World’s Fair, The Waterworks, and All the Time in the World.

Steve Metzger grew up in Queens, NYC. He went to Baruch College and received his Masters in Education from Bank Street College. He taught young children for 15 years before moving on to Scholastic, where he has mainly worked with the Book Clubs.

Kathryn Minshew is the CEO & Founder of TheMuse.com, a career platform and job discovery tool helping 15+ million people find inspiring careers at thoughtful companies.

Jim Holt writes about math, science, and philosophy for The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Review of Books. His book Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story was an international bestseller.

Laura J. Snyder is a historian, philosopher, and science writer. Oliver Sacks has called her “both a masterly scholar and a powerful storyteller.” Snyder is the author of Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of Seeing.

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.

Christian Schaal has been bartending in New York for over a decade. In that time, he has contributed original cocktails to chef-driven restaurants such as Estela and Alder and run the bar program at Nights & Weekends and Manhattan Inn.

Tanya Lowe has worked with Hawk Creek Wildlife Center, Inc., since 2004. As the director of wildlife education, she has presented Hawk Creek’s free-flying bird shows at the Bronx Zoo, Central Park, and the New York State Fair.

Mindy Greenstein is a clinical psychologist, psycho-oncologist, and writer, who also serves as a consultant to the geriatric group in the Department of Psychiatry at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

Justin M. Rao is a researcher at Microsoft Research in New York City. He did his undergraduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his Ph.D. in economics at the University of California in San Diego.

Michael Winther has appeared on Broadway in 33 Variations, Mamma Mia, 1776, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Crucible, and Damn Yankees. His recent credits include “Bruce standby” Fun Home National Tour, “Albert Einstein” in physicist Brian Greene’s Light Falls in New York and Princeton, Australia.

Alyssa Loorya is a New York City-based archaeologist and preservationist. Co-founder and President of Chrysalis Archaeology she also serves as a board member for several preservation organizations, including the Hendrick I. Lott House and Historic Districts Council.

James B. McClintock is the Endowed University Professor of Polar and Marine Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He is an expert on invertebrate nutrition, reproduction, and primarily, Antarctic marine chemical ecology, climate change, and ocean acidification.

Linda C. Rourke is a board certified criminalist and a life-long science geek. She studied biochemistry in college but hadn’t found her career passion until she learned about forensic science.

Tobias Picker, called “our finest composer for the lyric stage” by The Wall Street Journal, has composed works in all genres including five operas to date. Picker’s operas have been commissioned by the Santa Fe Opera, The LA Opera, The Dallas Opera, San Francisco Opera, and The Metropolitan Opera, and have gone on to be produced by New York City Opera, L’Opera de Montreal, and many other distinguished companies.

Christine Ebersole has captivated audiences throughout her performing career, from the Broadway stage to television series and specials, films, concert appearances, and recordings.

Josephine Johnston is a bioethicist and lawyer at The Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York. She works on the ethics of emerging biotechnologies with a focus on their use in reproduction, psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience.

Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science, nature, and human biology for almost three decades. Her new book, The Genius of Birds (Penguin Press, 2016)–a New York Times bestseller–has been called a “lovely, celebratory survey” by The New York Times and “gloriously provocative and highly entertaining” by the Wall Street Journal.

Pianist-Composer Michael Brown, winner of a 2015 Avery Fisher Career Grant, has been described by The New York Times as a “young piano visionary” and “one of the leading figures in the current renaissance of performer-composers.”

Nina Strohminger is a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University, with appointments at the School of Management and the Cognitive Science program. She conducts research on moral psychology, personal identity, and emotion.

Historian, psychoanalyst, and psychiatrist George Makari is the author of Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, which the Wall Street Journal called “brilliant, essential reading.” Makari also wrote the award-winning, widely acclaimed Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis.

Yemi Amu is the owner and operator of Oko Farms, LLC, an urban aquaponics farm, education, and design company in Brooklyn, New York. Amu is the Farm Manager at the Moore Street Farm, an outdoor aquaponics farm developed by Oko Farms.

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.”

Vasant Dhar is a Professor at the NYU Stern School of Business and the Center for Data Science, and Editor-in-Chief of the Big Data journal. He is also the founder of SCT Capital Management, a machine learning based investment entity in New York City that implements a systematic process of knowledge discovery to make trading decisions autonomously.

James Ransome and Lesa Cline-Ransome collaborated on their first book together with a biography of Satchel Paige, an ALA Notable Book and a Bank Street College “Best Children’s Book of the Year.”

Chef Christopher Burgess is currently the executive chef/owner of Fresh Kitchen, where he spends his time between the kitchen and local organic hydroponic farms. Burgess grew up working in kitchens, where he learned at an early age that quality food was an essential ingredient to good living.

Tim Hwang is director of the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative, a philanthropic project working to ensure that machine learning and autonomous technologies are researched, developed, and deployed in the public interest.

Jay Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University. He conducts research on how group identities’ moral values and political beliefs shape the mind and brain.

Steven Liddell is a passionate science educator who has a remarkable ability to communicate science to people of all ages. As a high school science and math teacher, Liddell created a student-centered learning approach now taught through “Street Science” that engages and inspires kids to foster a love of learning.

Michael Benson’s work focuses on the intersection of art and science. A writer, artist, and filmmaker, Benson has staged a series of large-scale shows of reprocessed planetary landscape photography in major museums.

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.

Neeraj Sakhrani is a rising sophomore at Columbia University planning to major in mathematics and pre-medicine. Accompanying his academic pursuits, Sakhrani is an associate editor for the Journal of Global Health.

Anjali Chadha is a rising Senior at duPont Manual High School, a Math Science Technology Magnet school in Louisville, Kentucky. She has a deep passion for technology and innovation and has been developing a novel IoT based 3D printed arsenic sensor for the past 2 years.

A student of Jericho High School, Marc Huo is an aspiring scientist who has conducted research on nanotechnology, won 1st Place in Cell and Molecular Biology at the International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), was named a Regeneron Scholar, and co-authored a paper that was published in Advanced Materials.

Michael Lai is currently pursuing a medical degree in Hofstra University’s combined BS/MD program in which he will directly matriculate into the Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine. He attended Jericho High School in Jericho New York.

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.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is a world leader in cognitive science, particularly the study of children’s learning and development, and the author of over 100 journal articles and several books.

Nathan H. Lents is professor of Biology at John Jay College and author of two recent books: Not So Different and Human Errors. With degrees in molecular biology and human physiology, and a postdoctoral fellowship in computational genomics, Lents tackles the evolution of human biology from a broad interdisciplinary perspective.

Georgia Frances King is an editor and facilitator born in Melbourne Australia and based in New York. Currently the Ideas Editor at Quartz and formerly the Editor of Kinfolk magazine, she has fused her background in lifestyle journalism with her passion for emerging technology.