Alan Alda, a seven-time Emmy® Award winner, played Hawkeye Pierce and wrote many of the episodes on the classic TV series M*A*S*H. He has starred in, written, and directed many films, and was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in The Aviator.

Chuck Close is a visual artist noted for his highly inventive techniques used to paint the human face, and is best known for his large-scale, photo-based portrait paintings. He has also participated in nearly 800 group exhibitions. In 1988, Close was paralyzed following a rare spinal artery collapse; he continues to paint using a brush-holding device strapped to his wrist and forearm.

Three-time Peabody Award winner, four-time Emmy Award winner, and Dateline NBC correspondent John Hockenberry has broad experience as a journalist and commentator for more than two decades. Hockenberry is the anchor of the public radio show The Takeaway on WNYC and PRI.

Charlie Kaufman wrote the screenplays for Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for which he won an Academy Award for best screenplay.

Lawrence Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist and best-selling author. His research focuses on the intersection of cosmology and elementary particle physics. Krauss’s work addresses questions about the origin of matter in the universe.

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.

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.

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.

Steven W. Squyres is a veteran of several of NASA’s planetary exploration missions, including the Voyager mission to Jupiter and Saturn, the Magellan mission to Venus, and the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous mission.

Michael Russell’s research into the emergence of life and early evolution will help determine whether earth alone supports life in our universe. Russell was awarded the William Smith Medal from the Geological Society of London.

Kip Thorne is the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech. He was the co-founder (with Rai Weiss and Ron Drever) of the LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) Project and he chaired the steering committee that led LIGO in its earliest years.

Called the “Renaissance Man of Evolutionary Biology” by The New York Times, Francisco J. Ayala has made significant and wide-ranging experimental and theoretical contributions to evolution theory.

A professional magician, Arthur Benjamin can multiply large numbers faster than a calculator, figure out the weekday of any date in history, and has memorized the decimal numbers of Pi out to 100 digits.

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.

Patrick Cavanagh helped change vision research by creating the Vision Sciences Lab at Harvard and the Centre of Attention & Vision in Paris. He is currently researching the problems of attention as a frequent component of mental illnesses, learning difficulties at school, and workplace accidents.

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.

Gregory Chaitin is a mathematician and computer scientist who began making lasting contributions to his field while still a student at the Bronx High School of Science. His approach to mathematics views the field as much as an art form as science and inextricably linked with philosophical questions.

Raphael Bousso is recognized for discovering the general relation between the curved geometry of space-time and its information content, known as the “covariant entropy bound.” This allowed for a precise and general formulation of the holographic principle, which is believed to underlie the unification of quantum theory and Einstein’s theory of gravity.

Jill Tarter has devoted her career to hunting for signs of sentient beings elsewhere through a systematic search for radio signals from Earth’s galactic neighbors. She has received wide recognition in the scientific community, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace, two Public Service Medals from NASA and a 2009 TEDPrize.

Luciano Floridi is one of Italy’s most influential thinkers in the area of philosophy science, technology, and ethics, and is best known as the founder of two major areas of research, Information Ethics and the Philosophy of Information. Dr. Floridi is the first philosopher elected Gauss Professor by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

Marc Hauser’s award-winning research, at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience, is aimed at understanding how the minds of human and nonhuman animals evolved.

Patrick R. Hof is an expert in the pathology of neuropsychiatric disorders whose laboratory is internationally known for its quantitative approaches to neuroanatomy and studies of brain evolution. Among his major contributions, Dr. Hof demonstrated that specific neurons are selectively vulnerable in dementing disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.

Dennis Hong, a TED alumnus, is an associate professor and the founding director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical Engineering Department at Virginia Tech.

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.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s Orthodox Jewish background and advanced studies in philosophy came together in an original writing style for which she has been widely recognized.

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.

Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard explores sound in art with a scientific approach. He focuses on the scientific and aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound and hearing. His installations, compositions, and performances deal with acoustic spaces and phenomena that usually remain imperceptible.

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.

Thupten Jinpa has been the principal English translator to the Dalai Lama for more than 25 years and has translated and edited many of his books, including Ethics for the New Millennium; Transforming the Mind; The Universe in a Single Atom: Convergence of Science and Spirituality.

Brian Hare is an expert in chimpanzee and bonobo behavior in African sanctuaries, and founded the Hominoid Psychology Research Group, which compares the psychology of hominoids (human and non-human ape).

Michio Kaku is one of the founders of string field theory, a field of research within string theory. He’s also the host of Sci Fi Science, the top-rated new series on the Science Channel, which is based on his New York Times best-selling book Physics of the Impossible.

Andrea Lommen has been a pioneer in detecting gravitational waves with pulsars. Dr. Lommen’s research, and that of the team she leads, has taken theoretical concepts and transformed them into experimental practice.

Brad Lubman, conductor/composer, is founding co-Artistic Director and Music Director of Ensemble Signal, hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most vital groups of its kind.” He has gained widespread recognition during the past two decades for his versatility, commanding technique, and insightful interpretations.

Sandra H. “Sandy” Magnus is the executive director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the world’s largest aerospace professional society. Magnus attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology, graduating with a degree in physics and a master’s degree in electrical engineering.

Nobel Laureate John Mather’s research in cosmology as part of the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) team has been recognized as some of the most important work of the 20th century.

A former wide receiver for the Detroit Lions, Leland Melvin is an engineer and NASA astronaut. He served on the space shuttle Atlantis as a mission specialist and was named the NASA Associate Administrator for Education in October 2010.

Margaret S. Livingstone is best known for her work on visual processing, which has led to a deeper understanding of how we see color, motion, and depth, and how these processes are involved in generating percepts of objects as distinct from their background.

Dr. Mario Livio is an astrophysicist, a best-selling author, and a popular speaker. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published more than 400 scientific papers on topics ranging from Dark Energy and cosmology to black holes and extrasolar planets.

Robert Krulwich is co-host of Radiolab, WNYC Radio’s Peabody Award-winning program about ‘big ideas’, now one of public radio’s most popular shows. It is carried on more than 500 radio stations and its podcasts are downloaded over 5 million times each month.

Oliver Sacks, a physician and author, has been called “the poet laureate of medicine” by The New York Times. His books and essays, including The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, are used in schools and universities around the world.

George Church is professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and director of PersonalGenomes.org, providing the world’s only open-access information on human Genomic, Environmental, and Trait data (GET). His 1984 Harvard Ph.D. included the first methods for direct genome sequencing, molecular multiplexing, and barcoding.

Fabien Cousteau is an ocean explorer, the third generation to carry on the tradition of adventure pioneered by his grandfather Jacques Cousteau. His Natural Entertainment company works to raise environmental awareness through television and other media.

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.

Since joining NASA in 1998, Tracy Caldwell Dyson has logged more than 300 hours in space. During her first trip aboard the space shuttle Endeavour in 2007 she served as the intra-vehicular (spacewalk coordinator and primary shuttle robotic arm operator).

Cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter and children’s book author & illustrator, Jules Feiffer has had a remarkable creative career turning contemporary urban anxiety into witty and revealing commentary for over fifty years.

André Fenton is a recognized neuroscientist, biomedical engineer, and entrepreneur. Dr. Fenton is a Professor at the Center for Neural Science at New York University.

Francis Collins is known for his landmark discoveries of disease genes and leadership of the Human Genome Project, an international project that culminated in 2003 with the completion of a finished sequence of the human DNA instruction book.

Louise O. Fresco is an expert in the intersection of international development, agriculture and food, advising the Dutch government on socio-economic policy and climate change.

Laura Danly is a spectroscopist specializing in ultraviolet observations from space satellites. Her research focuses on the large-scale distribution and dynamics of the interstellar medium and its relationship to galaxy evolution.

Robbert Dijkgraaf is director and Leon Levy Professor of the Institute for Advanced Study, one of the world’s leading centers for curiosity-driven research in the sciences and humanities.

Pamela Ronald is Professor at the University of California, Davis, where she studies the role that genes play in a plant’s response to its environment. Her laboratory has genetically engineered rice for resistance to diseases and flooding, which are serious problems of rice crops in Asia and Africa.

Christopher Shera has done extensive research in solving fundamental problems in the mechanics and physiology of the peripheral auditory system. His work focuses on how the ear amplifies, analyzes, and emits sound.

Rai Weiss is known for his pioneering measurements of the spectrum of the cosmic microwave background radiation and his seminal leadership in the conception, design and operation of the laser interferometer gravitational wave detector; remarkable scientific achievements recognized by his roles as a co-founder and an intellectual leader of both the COBE Project and LIGO.

Mark Whittle uses large optical and radio telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, to study processes occurring within 1,000 light years of the central supermassive black hole in Active Galaxies.

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.

Pamela Schaller is the primary biologist for a charismatic colony of African penguins and designed and implemented the first-ever penguin wetsuit, which helped a balding bird re-grow his feathers and stay warm.

Winston “Wole” Soboyejo’s research focuses on experimental studies of biomaterials, the mechanical behavior of materials and the development of alternative science and technology-driven methods for addressing global development needs in the areas of health, energy and water purification.

Vanessa Woods is an award-winning journalist and author who studies the cognitive development of chimpanzees and bonobos at sanctuaries in the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Gary Small is the co-inventor of the first brain-scanning technology to detect the physical evidence of Alzheimer’s disease in living people. He also led the team of neuroscientists that was the first to reveal that Internet searching may result in rapid and significant alterations in brain neural circuitry.

Robert C. Green is a medical geneticist who directs the G2P Research Program (genomes2people.org) in translational genomics and health outcomes at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He has been continuously funded by NIH for over 26 years and has published over 300 scientific articles.

Mark Moffett began doing research in biology in college and went on to complete a PhD at Harvard. Moffett is known for documenting new animal species and behaviors during his exploration of remote places in more than a hundred countries.

Dava Newman specializes in investigating human performance across the spectrum of gravity. She is an expert in the areas of extravehicular activity, human movement, physics-based modeling, biomechanics, energetics and human-robotic cooperation.

Elaine Pagels changed the historical landscape of the Christian religion by exploding the myth of the early Church as a unified movement. Her findings were published in the bestselling book, The Gnostic Gospels, an analysis of 52 early Christian manuscripts that were unearthed in Egypt.

Karole Armitage is a dancer and choreographer widely known for combining disparate styles and themes with the discipline and techniques of classical ballet. Armitage danced with the Ballet du Grand Théâtre de Genève, Switzerland, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, before forming her own New York-based company in the 1980s.

Tom Ashbrook is an award-winning journalist brought to public radio by the attacks of September 11, 2001, when he was enlisted by NPR and WBUR-Boston for special coverage, after a distinguished career in newspaper reporting and editing. He is the host of On Point. Ashbrook’s journalism career spans twenty years as a foreign correspondent, newspaper editor, and author.

Jamshed Bharucha conducts research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, focusing on the cognitive and neural basis of the perception of music. He is a past editor of the interdisciplinary journal Music Perception. Dr. Bharucha is the twelfth president of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

Marcela Carena is an internationally renowned expert on revolutionary ideas in particle physics, ideas about to be tested at the Large Hadron Collider. She has worked closely with experimental physicists at the Fermilab and CERN laboratories developing strategies for discovery at the world’s highest-energy particle colliders.

Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, astrobiologist, and best-selling author. He is Regents’ Professor at Arizona State University, where he is Director of Beyond: Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science.

Grammy-nominated Eldar Djangirov is one of the top jazz pianists on the scene today. He has played with many of the masters, including Dave Brubeck, Michael Brecker, Wynton Marsalis and Dr. Billy Taylor. His latest recording Virtue, made it to the Top 20 on Billboard’s Jazz album chart and Jazzweek’s radio chart by the third week.

Professor John Donoghue was the founding chairman of the Department of Neuroscience at Brown, a position he held for thirteen years. He is currently the director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science, which unites more than one hundred Brown faculty members to support interdisciplinary research on the nervous system.

Monica Dunford is an experimental high-energy particle physicist who helped bring the ATLAS detector at CERN into operation for the first Large Hadron Collider beam and collisions.

National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence Dr. Sylvia A. Earle is an oceanographer, explorer, author, and lecturer who has been called a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress and “Hero for the Planet” by TIME magazine.

Arturo Delmoni, violinist and violist, has earned critical acclaim in the United States and abroad for his stylish, elegant interpretations of classical masterpieces. His distinctive playing embodies the romantic warmth that was the special province of the great virtuosi of the golden age of violin playing.

In 2008, Richard Garriott, a leading expert on private and commercial space travel, realized a lifelong dream to travel to space when he launched aboard the Russian Soyuz TMA-13 spacecraft to the International Space Station and became the sixth private citizen to fly in Earth’s orbit.

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.

Dr. Kristin Baldwin is an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Baldwin’s research harnesses cutting-edge stem cell technology and cloning.

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.

Hugo Van Vuuren helped launch The Laboratory at Harvard, a new platform for idea experimentation in the arts and sciences. Born and raised in South Africa, his endeavors and research focus on Design with Africa and the intersection between technology, design and innovation.

Jad Abumrad is the host and creator of WNYC/NPR’s award-winning radio series Radio Lab, which reaches nearly 4 million people per month and describes itself as believing “your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience.”

Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, essayist, playwright, and teacher, who composed and delivered “Praise Song for the Day” for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. Among her many awards was the first Alphonse Fletcher, Sr. Fellowship for work that “contributes to improving race relations in American society and furthers the broad social goals of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954.”

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.

Mostafa A. El-Sayed is an internationally renowned nanoscience researcher whose work in the synthesis and study of the properties of nanomaterials of different shape may have applications in the treatment of cancer.

Debra Fischer is a planet hunter who has discovered hundreds of worlds orbiting other stars, most of them gas giants, like Jupiter or Saturn. She is currently working to detect lower mass, Earth-like planets.

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.

John M. Grunsfeld was named Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 2012. He previously served as the Deputy Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

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

Heidi Hammel is a noted planetary scientist. Currently, she is senior research scientist and codirector of research at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

Researching the theoretical and practical impact of computational systems that perceive, learn, reason, and reflect, Eric Horvitz has pursued principles and methods that enable computing systems to reason about their own cognition and to make decisions amidst the complexities and uncertainties of an “open world.”

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.

John Lithgow’s many Broadway appearances include The Changing Room, My Fat Friend, Trelawney of the Wells, Comedians, Anna Christie, Once in a Lifetime, Spokesong, Bedroom Farce, Beyond Therapy, Requiem for a Heavyweight, The Front Page, M. Butterfly, and Sweet Smell of Success.

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.

Oliver Goodenough’s research and writing at the intersection of law, economics, finance, media, technology, neuroscience and behavioral biology make him an authority in several emerging areas of law and its application in society.

Marvin Minsky is one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and had made numerous contributions to the fields of AI, cognitive science, mathematics and robotics. His current work focuses on trying to imbue machines with a capacity for common sense.

Amy Chase Gulden is a visual artist interested in art-making processes that are collaborative, not fully under her control, and bring her into direct contact with the living world. She has been collaborating with molecular biologist Kristin Baldwin, using the microorganism, E. coli bacteria, to generate living, growing paintings that can be replicated indefinitely or immortalized by printing onto paper.

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.

Andrew Hamilton is an astrophysicist known for his scientifically accurate general relativistic visualizations of black holes, which have appeared on a number of TV documentary programs, including Nova and National Geographic, in a show at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and on the web, including on YouTube.

A native of Bolivar, New York, soprano Joélle Harvey is quickly becoming recognized as one of the most promising young talents of her generation. She is the recent recipient of a 2009 Sara Tucker Study Grant from the Richard Tucker Foundation.

Stephen W. Hawking is one of the world’s foremost theoretical physicists. His dramatic breakthroughs into the origin of the universe and the properties of black holes are among the most revolutionary insights into the nature of the cosmos since the work of Albert Einstein.

Buzz Hays is one of the pioneers in the field of 3D production, who in recent years was responsible for overseeing the adaptation of standard-release feature films into three-dimensional stereoscopic versions for the IMAX 3D and Real D platforms.

Walter Isaacson is president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been chairman and CEO of CNN and editor of TIME magazine. Isaacson’s most recent book is The Innovators; he authored Steve Jobs and several other best-selling biographies.

Monty Jones is co-winner of the prestigious 2004 World Food Prize, awarded for his discovery of the genetic process to create the New Rice for Africa (NERICA) which gives higher yields, shorter growth cycles and more protein content than its Asian and African parents.

Janna Levin is a professor of physics and astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University and the author of Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space.

Rebecca Luker is frequently seen in leading roles on Broadway, and is equally known for her interpretations of music, old and new, at Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress and the White House.

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.

Steve Mirsky has written the humorous Anti Gravity column for Scientific American since 1995 and is a member of the magazine’s board of editors. Since 2006 his primary responsibilities have been overseeing the magazine’s weekly podcast Science Talk and the daily podcast, 60-Second Science.

Stephen Morse is a renowned expert in criminal and mental health law, whose work emphasizes individual responsibility in criminal and civil law.

Jeremy Niven’s research focuses on the interface between neuroscience, behavior and evolutionary biology in the insect nervous system.

Paul Nurse is a geneticist and cell biologist who has worked on how the eukaryotic cell cycle is controlled and how cell shape and cell dimensions are determined. His major work has been on the cyclin dependent protein kinases and how they regulate cell reproduction.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Phillips is a professor at the University of Maryland and leads the Laser Cooling and Trapping Group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Faith Salie is a three-time Emmy-winning contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and a regular on NPR’s Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me! She’s hosted five seasons of PBS’s Science Goes to the Movies and is a storyteller for The Moth. She hosts the new podcast “One Plus One,” from Wondery.

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.

The Silk Road Ensemble is a collective of internationally renowned performers and composers from more than 20 countries. Many of the musicians first came together under the artistic direction of Yo-Yo Ma at a workshop at Tanglewood Music Center in Massachusetts in 2000.

Emmy Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Vargas has traveled the world covering breaking news stories, reporting in-depth investigations, and conducting newsmaker interviews. She is the host of A&E Investigates.

Harold Varmus, M.D., co-recipient of the Nobel Prize for studies of the genetic basis of cancer, joined the Meyer Cancer Center of Weill Cornell Medicine as the Lewis Thomas University Professor of Medicine on April 1, 2015.

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. 

Damian Woetzel is a former Principal Dancer with the New York City Ballet who has moved into directing and producing. He also works with Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Connect Program in the New York City Public Schools.

Miles O’Brien is a veteran award-winning journalist who focuses on science technology and aerospace. He is the science correspondent for the PBS NewsHour, a producer and director for the PBS science documentary series NOVA, and a correspondent for the PBS documentary series Frontline and the National Science Foundation Science Nation series.

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.

Tiler Peck has danced leading roles in ballets by George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, in addition to a wide variety of choreographers, including Peter Martins, Susan Stroman and Christopher Wheeldon. She has also had numerous works created for her, most recently by Wheeldon and Wayne McGregor for the 2010 New York City Ballet Spring season.

Rosalind W. Picard is an international leader in envisioning and inventing innovative technology. Her award-winning book Affective Computing was instrumental in starting the new field by that name.

Polygraph Lounge is the virtuosic duo of Mark Stewart and Rob Schwimmer, a multi-instrumentalist song and comedy team who specialize in musical mayhem. The New York Times has said “mad genius should always be this much fun.”

Emalie Savoy made her Carnegie Hall debut as the soprano soloist in Mendelssohn’s Paulus with The Oratorio Society of New York. A lover of concert and recital, she has also been seen in performance at Alice Tully Hall and the New York Society for Ethical Culture.

Seth Shostak is an astronomer, lecturer and the author and editor of several books, including the 2009 Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (National Geographic). For much of his career, he conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies.

Christopher Tyler has spent his research career exploring how the eyes and brain work together to produce meaningful vision.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He is the author of several books and hosts the NOVA ScienceNow program on PBS. Tyson is best known as an ardent popularizer of astronomy and astrophysics.

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.

Lawrence Weschler was for over 20 years a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is a two-time winner of the George Polk Award, for Cultural Reporting in 1988 and Magazine Reporting in 1992, and was also a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award.

Benjamin West brings improved cook stoves to less developed countries, working under the philosophy that appropriate technology and entrepreneurship can bring large-scale social, environmental and economic development to the world.

Josh Zepps is a correspondent for Bloomberg TV’s Energy Now, reporting on the future of energy and the environment. His show on Discovery Science Channel, Brink, took an irreverent look at the latest breakthroughs on the brink of changing our lives.

Carl Zimmer is an award-winning columnist for the New York Times and the author of 13 books about science. His reporting has earned awards from the National Academies of Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and the Online Journalism Association.

What Bobby McFerrin does is not an act; it’s spontaneous invention. He peers over the edge of the cliff, acknowledges the void below, and dives head first, buoyed by the element of surprise. McFerrin uses dense rhythms, extraordinary scales, and complicated intervals that accomplished musicians and educators have studied and dissected.

Lawrence Parsons is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. His early research on action, spatial reasoning and object recognition was followed by his current work in reasoning, language, emotion and the improvisation of music and dancing.

Rob Boyd is Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. He studies the evolution of cooperation in large groups, and is the co-author of numerous books on cultural evolution, including Not By Genes Alone.

Anna Nagurney is the John F. Smith Memorial Professor in the Department of Finance and Operations Management at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Sarah Hrdy is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Davis. An award-winning author, Dr. Hrdy’s latest book is Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding.

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.

Iain Couzin is assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University. He studies the actions and interactions that give rise to collective behavior—from marching ants and swarming locusts to flocking birds and crowds of people—and what we might learn from successful swarming.

Mitchell Joachim is on the faculty at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. He is a partner in Terrefuge, a New York-based organization for philanthropic architecture and ecological design.

Dominic Johnson received a D.Phil. in evolutionary biology from Oxford University and a Ph.D. in political science from Geneva University.

Dickson Despommier is a trailblazer, devising solutions to problems in agriculture and public health that likely will be magnified by climate change. A microbiologist, he is a Professor of Public Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School, where he developed the idea of growing food in urban farm skyscrapers.

Tyrone Hayes is Professor of Integrative Biology at the University of California at Berkeley. He transformed his childhood love of tadpoles, frogs and toads into a serious study of the connections between pesticides, amphibians, and the impact of molecular changes on the public health environment.

Maurizio Seracini is a pioneer in the use of multispectral imaging to examine works of art. Using diagnostic and analytical technologies, he has studied over 2,500 works of art and historic buildings, including major works by Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Raphael, Caravaggio.

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.

A YouTube sensation with his video hit, “A Biologist’s Mother’s Day Song,” Adam Cole is a soon-to-be-unemployed college student born and raised in Oregon. He has studied everything from snake pheromones to intertidal biomechanics to genes involved with adenocarcinomas.

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.

Claire Evans is a freelance science writer, science fiction critic, polymath, and musician. Her work explores the synchronies between culture, technology, and science. She has been writing the art/science blog Universe for over five years and still doesn’t know how to describe it.

Nick Bostrom is a co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. His research areas of interest include artificial intelligence, bio-enhancement, and mind uploading.

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.

Andrei Linde is a professor of physics at Stanford University, one of the authors of the inflationary theory and the theory of inflationary multiverse. He invented the theory of chaotic inflation, which is the most general version of inflationary cosmology. Linde also helped to develop the theory of eternal chaotic inflation, and the mechanism of vacuum stabilization in string theory.

Alan Guth is a professor of physics at MIT, and world-renowned for his discovery of inflationary cosmology, the dominant cosmological paradigm for over two decades. His current research focuses on developing mathematical tools for quantitatively analyzing inflation’s suggestion that there are an infinite number of universes.

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.

Klaus Zuberbühler’s award-winning work on the communication and cognition of non-human primates in their natural habitats in Africa, South America and Asia has had a considerable impact on our understanding of primate cognition and, more generally, what it means to be human.

E.O. Wilson is a life-long explorer of the natural world whose pioneering studies of ants have led to revolutionary insights across a wide range of fields, from evolution to animal and human behavior.

The Inspirational Voices of Abyssinian Baptist Church is the resident choir of one of the most prominent African-American institutions in America. Under the leadership of the Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III, the Abyssinian Baptist Church has followed the African-American church tradition of actively building communities.

David Albert is the Frederick E. Woodbridge Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University and a physicist who explores quantum mechanics. He is world-renowned for his insights into philosophical questions about the nature of time, space, and other problems of modern physics.

Marin Alsop made history with her appointment in 2007 as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the first woman to head a major American orchestra. This mirrored her ongoing success in the United Kingdom where she was Principal Conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony from 2002- 2008 and is now Conductor Emeritus.

Monsignor Lorenzo Albacete is a Roman Catholic priest, theologian, physicist and author. A frequent contributor to The New York Times, he is one of the leaders in the United States for the international Catholic movement Communion and Liberation and is on the Board of Advisors of the Crossroads Cultural Center.

Shreya Amin, a senior at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, has a knack for discovering and learning more about the world through science.

Robert Anderson has a message that resonates with audiences as he talks of building the smallest team to ascend Everest’s largest face, without oxygen.

An activist who is known as “the Ralph Nadar of Canada,” Maude Barlow is the best-selling author of 16 books, including the recently released Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water.

John Barrow is a research professor of mathematical sciences in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge in England. He is also the author of nearly twenty books for a general audience, including The Book of Nothing.

Hazel A. Barton has explored caves on five continents, studying microorganisms to research cures for antibiotic-resistant diseases. She coordinates an active undergraduate research laboratory, including a National Institutes of Health funded study examining microbial responses to starvation and a National Science Foundation funded project examining the energetic interactions of bacteria in cave environments.

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.

George Ellis is Professor Emeritus of Applied Mathematics at the University of Capetown and investigates cosmology, the nature of time, and the emergence of complexity. He is the co-author with Stephen Hawking of The Large Scale Structure of Space Time.

Harold Evans is an editor and author of two critically acclaimed best-selling histories of America: The American Century and, most recently, They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators.

Jesse Flores, a senior at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, first developed a love for science when he picked up The Anatomy of the Human Body. He’s since worked with lasers and with the bacteria staphylococcus, and is currently researching weather tracking systems. He can often be found playing handball or embarking on culinary and scenic adventures around town.

Over the course of his career, Harrison Ford has become one of the most popularly acclaimed actors of our time. His body of work includes 41 feature films, eleven of which have exceeded $100 million each at the box office.

Sylvester James (Jim) Gates, Jr. is currently the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland-College Park. In spring of 2009 he was appointed to serve on President Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the Maryland State Board of Education.

Evalyn Gates is the Assistant Director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Her research focuses on theoretical cosmology and particle astrophysics.

Daniel Gilbert is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of the best-selling book, Stumbling on Happiness, which has been translated into 30 languages. His research focuses on prospection — the ability to imagine oneself in the future — and the mistakes people make when they attempt to predict their hedonic reactions to future events.

Aneela Gillani, a junior at Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics, is passionate about biology and is working towards a career in medicine. Her extracurricular activities include Model United Nations and the National Honors Society, and she’s also enrolled in the Advanced Science Research program.

Brooke Gladstone is the Host and Managing Editor of NPR’s On the Media from WNYC. She’s also an accomplished print journalist with works appearing in the London Observer, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and many other leading publications.

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 …

With a career spanning more than 30 years as a soloist, chamber musician, recording artist, and conductor, Joshua Bell is one of the most celebrated violinists of his era. An exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded more than 40 CDs garnering Grammy, Mercury, Gramophone and Echo Klassik awards and is the recipient of the Avery Fisher Prize.

Leonardo Bonanni is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. He has a background in architecture and sculpture from Columbia University, and has been working as an industrial designer and an inventor for the past six years.

Andy Borowitz is a comedian, actor and writer whose work appears regularly in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and at Newsweek.com. He is the first winner of the National Press Club’s humor award and has won seven Dot-Comedy Awards for his website, borowitzreport.com.

Derek E.G. Briggs is Frederick William Beinecke Professor of Geology and Geophysics and Director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History. A distinguished paleontologist whose primary research interest is the preservation and evolutionary significance of exceptionally preserved fossils, Briggs joined the faculty of Yale University in 2003.

Danny Burstein is a native New Yorker who got his Equity card at 19 and has been working ever since in summer stock, regional theatre, movies, television and on and off Broadway.

Sean Carroll is the Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Prior to that he was a research …

Yoon Chang joined Argonne National Laboratory in 1974 and has been responsible for leadership of advanced reactor design and fuel cycle technology development activities in positions of increasing responsibility.

Diana Cheung is a senior in the Gateway to Medicine/Biochemistry Major at Brooklyn Technical High School. She is currently conducting research on novel treatments for pancreatic cancer at SUNY Downstate under the guidance of Dr. Josef Michl, and is also interested in immunology, health policy, and medical ethics.

Nicola Clayton is professor Comparative Cognition in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Clare College. Clayton’s work in integrating biology and psychology led to a re-evaluation of the cognitive capacities of animals, particularly birds, resulting in a theory that intelligence evolved independently in at least two disparate groups, apes and corvids.

Emmy, Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning actress Glenn Close is best known for her riveting performances of complex women. The star of Damages for FX, Close’s portrayal of the high-stakes litigator Patty Hewes won her both an Emmy Award as “Best Actress in a Drama Series” and a Golden Globe for “Best Actress in a TV Drama.”

Brother Guy Consolmagno, SJ, earned undergraduate and masters’ degrees from MIT, and a Ph. D. in Planetary Science from the University of Arizona. He was a researcher at Harvard and MIT, served in the US Peace Corps (Kenya), and taught university physics at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania, before entering the Jesuits in 1989.

Dr. Robert W. Corell, Vice President of Programs & Policy for The H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment is also a Council Member for the Global Energy Assessment and a Senior Policy Fellow at the Policy Program of the American Meteorological Society.

Patrick Haggard is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. He has studied the relationships between brain activity and subjective experience. He has published extensively on voluntary action, particularly on how and when we become conscious of our intentions and our actions.

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.

Lucy Hawking is a journalist, and the author of several novels. With her father, the physicist Stephen Hawking, she has written George’s Secret Key to the Universe, a children’s adventure featuring the mysteries of physics, science and the Universe.

John-Dylan Haynes is a leading expert investigating neural correlates of consciousness and volitional processing, and has developed groundbreaking methods for decoding or “reading out” a person’s mental states from their brain activity.

Gradjola Hazizaj came to the U.S. from Albania in 2005, and is now a junior at the Brooklyn International High School. She has long dreamed of working in medicine, and believes that through science she can help people and make their lives easier.

Michael Heller is a Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow, Poland. His research interest is the intersection of physics, philosophy and theology in describing the nature of time.

Hugh Herr is Associate Professor at MIT and Director of the Biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab. His research seeks to advance technologies merging body and machine, and encompasses a diverse set of disciplines.

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.

Michael Hogan played Colonel Saul Tigh in Battlestar Galactica. With more than thirty years experience working on stage and screen, he is also a recurring character in The L Word and has guested on such series as Millennium, The Outer Limits, Cold Squad, X Files and Monk.

Radley Horton conducts regional climate change scenario assessments for stakeholders around the globe, projecting impacts on agriculture, water resources, ecosystems, and infrastructure.

Elizabeth Hutchinson is Assistant Professor of Art History at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is the author of The Indian Craze: Primitivism, Modernism, and Transculturation in American Art, 1890-1915.

For over 30 years, National Dance Institute (NDI), a not-for-profit organization founded by New York City Ballet star Jacques d’Amboise, has transformed the lives of close to 2 million public school children through award-winning arts and learning programs.

Described by Time Magazine as “perhaps the ultimate role model for women in science,” the Honorable Shirley Ann Jackson, Ph.D., has served as the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute since 1999.

At Duke University, neurobiologist Erich Jarvis leads a team that studies the abilities of songbirds, parrots and hummingbirds to learn new sounds and pass along a vocal repertoire in to the next generation.

Dean Kamen is an inventor, entrepreneur and tireless advocate for science and technology. He holds more than 440 U.S. and foreign patents, many for innovative medical devices that have expanded the frontiers of healthcare worldwide.

One of the great nature photographers of our time, Frans Lanting’s images of nature and wildlife have been published in National Geographic, Audubon and Time as well as exhibitions around the world. His most recent work, LIFE: A Journey Through Time, is a multimedia event that combines the music of Philip Glass with incredible photographs that document the history of the big bang to life on present day Earth.

Leon Lederman is the Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois, and Pritzker Professor of Science at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago; for his contributions to neutrino physics, he shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hod Lipson is a roboticist who works in the areas of artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing. An award-winning researcher, teacher, and communicator, Lipson enjoys sharing the beauty of robotics though his books, essays, public lectures, and radio and television appearances.

Thomas Lovejoy holds the Biodiversity Chair at the Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment based in Washington, DC, and is a recipient of the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement and the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award.

Jonathan Rosen has written about the ivory-billed woodpecker, a bird long thought to be extinct. His most recent books are The Life of the Skies: Birding at the End of Nature and The Talmud and the Internet. His writings have also appeared in the New York Times, the New Yorker magazine, the American Scholar and numerous anthologies.

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.

By examining historical maps and archeological records in combination with geographic computer modeling and scientific sleuthing, Eric Sanderson has reimagined the old growth forests, wetlands and meadows that Henry Hudson saw when he first arrived on the shores of Manhattan in 1609.

Irena Schulz is the founder and president of Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service, Inc., but is perhaps best known for her cockatoo, Snowball, the famous dancing bird on You Tube. Irena worked as a molecular biologist studying Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease, but has dedicated her entire life to owning, studying, and caring for parrots.

Ben Schwegler is Walt Disney Imagineering R&D’s chief scientist, and is particularly interested in the development of sustainable engineering techniques. He was instrumental in the creation of the most energy efficient theme park ever built as well as a new generation of environmentally friendly fireworks.

Interested in the links between art, science, and technology through the ages, New York artist Devorah Sperber’s work addresses the way the brain processes visual information versus the way we think we see.

Julienne Stroeve studies the decline of the Arctic Sea ice cover with the goal of understanding how a seasonally ice-free Arctic will impact climate in the Northern Hemisphere. She is a research scientist with the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado and specializes in reading data gathered by satellite and other remote measuring tools.

Ofer Tchernichovski is an Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Animal Behavior at City University of New York’s City College. His work involves mapping the mechanisms of song learning by studying the behavior and dynamics of the sound production of song birds.

From 2001-2008 Stephen Tindale was executive director of Greenpeace UK and and chair of the environmental organization’s European unit. He has worked to mitigate climate change for the last two decades.

Frank Tong is a cognitive neuroscientist and an associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University. He uses functional brain imaging and neural decoding methods to predict what people are seeing or thinking from their patterns of brain activity.

Nibh, a junior at Brooklyn International High School, arrived in New York from Bangladesh in 2007. He’s a member of the National Honor Society, he writes for the school newspaper, does extensive community service and recently completed an internship at the medical clinic of New York Methodist Hospital. Nibh loves the sense of discovery that comes with doing experiments, and is certain he will pursue a career in science.

John Waldman is professor of biology at Queens College, City University of New York. Prior to this appointment in 2004, he was employed for 20 years by the Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research.

Kevin Warwick is Professor of Cybernetics at the University of Reading in England. Warwick works in robotics and artificial intelligence and recently designed an intelligent deep brain stimulator to treat Parkinson’s Disease. Best known for his pioneering research with implants, including experimentation on himself which led to him being called the ‘World’s First Cyborg.’

Daniel M. Wegner is Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He studies how human minds accomplish self-control and guide us through social life. He conducted pioneering research on how people identify their actions and what gives us the sense that we are consciously causing them.

Richard Weindruch has devoted decades to exploring extreme low-calorie diets and their promise in delaying aging. He is a professor of medicine at the University of Wisconsin and the director and co-founder of LifeGen Technologies.

Paul Root Wolpe, Ph.D. is the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Bioethics, Raymond Schinazi Distinguished Research Professor of Jewish Bioethics, Professor of Medicine, Pediatrics, and Sociology, and the Director of the Center for Ethics at Emory University.

Jane Lubchenco, University Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University, is a marine ecologist with expertise in the ocean, climate change, and interactions between the environment and human well-being.

A founding member and faculty at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, a research institute devoted to foundational issues in theoretical physics, Fotini Markopoulou-Kalamara is a leading researcher in the problem of quantum gravity.

Alex Matthiessen is the President of Riverkeeper. By forging partnerships with leading academic and research institutions, he has strengthened and expanded Riverkeeper’s environmental enforcement efforts and advanced scientific understanding of the Hudson River.

Alan McDonald is Head, Programme Coordination Group, Department of Nuclear Energy, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Department of Nuclear Energy supports interested Member States in improving the performance of nuclear power plants and the nuclear fuel cycle.

Mary McDonnell is an academy award nominated actress. She plays President Laura Roslin in Battlestar Galactica and more recently Dr. Virginia Dixon in Grey’s Anatomy. Her other screen credits include Grand Canyon, Sneakers, Independence Day and Donnie Darko. McDonnell’s stage credits include Broadway productions of Execution of Justice, The Heidi Chronicles, and Summer and Smoke.

Colin McGinn is a professor and Cooper Fellow at University of Miami. In 2006, he joined the UM philosophy department, having taught previously at University of London, University of Oxford, and Rutgers University.

Bill McKibben is the author of a dozen books about the environment, including The End of Nature. A scholar in residence at Middlebury College, he is also the founder of the first global scale grassroots campaign to fight climate change, 350.org.

Warren Meck is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. An internationally recognized expert on time perception, Meck’s research explores the neural basis of the “internal clocks” humans and other animals use to time events in seconds, minutes, and hours.

Alfred Mele is the William H. and Lucyle T. Werkmeister Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is the author of 10 books, including Free Will and Luck, Effective Intentions, A Dialogue on Free Will and Science, and Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will.

Ken Miller is professor of Biology at Brown University. He serves as life science advisor to the NewsHour on PBS and is coauthor, with Joseph S. Levine, of Biology textbooks used by millions of students. In 2005, he served as lead witness in the trial on evolution and intelligent design in Dover, Pennsylvania.

Ken Nakayama received his B.A. in Psychology from the Haverford College in 1962 and his PhD from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1967. For almost twenty years, he was at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco.

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.”

Sir Roger Penrose has made seminal contributions to our understanding of space and time. In describing the initial conditions of the universe, he provided the foundation for studying the origins of the arrow of time.

Irene Pepperberg is Adjunct Associate Professor at Brandeis University and Research Associate and Lecturer at Harvard. She has studied the cognitive and communicative ability of Grey parrots for over two decades.

Andrew Revkin is one of America’s most honored and experienced journalists and authors focused on environmental and human sustainability. He recently joined the staff of the National Geographic Society as strategic adviser for environmental and science journalism.

Emmy award winning journalist Charlie Rose has been praised as “one of America’s premiere interviewers.” He is the host of Charlie Rose, the nightly PBS program that engages America’s preeminent thinkers, writers, politicians, athletes, entertainers, business leaders, scientists and other newsmakers.

Theoretical physicist Stephon Alexander explores unresolved questions about the early universe. Also an accomplished jazz musician, Alexander has collaborated with Grammy Award-winning musician Will Calhoun.

Misha Angrist is a 43-year-old male who is near-sighted and has a family history of heart disease. He has 23 pairs of chromosomes, a wife, and two children.

George Annas is the author or editor of seventeen books on health law and bioethics and is cofounder of Global Lawyers and Physicians, an organization that promotes human rights and health. He is the Edward R. Utley Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics & Human Rights of Boston University School of Public Health.

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.

Dan Ariely studies people’s irrational behavior in the marketplace. He is the founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, author of the book Predictably Irrational, and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Behavioral Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Nina Azari specializes in cognitive neuroscience and the psychology of religion. She uses traditional psychological methods as well as cutting-edge medical imaging technology to explore religious experiences, consciousness, belief and perception in her subjects. Azari is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Hawaii at Hilo.

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.

Mia Barron is a theater, film and television actress. Her stage credits include Springtime for Henry and Heartbreak House, She Stoops to Comedy and Hedda Gabler. She appeared in 27 Dresses with Katherine Heigl and also has a recurring role as the voice of Molotov in the cartoon network’s The Venture Brothers.

Eben Bayer uses biology to solve important environmental challenges by growing safe and healthy new materials as well as envisioning creative ways to use natural technology at industrial scales and in consumer applications.

Steven Benner is one of the pioneers of synthetic biology, which seeks to create artificial living systems. He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Gainesville, Florida and a founder of the Westheimer Institute for Science.

Paul Bloom’s research explores how children and adults understand the physical and social world, with special focus on morality, religion, fiction, and art. A professor of psychology at Yale University, Bloom has written for scientific journals such as Nature and Science, but also for publications with more general circulation, such as The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Atlantic.

Cynthia Breazeal is an associate professor of media arts and sciences and the director of the personal robots group at the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. She is an expert on the interaction between people and sociable robots.

Blaine Brownell is an architect, sustainable building advisor, and a researcher of innovative materials for design and construction. From self-cleaning paint to transparent ceramics and biological plastics, he has described these and hundreds of other revolutionary products in his two-volume book Transmaterial: A Catalogue of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment.

Kate Burton is a Tony and Emmy Award-nominated actress. Currently on Broadway in the hit musical Spring Awakening, her other stage and screen credits include Hedda Gabler, The Elephant Man, The First Wives Club and The Ice Storm. Her television work includes recurring roles on The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy.

Robert Butler is a pioneer in gerontology — the study of aging and its biological, psychological, and social implications. His book, Why Survive? Being Old in America, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1976.

The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts, III, is Pastor of the nationally renowned Abyssinian Baptist Church and President of SUNY College at Old Westbury. Under his leadership, the Church leads crucial community development and social justice initiatives in Harlem.

Neuroethicist Patricia Churchland explores the complex philosophical and ethical impact that the rapidly expanding field of neuroscience has on society. She is the President’s Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla.

Brian Cox is a physicist and BBC television and radio presenter who appears in programs such as In Einstein’s Shadow, Bitesize and Horizon.

Tom Crawford has been helping athletes, executives and teams across the U.S. perform at their highest levels for over 20 years — from youth programs to Major League Baseball, the National Football League and the National Basketball association.

Gordon Davidson is a Tony Award-winning theater director. He was artistic director of the renowned Center Theater Group in Los Angeles for more than thirty years. His credits include Broadway productions of Children of a Lesser God and The Shadow Box.

Eric DeCamps is the personification of a magician. Every one of his performances is filled with compelling stories and visual artistry, and at every turn, he performs the seemingly impossible. DeCamps has been a serious student of the art of magic for over 30 years.

Daniel C. Dennett is a University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, as well as Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University.

Peter Diaczuk is a leading authority in forensics and an expert witness on firearms, trace evidence, and crime scene reconstruction. He has performed research on topics as diverse as underwater fingerprints, blood spatter patterns from gunshot wounds, and bullets ricochetting from different surfaces.

Josh Dorfman is an environmental entrepreneur, green-living advisor, media personality and author. He wrote The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living. Dorfman is the founder and CEO of Vivavi, a retailer of modern, green furniture and home furnishings.

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.

Nathan Englander’s story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges became an international bestseller, earning him both the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. His first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, was published in 2007.

Mark Oliver Everett is the lead singer, songwriter, guitarist, keyboardist, and creative force behind the independent rock band, Eels. He is the son of Hugh Everett III, the physicist who proposed the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Ira Flatow is the host of Science Friday on PRI, Public Radio International. He anchors the show each Friday, bringing radio and Internet listeners worldwide a lively, informative discussion on science, technology, health, space and the environment. Flatow is president of ScienceFriday, Inc. and founder and president of Science Friday Initiative.

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.

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.

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.

As director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, William Solecki’s research focuses on urban environmental change, urban land use, and suburbanization.

Xavier LePichon is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geophysics at the College de France in Aix en Provence. In addition to his groundbreaking work in geophysics and plate tectonics, Prof. LePichon has done extensive research on human compassionate behavior and how society is structured counter-intuitively to the laws of natural selection.

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.

Chris Eckstrom is a writer, videographer, and producer. Her stories have appeared in National Geographic Magazine, Audubon, International Wildlife, National Geographic Traveler, and other publications. Her Traveler story, “The Last Real Africa,” won a 2007 Lowell Thomas Award for Best Magazine Article on Foreign Travel from the Society of American Travel Writers.

Michael Novacek has served since 1982 as a curator at the American Museum of Natural History where he is currently Senior Vice President and Provost of Science and Curator of Paleontology.

A managing partner at the consulting firm, Haseltine Partners, Eric Haseltine is a neuroscientist who has applied new discoveries about the human brain in fields as diverse as aerospace technology, virtual reality, special effects, journalism, entertainment and, most recently, national security and intelligence.

Peter Head is a civil and structural engineer who has become a major proponent and practitioner of sustainable urban design. He applies “biomimetics” — an engineering approach that looks to systems in nature to design efficient structures and systems in the manmade world that produce little if any waste.

Physicist Pierre C. Hohenberg is interested in questions about the structure of matter under extreme conditions. A recipient of the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society and the Lars Onsager Prize of the American Physical Society, Hohenberg is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and is Senior Vice Provost for Research at NYU.

Sandra Kaufmann choreographs for concert dance, video, musical and theatrical productions. She has taught throughout the US and abroad and has served on the faculty of Barnard College, NYU, University of Chicago and the Martha Graham School of Contemporary Dance.

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.

Alan Friedman is a consultant in the areas of museum development and science communication. He has consulted for over sixty institutions around the world. From 1984 to 2006, Friedman was the Director and CEO of the New York Hall of Science. He is co-author of the book, Einstein as Myth and Muse.

A plant biologist and virologist by training, Robert Goodman is a world authority on soil microorganisms and plant disease.

Peter Galison is the Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. He is a leading historian of science whose research explores the interaction …

Saul Griffith is the President and Chief Scientist at Makani Power, a company that is seeking to harness clean energy from high-altitude wind. He is a 2007 MacArthur Award-winning inventor, entrepreneur, and writer.

President of the Future of Life Institute, Max Tegmark advocates for positive use of technology. He is also a professor doing physics and AI research at MIT.

Eugene Thacker is the author of several books and articles that combine philosophy, science, and technology, including Biomedia, The Global Genome, and The Exploit: A Theory of Networks which he co-authored with Alexander Galloway. He has collaborated with art collectives Biotech Hobbyist and the Radical Software Group.

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.

Plant physiologist and inventor M. Glen Kertz has been a global leader in the fields of molecular genetics, plant tissue and cell culture for over 35 years. He is president and director of research and development for Valcent Products Inc., a company aiming to bring to market algae-to-biofuel technology.

Helge Kragh is a leading science historian whose research focuses on the history of cosmology. He is the author of several books including, Cosmology and Controversy and Conceptions of the Cosmos. Kragh is a professor in the History of Science Department at the University of Aarhus in Denmark.

Steven Kurtz is a co-founder of the multi award-winning art and theater collective, Critical Art Ensemble, an organization that performs and exhibits art about information, communications, and biotechnologies. He is also a Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY at Buffalo.

Ray Kurzweil is an inventor, entrepreneur, and futurist. In several books for a general audience, he has laid out his vision of a merger of man and machine that he contends will shape the future of humankind.

Anthony LaPaglia is the Tony, Emmy and Golden Globe-winning actor currently starring as FBI Missing Persons investigator Jack Malone in CBS’s popular television crime drama, Without a Trace. LaPaglia has appeared in a number of films, including Summer of Sam, Sweet and Lowdown, The House of Mirth, and Lantana.

Jonah Lehrer is contributing editor at Wired and the author of the bestselling books How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. His articles regularly appear in The New Yorker, Nature, The New York Times Magazine, Seed, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. He is also a contributing editor at Scientific American Mind and NPR’s Radio Lab.

Emergency physician and avid outdoorsman, Jay Lemery is an authority on the effects of wilderness exposure on the human body. He is known for research on treatments for conditions resulting from high altitude climbing, natural and environmental disasters, and the exposure to other extreme environments.

Lukas Ligeti is a composer whose works combine downtown New York experimentalism with contemporary classical music, jazz, electronica, and world music.

Alan Lightman is a writer, astrophysicist, and educator. He is professor of the practice of the humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). As a theoretical physicist, he has contributed to the understanding of the unusual radiation processes, black holes, and stellar dynamics.

Doug Liman is an American film director and producer, whose credits include The Bourne Identity (2002), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).

Marilyn Maye is an award-winning, renowned jazz singer who has been named an Official Jazz Legend by the American Jazz Museum. She has been onstage with many of the greatest jazz performers, including Count Basie, Charlie “Bird” Parker, and Big Joe Turner.

A co-founder of Ecovative Design, Gavin McIntyre is an avid backpacker with an intense interest in preserving the natural world. Under McIntyre’s direction, Ecovative garnered a grant from the New York State Energy and Development Authority to fund the testing of its flagship product, Greensulate™ organic insulation.

Chemist Dan Nocera is developing ways to derive clean renewable solar energy by replicating basic chemical reactions similar to those used by plants in the process of photosynthesis. A vocal advocate of solar power, he is the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy and a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Physicist Lyman Page measures the cosmic microwave background radiation left over from the Big Bang to better understand the very early universe and how it has since evolved. He is the Henry DeWolf Smyth Professor of Physics at Princeton University.

MTV News correspondent SuChin Pak, began her television career as host of the PBS Science program Newton’s Apple. She has hosted the MTV Video Music Awards, the Movie Awards, and the documentary series My Life Translated. She will host The G-Word on Discovery’s forthcoming eco-lifestyle network, Planet Green.

Reijo Pera is a professor and the Director of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research and Education Center at Stanford University. Her research is aimed at understanding the developmental genetics of human germ cell formation and differentiation.

Ellen Prager is a marine biologist, author and chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aquarius Undersea Laboratory in Key Largo, Florida. She is the Chairman of the Ocean Research and Resources Advisory Panel for the federal government and an author of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy’s 2004 report to Congress and the President.

Peter Pringle is the author of The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov and co-author of nine previous books. His book, Food Inc., traced the history of biotech agriculture. The former Moscow bureau chief for The Independent, he has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and The Nation.

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.

Matthew Ritchie is a painter, sculptor, and digital artist. His work combines science, architecture, history, and the dynamics of culture to explore the idea of information, and is featured in the collections of numerous institutions, including MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum.

Sociologist Nikolas Rose is interested in how genomics affects personal identity and the social and legal ramifications of studying the human genome. He is the James Martin White Professor of Sociology and the Director of the BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society at the London School of Economics.

The late F. Sherwood Rowland studied the Earth’s atmosphere in remote locations from Alaska to New Zealand, in highly polluted cities, and in areas with special conditions such as burning forests. He was best known for the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons contribute to ozone depletion.

Vera C. Rubin is an observational astronomer who has studied the motions of gas and stars in galaxies and motions of galaxies in the universe for 75 percent of her life. Her work was influential in discovering that most of the matter in the universe is dark — it does not emit or absorb any light, and it does not interact with ordinary matter (which is made of atoms) except via gravity.

Laurie Santos is a cognitive psychologist who studies monkeys’ capacity for learning and the evolution of the human mind. She is an Associate Professor of Psychology and director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory at Yale University and was named one of Popular Science magazine’s “Brilliant 10” for 2007.

James Schamus is CEO of Focus Features, and an associate professor at Columbia University’s School of the Arts in New York City, where he teaches film history and theory.

Sam Shepard is an Oscar-nominated actor, screenwriter, director, and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. His best-known works include Buried Child, Curse of the Starving Class, and True West. He has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1986.

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.

Paul J. Steinhardt is the Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton University, where he is also on the faculty of …

Horst Stormer is the Isidor Isaac Rabi Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Columbia University in New York City and an expert in condensed-matter physics.

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.

Leonard Susskind is the Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics at Stanford University, and one of the discoverers of string theory, a candidate for a theory that unifies all laws of physics. An award-winning author, he is a proponent of the idea that our universe is one of an infinite number.

Julia Sweeney is an actress and comedian who has been part of the cast of Saturday Night Live and has appeared in feature films such as Pulp Fiction and Clockstoppers. Most recently, she has come to wider attention with her autobiographical monologue, Letting go of God.

Ian Tattersall is a prominent anthropologist whose work focuses on the evolution of humans and other primates. He is a curator emeritus for the division of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and an adjunct professor at Columbia University and the City University of New York.

Betsy Taylor is the president of the board of directors of the non-profit organization 1Sky, founded in 2007 to mobilize a grass-roots campaign demanding federal action to reverse climate change. She has spent more than 20 years leading efforts to organize, fund and advise groups devoted to promoting energy conservation and community building.

Bill Ritter is a television news anchor and journalist. He began his journalism career as a newspaper reporter, for the Los Angeles Times and others, before moving into television. His work in local and national television has taken him to political conventions for almost 20 years.

Chris McKay is a research scientist with the NASA Ames Research Center. His current research focuses on the evolution of the solar system and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions including human exploration.

Bernie Krause is a bioacoustician — an expert on the sounds of nature — who has traveled the world recording and archiving the sounds of endangered creatures and environments. He is President and CEO of Wild Sanctuary, Inc., one of the world’s largest archives of natural sounds.

Paleontologist Richard Leakey’s discoveries have helped shape our understanding of human origins. He is a committed conservationist and staunch advocate for the protection of Kenyan wildlife. He is the author of several books including The Sixth Extinction.

Jon Meacham is the managing editor of Newsweek magazine, a bestselling author, and a commentator on politics, history, and faith in America. His books include Franklin and Winston: An Intimate Portrait of an Epic Friendship and American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation.

Bill T. Jones, a Tony Award-winning choreographer and dancer, has changed the face of American dance. He has infused issues of identity, form and social commentary into hundreds of award-winning shows worldwide. Jones is the artistic director and co-founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in New York City.

Neuroscientist Nancy C. Andreasen is well known for her pioneering work using MRI imaging to explore mental illness and the neural bases for artistic creativity and innovation. She is the author of several books including The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius.

Theoretical astrophysicist Michael S. Turner is a recognized figure in pioneering the interdisciplinary field of particle astrophysics and cosmology, for which he shared the 2010 Dannie Heineman Prize. In collaboration with Edward Kolb, he initiated the Fermilab astrophysics program.

A leading authority on landscape management and plant conservation, Edward Toth is Director of the Greenbelt Native Plant Center, which collects and raises specimens of New York’s indigenous flora and maintains a seed bank for the preservation of local species.

Margaret Turnbull leads the science team of the NASA New Worlds Observer mission looking for Earth-like planets and signs of alien life. She is an astrobiologist at the Global Science Institute in Wisconsin.

After graduation from Oxford in 1964, Michael York joined the National Theatre company, making his film debut in The Taming of the Shrew. His more than 60 other screen credits include Romeo and Juliet, Cabaret, Jesus of Nazareth, The Three Musketeers, Logan’s Run, Murder on the Orient Express, Conduct Unbecoming, The Omega Code and all three Austin Powers movies.

Physician and geneticist James Evans uses family history and genetic testing to evaluate and counsel patients about their risk for cancer. His research explores how genetics influences an individual’s response to medication.

Computer scientist Latanya Sweeney is interested in the intersection between technology and policy. She has had a major impact on the health care industry and on the creation of systems and legislation that insure patients’ privacy rights.

Beth Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in the genetics of ice age animals and plants. A pioneer in the young field called “ancient DNA,” Beth travels extensively in the Arctic regions of Alaska, Siberia and Canada collecting bones and other remains of long-dead creatures.

Canadian rap artist, writer, and former tree-planter, Baba Brinkman has personally planted more than one million trees in the Rocky Mountains. After graduating with an M.A. in comparative literature in 2003, he began his career as a rap troubadour.

Biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey’s research interests encompass the characterization of the accumulating and eventually pathogenic molecular and cellular side-effects of metabolism that constitute mammalian aging. His work also involves the design of interventions to repair and/or obviate that damage.

Anna Ziegler is a playwright, whose plays have been developed at The Sundance Theatre Lab, O’Neill Playwrights Conference, Williamstown Theatre Festival, New York Stage and Film, and Soho Rep, among others, and are published by Dramatists Play Service. An upcoming collection will be published by Oberon Books. She is a graduate of Yale and holds an M.F.A. in dramatic writing from Tisch.

Recognized mathematician and science writer Amir D. Aczel is the author of numerous books that have appeared on various bestseller lists in the United States and abroad, with translations into 22 languages. Present at the Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider is his most recent literary contribution.

Recognized mathematician and computer scientist Brian Snow’s early work spans from teaching mathematics and laying the groundwork for a computer science department at Ohio University in the 1960’s, to working as a cryptologic designer and architect at the National Security Agency (NSA) in the 1970s.

Recognized for his contributions to sleep research, Carlos H. Schenck has helped identify a wide range of extreme sleep behaviors known as parasomnias and therapies to treat them, as well as their potential forensic consequences.

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

Daniel L. Schacter is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. Many of Schacter’s studies and ideas are summarized in his 1996 book, Searching for Memory, and his 2001 contribution, The Seven Sins of Memory.

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.

Renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to the study of genius, Dean Keith Simonton has provided his expertise to over 400 publications on the topic, including a dozen books entitled Genius, Creativity, and Leadership; Scientific Genius; Greatness; Genius and Creativity; Origins of Genius; and more.