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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Inventor, entrepreneur, athlete, musician, and TV host Nate Ball draws on his many different pursuits to inspire budding engineers on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the History Channel. Ball’s fascination with engineering started early.

Seth Lloyd was the first person to develop a realizable model for quantum computation and is working with a variety of groups to construct and operate quantum computers and quantum …

Matthew Wilson is Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience and Picower Scholar at MIT. His lab is interested in teasing apart the mechanisms of sleep and arousal, and applications of neuroscience in engineering and the study of intelligence.

Mary-Claire King, PhD, is American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle. She was the first to show that breast cancer is inherited in some families, as the result of mutations in the gene that she named BRCA1.

Ralph J. Cicerone work on atmospheric chemistry, climate change, and energy has involved him in shaping science and environmental policy at the highest levels.

Freeman Dyson, born and raised in England, excelled in all subjects from a very young age, going on to specialize in mathematics and theoretical physics in his studies at the University of Cambridge.

Jim Pfaus has sex on the brain. An internationally known expert in the neurobiology of sexual behavior, Pfaus has authored over 150 publications and chapters that examine how the brain’s neurochemical and neuroanatomical systems are organized for sexual arousal, desire, pleasure, and inhibition.

MIT physicist Enectali Figueroa-Feliciano works at the intersection of cosmology, particle physics, astronomy, and engineering.

Pamela Bjorkman is the Max Delbrück Professor of Biology and an HHMI investigator at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, California. She received a BA degree in Chemistry from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. degree in biochemistry from Harvard University.

Jocelyn Monroe is an assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science who works on experimental searches for new particles. Her current research focus is on directly detecting dark matter particle interactions with the MiniCLEAN and DMTPC experiments.

Esther Conwell is widely known for her theoretical studies of the properties of materials. Her early research, with V. F. Weisskopf, on the effect of impurities on the motion of electrons, was an important step for the understanding of conduction in semiconductors, the materials of which transistors are made.

Maurizio Porfiri is a professor in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department at the New York University Polytechnic School of Engineering.

Lisa P. Jackson is administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). She is the first African-American to serve the post. Originally from New Orleans, Jackson graduated summa cum laude from Tulane University, and earned a master’s degree in chemical engineering from Princeton University.

Cynthia Bir studies what happens to the human body after sports injuries, ballistic impacts, and explosive blasts. She is known worldwide for her research into the effects of blunt ballistic impacts from rubber bullets and other less-lethal ammunition.

Adam Wilson was the first person to communicate over the Internet using only his mind. The biomedical engineer studies neural prosthetic devices that can allow people with severe motor disabilities, such as Lou Gehrig’s disease or “locked-in” syndrome, to communicate with the outside world.

Ed Green has helped pioneer the use of advanced genetic sequencing technology to read ancient DNA extracted from fossilized bones. In 2010, he and large collaboration of other scientists announced that they had used 40,000-year-old bone fragments excavated in a cave in Croatia to map out the genetic code of Neanderthals, humans’ long-dead ancestral cousins.

John Holdren is the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and President Barack Obama’s senior science and technology advisor.

Angela Belcher is the W. M. Keck Professor of Energy at MIT. She combines chemistry, molecular biology and electrical engineering to understand how living things make molecular-scale materials and incorporate their tricks into new organic-inorganic hybrid technologies.

Tomás Saraceno’s work defies traditional notions of space, time, gravity, consciousness and perception through architectural, social and communitarian means that are utopian and participatory. His installations blend the boundary between sky and the earth, creating the sensation of flight.

Katherine Isbister has a joint appointment between the NYU-Poly computer science department and the NYU Game Center. Isbister is research director of the Game Innovation Lab at NYU-Poly, and an investigator in the NYU Games for Learning Institute.

Matt Mountain has been the Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute since September 1, 2005. He leads the 400-person organization responsible for the science operations and education and public outreach of the Hubble Space Telescope and of its planned successor, the James Webb Space Telescope.

Maja Matarić is at the forefront of the growing field of “socially assistive” robotics, building intelligent machines that can interact with humans socially, rather than physically, to help them learn new skills or recover from illness and injury.

Heinrich Frontzek has more than 15 years of experience in corporate communication of innovation, technology, education and knowledge in engineering industrial companies.

Eitan Grinspun is associate professor of computer science at Columbia University, and Director of the Columbia Computer Graphics Group. His research seeks to discover connections between geometry, physics, and computation.

Don Ingber is Founding Director of the Wyss Institute and a leader in the emerging field of biologically inspired engineering. He oversees a multifaceted effort to identify the mechanisms that living organisms use to self assemble and to apply these design principles to develop advanced materials and devices.

Jin Kim Montclare is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who is performing groundbreaking research in engineering proteins to mimic nature and, in some cases, work better than nature.

Yann LeCun is VP & Chief AI Scientist at Facebook and Silver Professor at NYU affiliated with the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences & the Center for Data Science. He …

Stephanie Butler Velegol first heard about the ability of the seeds of the Moringa Oleifera tree to clean water while teaching Water and Wastewater Treatment at Penn State University. Since then she has advised over a dozen students on the use of Moringa seeds for sustainable water treatment in the developing world.

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

Carey Hidaka is an IBM Public Sector Business Solutions Professional in IBM Global Business Services, with experience as a consultant in the Smarter Water Management business development team and mobile/wireless services.

Laura Allen is the editorial producer of the American Museum of Natural History’s Science Bulletins program, which produces video and visualization for exhibition at the museum and other public spaces that highlight cutting-edge scientific research and issues.

Metin Sitti’s academic discipline is robotics, with emphasis on micro- and nano-scale robotics. His research program combines applied micro/nano-robotic systems with micro/nanoscale mechanics modeling and analysis.

Michelle Khine is an associate professor of biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, and materials science at University of California, Irvine. She was an assistant & founding professor at U.C. Merced from 2006 to 2009.

Peter Hoffmann is a professor of physics at Wayne State University and an Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His research interests are the area of nanomechanics, biophysics and atomic force microscopy. He is one of the founders of the Wayne State Biomedical Physics program.

Peter Staley has been a long-term AIDS and gay rights activist, first as a member of ACT UP New York, then as the founding director of TAG, the Treatment Action Group. He served on the board of the American Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) for 13 years.

Randy Jirtle headed the epigenetics and imprinting laboratory at Duke University until 2012. He is presently a visiting professor at McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Jirtle’s research interests are in epigenetics, genomic imprinting, and the fetal origins of disease susceptibility.

Born in the American Midwest, Christof Koch grew up in Holland, Germany, Canada, and Morocco. He studied Physics and Philosophy and was awarded his Ph.D. in Biophysics. In 1987, Koch joined the California Institute of Technology as a Professor in Biology and Engineering.

Edwin Olson is an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on autonomous robots, ranging from self-driving cars to teams of robots that work together to perform search and rescue missions. He received a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008 for his work in robust robot mapping.

William Yosses previously worked as White House executive pastry chef, where he was closely involved with Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative with the goal of reducing childhood health problems related to diet. Other executive pastry chef experience include The Dressing Room in Westport Connecticut, Josephs Citarella in New York City, Bouley Bakery, and Bouley Restaurant.

Bjørn Torger Stokke holds an engineering degree in physics and a Ph.D. in biophysics from the Norwegian Institute of Technology (NTH). Stokke is currently a professor in physics, specialization in biophysics and medical technology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway.

Miyoung Chun is vice president of science programs at The Kavli Foundation in Oxnard, California. Prior to her current role, Chun was an assistant dean of science and engineering at University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB), in particular serving for the California Nanosystems Institute.

Zahi Fayad serves as professor of radiology and medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. He is the director of the Translational and Molecular Imaging Institute; vice chair for research, department of radiology; director and founder of the Eva and Morris Feld Imaging Science Laboratories.

Philip Rubin is the principal assistant director for science at the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) in the Executive Office of the President of the United States, where he also leads the White House Neuroscience Initiative.

Jim Ottaviani is the author of many graphic novels about scientists, ranging from physicists to paleontologists to behaviorists. His most recent are The New York Times bestselling Primates, about Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas and Feynman, a book about the Nobel-prize winning physicist, bongo-playing artist, and best-selling author Richard Feynman.

Simone Buitendijk is vice-rector magnificus at Leiden University, and as such responsible for education, student affairs and diversity. She is a professor in Women’s and Family Health at the Leiden University Hospital LUMC.

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

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

Bobak Ferdowsi, also known as “Mohawk Guy,” is a member of the Engineering Operations Team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He acted as Flight Director during the landing of the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity on Gale Crater in 2012.

Odest Chadwicke Jenkins is an associate professor of Computer Science at Brown University. He explores human-robot interaction and robot learning with the goal of creating autonomous systems that can collaborate with humans in real-world tasks.

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

Michael S. Hopkins is a current NASA astronaut who returned from a six-month stay aboard the International Space Station in March. He served as a flight engineer and conducted both science experiments and maintenance, spending almost 13 hours outside of the station on spacewalks.

Andrea Hanson joins us from NASA Johnson Space Center, where she works in the Exercise, Physiology and Countermeasures Laboratory. She supports and conducts research centered on using exercise and fitness to keep astronauts strong and healthy while living aboard the space station.

Farren Isaacs is assistant professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and Systems Biology at Yale University. He pioneered the development of synthetic RNA molecules capable of probing and programming cellular function.

Tara M. Ruttley is an associate program scientist for the International Space Station for NASA at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Her current role consists of representing and communicating all research on the ISS, and supporting the ISS Chief Scientist’s research recommendations to NASA Headquarters.

Hunter Peckham works on functional electrical stimulation, a method to restore limb control in paralyzed individuals. The technique uses implantable neural prostheses to control the muscles.

Michel Maharbiz is one of the inventors of neural dust, a low-power solution for chronic brain-machine interfaces and untethered neural recording. He also developed the world’s first remotely radio-controlled cyborg insects (beetles).

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

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

Paul S. Weiss holds a UC Presidential Chair and is a distinguished professor of chemistry and biochemistry, and of materials science and engineering at UCLA. He served as the director of the California NanoSystems Institute and held the Fred Kavli Chair in NanoSystems Sciences.

Artur B. Chmielewski is the US Rosetta Project Manager. He has managed several flight projects at JPL: the Space Technology 8 mission, Mars Telecommunication Orbiter Rendezvous Experiment, Space Technology 6 mission, Gossamer Program, and Inflatable Antenna Flight Experiment.

Suresh Jagannathan joined DARPA in September 2013. His research interests include programming languages, program analysis and verification, and concurrent/distributed systems.

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

Janelle Robbins is the executive director at Bedford Audubon Society. She began her career championing clean water and strong communities as the staff scientist at Waterkeeper Alliance.

Michael López-Alegría has over three decades of aviation and space experience with the U.S. Navy and NASA in a variety of roles.

Marom Bikson is a Cattell Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the City College of New York (CCNY) of the City University of New York (CUNY) and codirector of the Neural Engineering Group at the New York Center for Biomedical Engineering.

Alan Peters is the principal architect of Neocortex. He’s also an associate professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt University where he supervises research on a humanoid robot, ISAC, in the Intelligent Robotics Laboratory. He has over fifty publications and has secured research funding in excess of $4 million.

Matthias Scheutz is a professor at Tufts University School of Engineerings Computer Science Department, and is director of the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory.

Justin Khoury is associate professor and undergraduate chair of physics & astronomy at the University of Pennsylvania. He obtained his B.Sc. from McGill University and his Ph.D from Princeton University under Paul Steinhardt.

Pamela Silver seeks to reprogram life for improved health and sustainability. Recently, she engineered gut microbes to report on animal health and is the co-creator of the Bionic Leaf.

Miguel Nicolelis, M.D., Ph.D., is the Duke School of Medicine Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience at Duke University, professor of neurobiology, biomedical engineering, and psychology & neuroscience, and founder of Duke’s Center for Neuroengineering.

Eddie Goldstein is a science communicator, program developer and performer who specializes in creating dynamic presentations, demonstrations and exhibits for museums and science centers. He also coaches scientists in communication skills to help them better tell the science stories that they want to tell.

Michal Lipson joined the Electrical Engineering faculty at Columbia University in July 2015. She completed her B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in Physics at the Technion in 1998, followed by a Postdoctoral position at MIT in the Materials Science Department.

France A. Córdova is an astrophysicist and the 14th director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the only government agency charged with advancing all fields of scientific discovery, technological innovation, and science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.

Erick Ordoñez is currently in the Systems Engineering Group at Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) and the lead systems engineer for In Space Manufacturing (ISM) and Additive Construction with Mobile Emplacement (ACME) Projects at NASA MSFC.

Rachel Rothman is the chief technologist and engineering director for the Good Housekeeping Institute, the legendary consumer product evaluation laboratory founded in 1900.

Colonel Linell Letendre is the permanent professor and Head of the Department of Law at the United States Air Force Academy.

Chantel Prat is an associate professor of Psychology with an appointment at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at University of Washington. She is also faculty in the Neuroscience graduate program, at the Institute for Neuroengineering, and at the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering.

Andrea Stocco is an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is also affiliated with the university’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, Institute for Neuroengineering, and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.

Drew Endy is an assistant professor of Bioengineering at Stanford. His Stanford research team develops genetically encoded computers and redesigns genomes. Endy co-founded the BioBricks Foundation as a public-benefit charity supporting free-to-use standards and technology that enable the engineering of biology.

Dan Juda is a product engineer at OXO. He studied both Mechanical Engineering and Product Design at Lehigh University. Soon after graduating from college, Juda worked at Arm & Hammer as a packaging engineer, designing detergent bottles.

Mary Roach is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers; Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void. Her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, came out in 2016.

Tom Knight spent most of his career in computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, before playing a major role in creating the field of synthetic biology. In 1996, he seeded interest in the field at DARPA, and built a molecular biology laboratory in the MIT computer science department.

Philip Sabes is a neuroscientist, neural engineer, and a Lange Endowed Chair in Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He directs the UCSF Swartz Center for Theoretical Neuroscience and is a member of the UCSF Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience and the UCB/UCSF Center for Neural Engineering and Prostheses.

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

Elisa Konofagou is Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology, and Director of the Ultrasound and Elasticity Imaging Laboratory at Columbia University. Her main interests are in the development of novel elasticity imaging techniques and therapeutic ultrasound methods.

Stephen Tsang is the László Bitó Associate Professor in Ophthalmology, Pathology & Cell Biology at Columbia University and an attending ophthalmologist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He has been culturing embryonic stem (ES) cells since 1992.

Pamela Abshire is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Institute for Systems Research at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her areas of specialty are in the fields of integrated circuit design and bioengineering.

Erin Styfco is an engineer working in a very unlikely industry, insurance. After earning her Bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Clarkson University, Styfco entered the workforce as a project manager in commercial construction. While working, she also earned her Master’s degree in Civil Engineering from Norwich University which, like her undergraduate work, focused on structural engineering.

Lav Varshney is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science (by courtesy), and a research affiliate in the Beckman Institute and in the Neuroscience Program, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Yenmin Young graduated with a degree in Physics Education from New York University. She teaches Physics and Engineering Design at East Side Community High School, a project-based school in New York’s Lower East Side.

Yury Gogotsi is Distinguished University Professor and Trustee Chair of Materials Science and Engineering at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He is the founding Director of the A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute and Associate Editor of ACS Nano.

Sanjoy Banerjee is Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering and Director of the CUNY Energy Institute, which he founded on moving to CUNY from UC Santa Barbara in 2008. The Institute develops sustainable energy technologies with low carbon footprints.

Cassie Lee is the Director of Aerospace at Vulcan, Inc. where she leads the development of innovative space solutions in support of Paul G. Allen’s philanthropic initiatives.

Dr. Stephen Badylak, DVM, PhD, MD is a Professor in the Department of Surgery and deputy director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh.

Lesa Roe is the Acting Deputy Administrator and Deputy Associate Administrator at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC.

Samuel H. Sternberg, PhD, runs a research laboratory at Columbia University, where he is an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics. Sternberg’s research focuses on the mechanism of DNA targeting by RNA-guided bacterial immune systems (CRISPR-Cas) and on the development of these systems for genome engineering.

Dr. Elizabeth Hillman is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Radiology at Columbia University, and a member of the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and Kavli Institute for Brain Science.

Professor Ponisseril Somasundaran received his M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He was invested as the first La von Duddleson Krumb Professor.

Dr. Christopher Mason is currently an Associate Professor at Weill Cornell Medicine, with appointments at the Tri-Institutional Program on Computational Biology and Medicine between Cornell, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Rockefeller University, the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center, and the Feil Family Brain and Mind Research Institute.

Jessica Garrett is a science educator/author and a voice actress who thinks kids are fabulous. She loved writing slimy, kid-friendly “ICK-speriments” with her co-authors Joy Masoff and Ben Ligon, in the truly disgusting, yet totally interesting, Oh Ick! 114 Science Experiments Guaranteed to Gross You Out!

Dr. Aprille J. Ericsson is the first female to receive a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Howard University, and the first African-American civil servant female to receive a Ph.D. in Engineering at NASA GSFC. She received her B.S. in Aeronautical/Astronautical Engineering from MIT.

Jamie Metzl is a leading futurist, geopolitical expert, science fiction novelist, and Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council. He was recently appointed to the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on human genome editing.

Bill Nye is a science educator, mechanical engineer, New York Times bestselling author, and the creator and host of the Emmy award-winning syndicated television show Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Dr. Vicki Colvin is the Victor Kreible Professor of Chemistry and Engineering at Brown University and the Director of its Center for Biomedical Engineering. A physical chemist by training, Professor Colvin studies how very small crystalline materials such as quantum dots and carbon nanotubes interact with environmental and biological systems.

Jonathan Butcher is Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Nancy E. and Peter C. Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on understanding how tissue assembly and maturation during embryonic development are controlled by mechanical signaling.

Carla Shatz has broken new ground for women in neuroscience. At Harvard Medical School, she was the first woman to receive a PhD in Neurobiology and the first woman to chair the department. Her research aims to understand how early developing brain circuits are transformed into adult connections during developmental critical periods.

Liz Knapp is a senior chemist in the New Technology group in Research and Development at Avon Products, Inc. In this role, she uses her skill in science and art to develop new skin care and color cosmetics. She enjoys working on teams to come up with innovations to help consumers around the world look and feel like their best selves.

Kely Norel is a research staff member in the Computational Biology Center at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center. She received a B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering from Universidad de Chile, a M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from Weizmann Institute, Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Jo Handelsman is the Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as well as a Vilas Research Professor and Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor. She is responsible for groundbreaking studies in microbial communication and work in the field of metagenomics.

Oki Gunawan is a Research Staff Member at IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Yoktown Heights, NY. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from Princeton University in Electrical Engineering. Gunawan’s research areas are semiconductor technology and physics such as nanoscale transistor, solar cell and novel sensors for internet of things technology.

Rob Knight is Professor of Pediatrics and Computer Science & Engineering and is Director of the Center for Microbiome Innovation at the University of California San Diego. He authored Follow Your Gut: The Enormous Impact of Tiny Microbes.

Mike Ressler has combined his passion for sports with his computer science education and accidentally stumbled across his favorite line of work, Sports Technology. Hooked on sports tech, Ressler joined local Pittsburgh startup Diamond Kinetics as director of engineering.

Mike Meacham holds a M.Eng. in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, concentrating in vehicular design and creating off-road skateboards as part of his education. He spent the first part of his career at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

Brett Frischmann is The Charles Widger Endowed University Professor in Law, Business, and Economics at Villanova University. He is also an affiliated scholar of the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, and a trustee for the Nexa Center for Internet & Society, Politecnico di Torino.

Aviv Ovadya is Chief Technologist at the Center for Social Media Responsibility at the University of Michigan School of Information, where he works on ensuring our information ecosystem has a positive impact on society. This involves identifying, measuring, and mitigating indirect harms of technologies that affect public discourse. Ovadya received his bachelors and masters degrees in computer science at MIT.

Dr. Casie Parish Fisher is the Director of the Forensic Science Program, and Chair of the Criminal Justice Department at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. She has been awarded for outstanding teaching and recognized for innovative teaching.

Meredith Whittaker is co-founder of the AI Now Institute, a leading university institute dedicated to researching the social implications of artificial intelligence and related technologies in an interdisciplinary context.

Dr. Bhavna Agrawal, a leading researcher at IBM, is bringing education and artificial intelligence technology together to help solve various problems in elementary and higher education. Some of her latest work involved working with automatic recognition of children’s speech.

Dr. William “Buddy” Clark grew up on a farm in rural Virginia where he enjoyed building things and learning how machinery worked. He also developed a passion for baseball.

Victoria Bill is the founding Manager of the NYU Tandon School of Engineering MakerSpace Lab. She is also an adjunct faculty member in the first-year engineering program, teaching EG 1003 Introduction to Engineering and Design. Her research interests include IoT, wearable technology, and engineering education.

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

Yiping Qi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture at University of Maryland, College Park. His current research focus is developing and applying plant genome editing tools for plant biology and crop improvement.

Fred Gould is Co-Director of the Genetic Engineering and Society Center of North Carolina State University. He conducts research on the application of evolutionary biology and population genetics to sustainable use of insect resistant crops and genetically engineered agricultural pests.

Clifford Stein is Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research and of Computer Science at Columbia University. He is also a member of the Data Science Institute.

Florian Pinel is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Master Inventor in the Watson Content and IoT group at IBM. He is the co-inventor of IBM Chef Watson, an application that uses machine learning and natural language processing to demonstrate computational creativity and suggest original recipe ideas.

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

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

Matthew Chun graduated from Jericho High School in 2014 and participated in ISEF in 2013 (4th place: Materials and Bioengineering) and 2014 (2nd place: Chemistry). Chun is currently a senior at MIT studying Mechanical Engineering.

Kendra Zhang is a current senior at Jericho High School and will attend Columbia University in the fall. Zhang participated in ISEF in 2017 and 2018, winning Best in Category and 1st Place her junior year and 4th Place her senior year.

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

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

Michael Bartlett is an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University. His research investigates and creates soft materials with multifunctional properties for soft robotics and electronics, adaptive materials, and ‘smart’ adhesives.

Gloria P. Huang is a research scientist in the New Technology group in Research and Development at Avon Products, Inc. She works to develop innovations for skin care and color cosmetics by combining her love of research and collaboration to help uncover ways to delight consumers around the world.

Naomi Leonard is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and associated faculty member of the Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics at Princeton University.

Ruth Spiro is the author of the Baby Loves Science board book series, published by Charlesbridge. Titles include Baby Loves Aerospace Engineering, Baby Loves Coding, and Baby Loves Green Energy. She hopes her books inspire kids to observe the world, ask questions, and when it comes to their futures, dream big!

Frank Grasso directs the Biomimetic and Cognitive Robotics lab which researches the control, organization, and coordination of behavior using robots and living animals.

Jasmine Lawrence currently serves as a technical program manager on the Portal team at Facebook. This team is building products that make it easier for people to connect with the ones they love most.

Michelle Rucker is a native of Anchorage, Alaska and a veteran of NASA. She began her career in the Houston oil industry, designing down-hole sensors while pursuing undergraduate and graduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering.

Jeannette M. Wing is Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and professor of computer science at Columbia University. Her current interests are in the foundations of security and privacy, with a new focus on trustworthy AI.

Markus J. Buehler is a materials scientist and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a professor and the department head at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, …

Robert Conn is the former president and CEO of The Kavli Foundation, a nonprofit with a mission to advance science for the benefit of humanity. He retired at the end of 2020 after serving 12 years in this role. Dr. Conn is a co-founder of the Science Philanthropy Alliance and served as board chair from 2015 to 2019.

Ralph Nuzzo is the G.L. Clark Professor Emeritus of Analytical Chemistry, and Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a recipient of the 2022 …

From October 2016 until the end of 2022, Thomas Zurbuchen was the Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA. The directorate’s stated mission is to find answers to …

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

Michael Blumenstein is currently a Professor and the Deputy Dean (Research and Innovation) in the Faculty of Engineering and IT at University of Technology Sydney. Michael is a nationally and …

Kate Stockly is a qualitative researcher specializing in the scientific study of religion and gender and sexualities studies. She is a co-author of High On God: How Megachurches Won the Heart …

Toby Walsh is Professor of Artificial Intelligence in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at University of New South Wales Sydney, where he is also the Chief Scientist at the …

Warren “Woody” Hoburg was selected by NASA to join the 2017 Astronaut Candidate Class, and. In 2020, NASA announced that he would be one of 18 astronauts chosen for the …