Participants
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.
Read MoreBill 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.
Read MoreRichard 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.
Read MoreRobert 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.
Read MoreEmmy 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.
Read MoreMiles 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.
Read MoreBill 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.
Read MoreRobert Anderson has a message that resonates with audiences as he talks of building the smallest team to ascend Everest’s largest face, without oxygen.
Read MoreFemi 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.”
Read MoreCombining 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.
Read MoreMTV 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.
Read MoreBill 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.
Read MoreKatherine Freese is the George E. Uhlenbeck Professor of Physics at the University of Michigan and Visiting Professor of Physics at Stockholm University. She works on a wide range of topics in theoretical cosmology and astroparticle physics. She has been working to identify the dark matter and dark energy that permeate the universe, as well as to build a successful model for the early universe immediately after the Big Bang.
Read MoreSeth Mnookin’s most recent book, The Panic Virus: A True Story of Medicine, Science, and Fear, uses a combination of investigative reporting, intellectual and scientific history, and sociological analysis to explore the controversies over vaccines and their rumored connection to developmental disorders. The New York Times said it was “just what the public needs…a tour-de-force.”
Read MoreDiana Rhoten is currently the Senior Vice President of Strategy in the News Corp Education Division. She has published in numerous journals and has co-edited a volume on the future of higher education called Knowledge Matters.
Read MoreEmmy Award-winning Juju Chang is a co-anchor for ABC News. During her career at ABC News, she has been news anchor for Good Morning America, contributed to 20/20, reported for World News Tonight, and anchored the early morning newscasts of World News Now and World News This Morning.
Read MoreEmily Bell is the director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and a professor of professional practice at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. She was director of digital content for Britain’s Guardian News and Media from 2006 to 2010. Previous to that post, Bell was editor-in-chief of Guardian Unlimited from 2001 to 2006.
Read MoreGary Stix commissions, writes and edits features, news articles and Web blogs for Scientific American. His area of coverage is neuroscience. He also has frequently been the issue or section editor for special issues or reports on topics ranging from nanotechnology to obesity.
Read MoreAward-winning broadcaster and author Lynn Sherr spent more than thirty years with ABC News, covering a wide range of stories—from women’s issues and social change to investigative reports, politics and the space program—at 20/20 and World News.
Read MoreEmily Senay is a physician, medical and public health educator, broadcast journalist, and author. She is an assistant professor of Medicine in the Department of Preventive Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and a clinician in the World Trade Center Health Program in New York City.
Read MoreDan Harris was named co-anchor of ABC News’ weekend edition of Good Morning America in October 2010. Additionally, Harris is a New York-based correspondent for ABC News’ broadcasts and platforms.
Read MoreMaggie Koerth-Baker is a freelance science journalist and the science editor at BoingBoing.net. Her work has appeared in magazines like Discover and Popular Science, and online at sites like New Scientist and National Geographic News.
Read MorePhilip Yam is the managing editor of ScientificAmerican.com, responsible for the overall content that appears online. Previously, he was the physics editor and later the news editor at Scientific American. He is the author of The Pathological Protein: Mad Cow, Chronic Wasting, and Other Prion Diseases.
Read MoreRobin Lloyd is responsible for editing and assigning stories for ScientificAmerican.com. She also manages Scientific American’s Twitter feed. Previously, she was a senior editor at LiveScience.com and SPACE.com. She has additional experience in print journalism (Pasadena Star–News); wire journalism (City News Service of Los Angeles); and network online journalism (CNN.com).
Read MoreAnna Kuchment edits the Advances news section of Scientific American magazine. Before coming to SciAm, Kuchment was a writer and editor at Newsweek International and Newsweek magazines.
Read MoreCynthia McFadden is the senior legal and investigative correspondent for NBC News. Before joining NBC News, she co-anchored Nightline at ABC News. She has won Emmy, Peabody, and duPont awards, among others.
Read MoreDavid Brancaccio is a correspondent for the radio program Marketplace produced by American Public Media. He hosted Marketplace for ten years after serving as a London-based correspondent for the program.
Read MoreJay Allison is an independent journalist, documentary maker, and leader in public broadcasting. He is a frequent producer for NPR news programs and This American Life, and a six-time Peabody Award winner.
Read MoreEllen Jorgensen is a molecular biologist and a passionate advocate of citizen science. Her research interests have encompassed such diverse areas as free radicals in disease, DNA fingerprinting, virus protein structure/function relationships, and cancer biomarkers.
Read MoreLesley Stahl is one of America’s most honored and experienced broadcast journalists, her five-decade career marked by political scoops, surprising features and award-winning foreign reporting. She was CBS’ first female White House correspondent and moderator of Face The Nation.
Read MoreNora D. Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at NIH. She pioneered the use of brain imaging to investigate the effects of drugs in the human brain and has demonstrated that drug addiction is a brain disease.
Read MorePeter 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.
Read MoreEmmy Award-winning journalist David Novarro is co-anchor of Eyewitness News First on Channel 7 WABC-TV in New York. A native of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and Queens, Novarro started his career with Eyewitness News as a college intern and rose through the ranks to become a reporter.
Read MoreTerry Moran is a co-anchor of ABC News’ Nightline and covers the Supreme Court for the network from his base in Washington, DC. At Nightline Moran has led the program’s distinguished coverage of many of the major news stories over the past several years.
Read More20ll marked Alison Stewart’s twentieth year as a professional journalist. In 2010-2011 she hosted the PBS news magazine Need to Know. In 2007 Stewart was the founding host of NPR’s breakthrough multiplatform news program, The Bryant Park Project, the first public radio news program to seamlessly incorporate audio, video, and social media.
Read MoreDOWNTOWN Magazine Editor-in-Chief Mike Hammer is a veteran media consultant, marketing veteran, and journalist with a long track record of accomplishments as at a wide variety of publications and online products.
Read MoreAmir Levine is an adult, adolescent, and child psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York and The Center of Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto.
Read MoreCeCe Moore is a professional genetic genealogist who is considered an innovator in the use of DNA for genealogical purposes. Currently, she is working as the genetic genealogy consultant and scriptwriter for PBS’ Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Read MoreBrian Hecht is a serial entrepreneur and a veteran of many startups in the digital media space. He is currently at the helm of two NY-based startups, both of which he co-founded. With a specialty in content and consumer marketing, he was also the Publisher of Premium Services for TheStreet.com, a publicly-traded financial media company.
Read MoreRandall Pinkston was a CBS News correspondent for more than 30 years, including two years covering the White House. Among his many awards are three Emmys, including one for Outstanding Investigative Reporting for CBS Reports: Legacy of Shame about migrant farm workers in the USA.
Read MoreRick Karr’s been reporting for NPR’s news magazines for more than 20 years and for various PBS shows for more than a decade. Much of his work examines the intersection of technology, culture, and law.
Read MoreCatherine Crier earned her B.A. in political science and international affairs from the University of Texas and her Juris Doctor from Southern Methodist University School of Law. In 1984, she was elected to the 162nd District Court in Dallas County, Texas as a State District Judge. During her tenure on the bench, Crier also served as Administrative Judge for the Civil District Courts.
Read MoreJami Floyd is an award-winning journalist and national television personality. She is the former anchor of Court TV’s Jami Floyd: Best Defense, a daily live show that tackled the day’s front-page legal stories.
Read MoreGlenn E. Martin is a national leader and criminal justice reform advocate who spent six years in New York State prisons. Prior to founding JustLeadershipUSA, Martin served for several years as Vice President of The Fortune Society and Co-Director of the National HIRE Network at the Legal Action Center.
Read MoreEric Jordan has been sought by opera companies for his trademark “big bass and presence to match” (Opera News). His voice is described as possessing “a resonant, ringing tone that was well produced throughout its range” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch), and The New York Times stated that his “powerful, nuanced singing and thoughtful acting amounted to a wholly remarkable portrayal.”
Read MoreJosephine Johnston is a bioethicist and lawyer at The Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York. She works on the ethics of emerging biotechnologies with a focus on their use in reproduction, psychiatry, genetics, and neuroscience.
Read MoreJuan Manuel Benitez is a political reporter for the 24-hour news television station NY1. He hosts the weekly current-affairs program Pura Política on NY1 Noticias. Benitez also teaches journalism at CUNY and Columbia University. He is a frequent contributor to WNYC Radio and MSNBC.
Read MoreCarl Safina’s work has been recognized with MacArthur, Pew, and Guggenheim Fellowships, and his writing has won Orion, Lannan, and National Academies literary awards and the John Burroughs, James Beard, and George Rabb medals.
Read MoreCaren Zucker is a veteran and award-winning television producer with ABC News and PBS, and the mother of an adult son with autism.
Read MoreSusannah Meadows is a former Senior Writer for Newsweek. She has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, most recently writing a column for the Arts section about books, along with reviews.
Read MoreBudd Mishkin is a broadcast journalist in New York City. As correspondent and host for NY1’s weekly profile series, One on 1 with Budd Mishkin, Mishkin profiled almost 400 influential New Yorkers with significant personal and professional ties to the city.
Read MoreSummer Ash is the Director of Outreach for Columbia University’s Department of Astronomy. Ash is also a freelance science writer and communicator. Her work has been published in The Atlantic, Smithsonian, Now.Space, Scientific American, Slate, and Nautilus.
Read MoreRichard Gallagher, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine. He is a clinical psychologist and neuropsychologist who holds a senior position at the Child Study Center of the NYU Langone Medical Center.
Read MoreJay Van Bavel is an Associate Professor of Psychology & Neural Science at New York University. He conducts research on how group identities’ moral values and political beliefs shape the mind and brain.
Read MorePsyche Loui is an Assistant Professor in Psychology and in Neuroscience and Behavior at Wesleyan University. She graduated from University of California, Berkeley with her PhD in Psychology, and attended Duke University as an undergraduate with degrees in Psychology and Music.
Read MoreDavid Kipping is a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia University where he leads the Cool Worlds Lab – a research team primarily focussed on discovering new planets and moons. He was recently named as a Sloan fellow.
Read MoreBrooke Borel is a Journalist and Author. She has written on everything on everything from biotech in agriculture, to the seedy world of cannabis pesticides, to the history of the bed bug. She is a contributing editor at Popular Science and an editor-at-large at Undark.
Read MoreCatherine Birndorf, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Obstetrics/Gynecology and Founding Director of the Payne Whitney Women’s Program, is Co-Founder of The Motherhood Center. The Motherhood Center provides supportive services for new and expecting moms.
Read MoreCarolyn P. Neuhaus is a Bioethicist at The Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institute in Garrison, New York. She explores philosophical and ethical questions that arise throughout biomedical research, with an eye toward the wise use of emerging technologies.
Read MoreLeo Lo is a senior at Jericho High School. Lo has conducted nano-optics research at Stony Brook University for 2 years, creating a computer simulation platform that could improve the accuracy of the state-of-the-art optical nano-imaging method.
Read MoreJens Ludwig is the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, and an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine.
Read MoreDr. Jennifer Wiseman is a senior astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, where she serves as the senior project scientist for the Hubble Space Telescope.
Read MoreDaniel Sieberg is the CEO and founder of iO—a startup building an empathic AI/AR experience in service of what humans need. He also advises other startups including Pressland and Ground.
Read MoreLoren Grush is a senior science reporter for The Verge, the technology and culture brand from Vox Media, where she specializes in all things space—from distant stars and planets to human spaceflight and the commercial space race.
Read More