Tropical explorer Mark Moffett is investigating the life and death of societies across species and in humans right up to the present day. Trained under the Harvard ecologist E.O. Wilson, he is most widely known for finding new species and behavior and recording them in the National Geographic magazine.
Melissa Wells is an expert at managing healthcare systems in the US and abroad. When on expeditions with fellow explorer Moffett, she also captures the work and inspiration of scientific researchers through photography and film.
Eric Fischl, a central figure in modern American art, is recognized for his narra tive sculpture and paintings, and is the author of Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, “a sharp critique of the art world’s recent evolution” (Los Angeles Times).
April Gornik, the influential artist and environmentalist described as “the Turner of contemporary painting” by the New York Times, has had numerous one-person exhibitions of her works, which have also been the topic of several books.
Carol Guzy, photographer at the Washington Post and the only journalist to win the Pulitzer Prize four times, is known for her images of the devastating mudslide in Colombia, the earthquake in Haiti, the war in Kosovo, among many others.
James Hansen, former director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies Center and an expert on planetary climates, is widely considered the leading authority on climate change and is the author of Storms of My Grandchildren.
Jack Horner, the foremost expert on Tyrannosaurus rex, is the basis for the lead character in Jurassic Park and served as advisor on all three of those films. His book How to Build a Dinosaur describes how dinosaurs could be brought back.
Paul (Dimitri) Magid is a founding member of The Flying Karamazov Brothers, a juggling troop that has performed on Broadway and internationally. He has also cofounded a travelling community of performers, the New Old Time Chautauqua.
Walter Murch, legendary film and sound editor for movies such as Godfather and Apocalypse Now, is a recent subject of the book, Waves Passing in the Night, by Lawrence Weschler, about his passion for solving the mysteries of astrophysics.
Ken Perlin, an Academy Award-winning innovator of animation technologies for movies and games, most notably techniques to realistically render fire, water, and other substances, is a professor of computer science at New York University.
Natasha Trethewey, twice named the United States Poet Laureate, is a professor at Emory University who has been inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and the Fellowship of Southern Writers. She has authored four books of poetry.
Cédric Villani, winner of the Fields Medal, which is considered the Nobel Prize for mathematicians and awarded only once every four years, is a spokesman for the love of math and the author of Birth of a Theorem: A Mathematical Adventure.
Patricia Wright, the MacArthur “genius grant” winning field scientist based at Stony Brook University, studies lemurs and conservation in Madagascar and is the author of High Moon Over the Amazon and For the Love of Lemurs.