Stuart Alan Kauffman is an American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher who studies the origin of life on Earth. Kauffman graduated from Dartmouth in 1960, was awarded the BA (Hons) by Oxford University (where he was a Marshall Scholar) in 1963, and completed a medical degree (MD) at the University of California, San Francisco…
Abraham (Avi) Loeb is an American/Israeli theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology. Loeb is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. He serves as Chair of the Harvard Astronomy department and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Loeb was born…
Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist and author, recognized for groundbreaking discoveries in physics, and as the author of five best-selling books. Dr. Mlodinow started his college education at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in 1972, but dropped out when the Yom Kippur War began in the Fall of 1973 and traveled to Israel to…
Raymond “Ray” Kurzweil is an American author, inventor, futurist, and Director of Engineering at Google. Aside from futurology, he is involved in fields such as optical character recognition (OCR), text-to-speech synthesis, speech recognition technology, and electronic keyboard instruments. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and…
Christopher Isham is a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London. where he is a Distinguished Research Fellow of the Faculty of Natural Sciences, in the Department of Physics His main research interests are quantum gravity and foundational studies in quantum theory. He was the inventor of an approach to temporal quantum logic called the HPO…
Nancey Murphy is an American philosopher and theologian who is Professor of Christian Philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, CA. She received the BA from Creighton University in philosophy and psychology, a PhD from University of California, Berkeley in philosophy of science, and a ThD from the Graduate Theological Union. Murphy’s research interests focus on…
Owen Gingerich (1930–2023) was Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and History of Science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he wrote many books on the history of astronomy. Gingerich was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the…
Raissa D’Souza is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California, Davis, as well as an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Raissa received a PhD in Statistical Physics from MIT in 1999, then was a postdoctoral fellow at Bell Laboratories, and later at Microsoft Research. Her…
The Revd Dr. Rodney Holder was Course Director of the Faraday Institute from its inception in 2006 until 2013, and remains a Bye Fellow of St. Edmund’s College and a Faraday Associate. Holder read mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and researched for a DPhil in astrophysics at Christ Church, Oxford. He remained at Oxford for…
Paul Davies is a theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist. He is currently Regents’ Professor of Physics and Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, where he also runs a cancer research project and co-directs a cosmology program. Davies’ research ranges from the origin of the universe to the origin…
William Albert Dembski is an American philosopher and theologian. He is currently the Philip E. Johnson Research Professor in Culture & Science at the Southern Evangelical Seminary at Matthews, North Carolina, and a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Dembski is the author of a number of books about intelligent…
David Ritz Finkelstein was an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Finkelstein obtained his PhD in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Finkelstein was educated at City College of New York and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and did early work on quantum logic, black holes, gravitational skyrmeons, the electroweak unification,…