Douglas Vakoch is the Director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute, as well as the only social scientist employed by a SETI organization. He received his BA in Comparative Religion from Carleton College and his PhD in Clinical Psychology from SUNY Stony Brook. Vakoch leads the SETI Institute’s project to compose interstellar messages…
Raymond C. Tallis is a a retired physician and neuroscientist from Great Britain. His resume boasts titles like philosopher, poet and novelist. He is also a member of the Academy of Medical Sciences, the Royal College of Physicians and Royal Society of Arts. Upon graduating from Liverpool College, Tallis gained an Open Scholarship to Keble…
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He has been Astronomer Royal since 1995 and Master of Trinity College, Cambridge from 2004 to 2012. He was President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. Rees was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge (where he attained a first class degree…
Michael Brant Shermer is an American science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims. Shermer also engages in debates on topics pertaining to pseudoscience and religion in which he promulgates the need for scientific skepticism.…
Christof Koch is an American neuroscientist best known for his work on the neural bases of consciousness. He is the President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Allen Institute of Brain Science in Seattle. From 1986 until 2013, he was the Lois and Victor Troendle Professor of Cognitive and Behavioral Biology at The California Institute…
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…
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…
Jaron Zepel Lanier is an American computer scientist, best known for popularizing the term virtual reality (VR). A pioneer in the field of VR, Lanier and Thomas G. Zimmerman left Atari in 1985 to found VPL Research, Inc., the first company to sell VR goggles and gloves. In the late 1990s, Lanier worked on applications…
Marvin Lee Minsky was an American cognitive scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), co-founder of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s AI laboratory, and author of several texts on AI and philosophy. Minsky served in the US Navy from 1944 to 1945. He held a BA in Mathematics from Harvard (1950) and a PhD in…
Lawrence Maxwell Krauss is a Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist who is a Professor of Physics, Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University. He is the author of several bestselling books, including The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing.…
Michio Kaku is an American theoretical physicist, the Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics in the City College of New York of City University of New York, a futurist, and a communicator and popularizer of science. He has written several books about physics and related topics; he has made frequent appearances on radio, television, and…
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…