Starmus

Sandra Magnus

Dr. Sandra H. “Sandy” Magnus is the Executive Director of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the world’s largest technical society dedicated to the global aerospace profession. Born and raised in Belleville, Ill., Dr. Magnus attended the Missouri University of Science and Technology, graduating in 1986 with a degree in physics and in […]

Susumu Tonegawa

Susumu Tonegawa received his Ph.D. from UCSD. He then undertook postdoctoral work at the Salk Institute in San Diego, before working at the Basel Institute for Immunology in Basel, Switzerland, where he performed his landmark immunology experiments. Tonegawa won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1987 for “his discovery of the genetic principle […]

Katharine Hayhoe

Katharine Hayhoe is an atmospheric scientist whose research focuses on developing and applying high-resolution climate projections to understand what climate change means for people and the natural environment. She is an associate professor and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University, and has a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Toronto […]

Sara Seager

Sara Seager, Class of 1941 Professor of Planetary Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Sara Seager is a planetary scientist and astrophysicist. She has been a pioneer in the vast and unknown world of exoplanets, planets that orbit stars other than the sun. Her ground-breaking research ranges from the detection […]

Oliver Stone

Oliver Stone has been credited with writing and or directing over 20 full-length feature films, earning him a well-respected place in cinematic history for some of the most influential and iconic films of the last two decades. Throughout his long career, which began at a young age writing short plays for his family, Oliver Stone […]

Stefan W. Hell

Stefan Walter Hell (born 23 December 1962) is a Romanian-born German physicist and one of the directors of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Göttingen, Germany. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy”, together with Eric Betzig and William Moerner. From 1991 to 1993 Hell […]

Priyamvada Natarajan

Priyamvada Natarajan is a theoretical astrophysicist at Yale. She is recognized for her seminal contributions to the study of dark matter and the formation and growth of black holes. She is a phenomenologist and uses gravitational lensing observations, the deflection of light rays by matter in the universe, to map the detailed distribution of dark […]

Alexandra Witze

Alexandra Witze is an award-winning science journalist and correspondent for the journal Nature. Her reporting has taken her from the North Pole (to report on climate change) to the jungles of Guatemala (to cover Maya archaeology) to China’s quake-ravaged Sichuan province. Island on Fire is her first book. Alex has freelanced for such publications as The […]

Brian Greene

Brian Greene is Professor of Physics and Mathematics at Columbia University and is widely recognized for a number of groundbreaking discoveries in mathematical physics and superstring theory, including the co-discoveries of mirror symmetry and topology change. His first book for general audiences, The Elegant Universe, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and has sold nearly two […]

Terry Virts

Colonel Terry Virts (USAF Retired) knew he wanted to be an astronaut as a kindergartener reading his first book about the Apollo missions while growing up in Columbia, Maryland.  He excelled in school, graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1989, and earned a Master of Aeronautical Science from Embry-Riddle.  Terry was commissioned as […]