Michel Mayor

Professor Michel Mayor is an astrophysicist at Geneva University (Switzerland). Together with Didier Queloz, in 1995 he discovered the first extrasolar planet, named 51 Pegasi b, orbiting the sunlike star 51 Pegasi. Professor Mayor was awarded the Swiss Marcel Benoist Prize in recognition of his work and its significance for human life. In 2000 he was […]
Robert Williams

Professor Robert Williams, an astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), is President of the International Astronomical Union. (IAU). He is an STScI Distinguished Research Scholar and Adjunct Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s Physics and Astronomy Department in Baltimore. Professor Williams served as Hubble STScI Director from 1993 until 1998, before which he had […]
Torsten Wiesel

Torsten Nils Wiesel is a Swedish neurophysiologist. Together with David H. Hubel, he received the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres. In 1947, he began his scientific career in […]
Nuno Bettencourt

Guitar virtuoso, singer-songwriter, and record producer, Nuno Bettencourt rose to international prominence as guitar player with the multi-platinum rock band EXTREME. To date, the Grammy-nominated band is one of the most successful rock acts of the early to mid 1990s selling over 8 million records worldwide. Nuno penned the acoustic ballad “More Than Words” that […]
George Smoot

Astrophysicist at the University of California Berkeley (USA), Professor Smoot won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2006 for his work on COBE with John C. Mather that led to the measurement of the anisotropy and blackbody form of the cosmic microwave background radiation. He is a senior scientist at LBL and, since 2010, a professor of […]
Brian E. Cox

Brian E. Cox is University Professor of particle physics at Manchester University. He is best known to the public as the presenter of science programmes. Before his academic career, Cox was a keyboard player for the bands D. Ream and Dare. Cox is a PPARC advanced fellow and member of the High Energy Physics group […]
Alexander Volkov

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Volkov is a Russian cosmonaut. His first spaceflight was a trip to Salyut 7 in 1985 (64 days in space), followed by two flights to the Mir space station, in 1988–1989 (151 days) and again in 1991–1992 (175 days) as commander of flight Soyuz TM-13. On board the Mir space station, he controlled the […]
Ane Brun

Ane Brun is a Norwegian international songwriter, guitarist, and vocalist. Since 2003 she has recorded eight albums, six of which are studio albums (including a collection of duets) and one live DVD. She has lived in Stockholm, Sweden, since 2001, where she writes, records, and runs her own label (Balloon Ranger Recordings) when not on […]
David Eicher

David John Eicher (born August 7, 1961) is an American editor, writer, and popularizer of astronomy and space. He has been editor-in-chief of Astronomymagazine since 2002. He is author, coauthor, or editor of 21 books on science and American history and is known for having founded a magazine on astronomical observing, Deep Sky Monthly, when he was a […]
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 […]