Andreas Kaufer
Andreas Kaufer is a senior science leader at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). He earned his PhD in astronomy at Heidelberg University (1996) and joined ESO in 1999, contributing to the start of operations of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. His scientific work focuses on high-resolution spectroscopy of massive, luminous stars, probing how their atmospheres, winds, and circumstellar environments evolve and vary over […]
Christiana Figueres
Christiana Figueres is an internationally recognized leader on climate change and sustainable development. She served as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010 to 2016, where she brought together governments, businesses, scientists, civil society organizations and financial institutions to achieve the historic Paris Agreement in 2015. This landmark […]
Pietro Barabaschi
Pietro Barabaschi is a Director-General of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). ITER is the world’s largest fusion experiment. Thirty-five nations are collaborating to build and operate the ITER Tokamak, the most complex machine ever constructed by humans. Pietro Barabaschi has been working since 2009 in Fusion for Energy (F4E), the European Union organisation responsible for […]
Maureen Raymo
Maureen Raymo is a climate scientist who works at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory where she is the G. Unger Vetlesen Professor of Earth and Climate Sciences and Co-Founding Dean Emerita of the Columbia Climate School. Prof. Raymo’s research focuses on the history and causes of climate change in the past, including understanding the consequences […]
Gary Marcus
GARY MARCUS is a leading voice in artificial intelligence. He is a scientist, best-selling author, and serial entrepreneur (Founder of Robust.AI and Geometric.AI, acquired by Uber). He is well-known for his challenges to contemporary AI, anticipating many of the current limitations decades in advance, and for his research in human language development and cognitive neuroscience. […]
Louis Friedman
Louis Dill Friedman (born July 7, 1941) is an American astronautics engineer and space spokesperson. He was born in New York and raised in the Bronx. Dr. Friedman was a co-founder of The Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Bruce C. Murray. In 1961, he earned his Bachelor of Science in applied mathematics and engineering […]
Gerald Griffin
Gerry Griffin is the former Director of the NASA Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston. In prior positions at NASA he served as the Deputy Director of the John F. Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Hugh F. Dryden (now Neil A. Armstrong) Flight Research Center in California. At NASA Headquarters in Washington […]
Eric Betzig
After obtaining a BS in Physics from Caltech, Eric Betzig moved to Cornell, where his thesis involved the development of near-field optics — the first method to break the diffraction barrier in light microscopy. He then became a PI at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ, where he further refined the technology and explored […]
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins is an English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and […]
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 […]
