Bill Bryson’s bestselling travel books include The Lost Continent, A Walk in the Woods and Notes from a Small Island, which in a national poll was voted the book that best represents Britain. Read more
Emily Anthes is a science journalist and author. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Wired, Scientific American, Psychology Today, BBC Future, SEED, Discover, Popular Science, Slate, The Boston Globe, and elsewhere. Read more
Buzz Aldrin is a retired US Air Force pilot, a former American astronaut and the second person to walk on the Moon, on July 21, 1969. He was the lunar module pilot on Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing in history. Read more
Gordon Chaplin was a journalist in the Saigon bureau of Newsweek and at Bangkok World, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post. He has also worked in sea conservation with the group Niparaja and since 2003 has been a research associate at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He is the author of several books, including Dark Wind: A Survivor’s Tale of Love and Loss. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York City and Hebron, New York, where they run a grass-fed beef operation. Gordon is the author of FULL FATHOM FIVE: Ocean Warming and a Father’s Legacy … Read more
Dan Drollette Jr is the author of “Gold Rush in the Jungle: The Race to Discover and Defend the Rarest Animals of Vietnam’s ‘Lost World,’ ” and held a Fulbright Postgraduate Traveling Fellowship to Australia. He has written for publications ranging from Australian Geographic and Scientific American to the BBC’s “Future” column, and was most recently the editor of CERN’s online computing magazine, International Science Grid This Week. You can also check out his TEDx Talk in Frankfurt, Germany, on the behind-the-scenes story of the making of the book here. Read more
Emily Coren is a science illustrator in California. She has a BS in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from UC-Santa Cruz that led to a position making transgenic butterflies at SUNY Buffalo. She graduated from the UC Santa Cruz Program in Science Illustration and drew bugs, plants and dinosaur bones at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of Natural History and developed educational content for Walden Media in Los Angeles. Her goal as a science illustrator has always been to use popular media to make science accessible to people with non-science backgrounds. Her current project for connecting is WalkaboutEm.com and she can be found on Twitter as @emilycoren. Read more
Dr Lawrence Goldman is Editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography—based at Oxford University, UK—and fellow and tutor in history at St Peter’s College, Oxford, where he teaches modern British and American history. Read more
Marc Kuchner is the author of Marketing for Scientists, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and a country songwriter. He is the co-inventor of the band-limited coronagraph, a tool for finding planets around other stars that will be part of the James Webb Space Telescope. He is also known for his work on planets with exotic chemistries: ocean planets, helium planets, and carbon planets. Kuchner received his bachelor’s degree in physics from Harvard and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech. He was awarded the 2009 SPIE early career achievement award for his work on planet hunting. He has contributed to more than 100 research papers and published articles in journals including the Astrophysical Journal, Nature, and Astrobiology. Read more
Jim Baggott is author of Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the ‘God Particle’ and a freelance science writer. He was a lecturer in chemistry at the University of Reading but left to pursue a business career, where he first worked with Shell International Petroleum Company and then as an independent business consultant and trainer. His many books include Atomic: The First War of Physics (Icon, 2009), Beyond Measure: Modern Physics, Philosophy and the Meaning of Quantum Theory (OUP, 2003), A Beginner’s Guide to Reality (Penguin, 2005), and A Quantum Story: A History in 40 Moments (OUP, 2010). Read more
Morton A. Meyers, MD is Distinguished University Professor and emeritus chair of the Department of Radiology in the School of Medicine SUNY, Stony Brook. He is the author of the seminal textbook on abdominal radiology (now in its sixth edition) that has been translated into Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese editions. He is also the founding editor in chief of the international journal Abdominal Imaging. The author of award-winning Happy Accidents: Serendipity in Modern Medical Breakthroughs, he lives in Stonybrook, New York. Read more