Bay Area LASER presenters since 2008

Leonardo Art Science Evenings

Past and future programs


Biographies

(As they were the day they presented at a LASER)
  • Pieter Abbeel (Associate Professor, UC Berkeley EECS) works in machine learning and robotics, in particular his research is on making robots learn by watching people (apprenticeship learning) and how to make robots learn through their own trial and error (reinforcement learning). His robots have learned: advanced helicopter aerobatics, knot-tying, basic assembly, and organizing laundry. His awards include best paper awards at ICML and ICRA, Young Investigator Awards from AFOSR, ONR, Darpa and NSF, the Sloan Fellowship, the MIT TR35, the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, and the Dick Volz Best U.S. Ph.D. Thesis in Robotics and Automation Award.
  • Tom Abel is Professor of Physics at Stanford University, Director of Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at SLAC, and Director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology. His group explores the first billion years of cosmic history using ab initio supercomputer calculations. He has shown from first principles that the very first luminous objects are very massive stars and has developed novel numerical algorithms using adaptive-mesh-refinement simulations that capture over 14 orders of magnitude in length and time scales. He currently continues his work on the first stars and first galaxies and their role in chemical enrichment and cosmological reionization. His group studies any of the first objects to form in the universe: first stars, first supernovae, first HII regions, first magnetic fields, first heavy elements, and so on. Most recently he is pioneering novel numerical algorithms to study collisionless fluids such as dark matter which makes up most of the mass in the Universe as well as astrophysical and terrestrial plasmas. Prof. Abel graduated from the Ludwig Maxemillian University of Munich and conducted post-doc research at both Cambridges, in England and MA. He joined Stanford and SLAC in 2004. He received multiple honors in both continents (including a Career Award from the National Science Foundation) and was elected fellow of the AAAS in 2014.
  • Dor Abrahamson is currently Assistant Professor of Cognition and Development in UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Education. Abrahamson researches mathematical intuition, reasoning, and learning, the relations among them, and the roles that artifacts can play in facilitating deep conceptual understanding and procedural fluency. Abrahamson holds a Ph.D. in the Learning Sciences (Northwestern University) and an M.A. in Cognitive Psychology (Tel Aviv University). He is a recipient of a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship.
  • Maya Ackerman teaches in the Department of Computer Engineering of Santa Clara University and was previously at San Jose State University. She specializes in Artificial Intelligence, with an emphasis on Computational Creativity and Machine Learning. Her work has been featured on NBC News and New Scientist, and her research appears at top academic venues. She received her PhD from the University of Waterloo and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Caltech and UC San Diego, followed by two years as an Assistant Professor at Florida State University.
  • Carmen Aguilar y Wedge is a Latinx engineer, designer, researcher and business woman. Co-captain of Hyphen-Labs, Carmen collaborates to create robust transmedia experiences by combining new and old ideas, crafts and digital, physical, mediums ranging in scale from small products and prototypes to large architectural installations. Carmens knowledge and experience spans a wealth of creative disciplines encompassing new media, virtual reality, animation, physical computing, parametric design, digital fabrication, programming, robotics, and architecture.
  • Patricia Alessandrini teaches composition, sonic arts and computer music at Stanford's Department of Music/CCRMA. She is a composer/sound artist, educator and researcher actively engaging with notions of canonicity, representation, interpretation, perception and memory, often in a social and political context, through work which is for the most part interactive and/or intermedial. She performs research on embodied interaction - including instrument design for inclusive performance - as well as on digitally-mediated performance and computer-assisted composition. Her works have been presented in numerous festivals, in the Americas, Asia, Australia, and over 15 European countries. She has also toured extensively as a performer of live electronics. She studied composition with electronics at the Conservatorio di Bologna and Ircam, holds a diploma in composition from the Conservatoire de Strasbourg, a PhD from Princeton University, and a second PhD from the Sonic Arts Research Centre (SARC), Queens University, Belfast. She previously taught Computer-Assisted Composition in the alto perfezionamento programme of the Accademia Musicale Pescarese, and served as a Lecturer in Composition with Technology at the University of Bangor and in Sonic Arts at Goldsmiths, University of London.
  • Lily Alexander (UC Santa Cruz) is currently a PhD candidate in the History of Art and Visual Culture Department at UC Santa Cruz where her dissertation research focuses on intersecting histories and theories from the political and social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s, with the development of certain participatory forms of media art. She is also a curator, and recent shows she has worked on have included (e)MERGE, a ZERO1 2012 Biennial exhibition of emerging California artists working at the intersection of art and technology; Liquescent, an exhibition of both historic and new work by sound artist Bill Fontana's held at the Haunch of Venison Gallery in New York and I've Got Something on Your Mind, the UCSC Digital Arts and New Media 2012 MFA show. Further, she is the director of the Prof. Christopher Alexander and Center for Environmental Structure (CES) Archives where she is spearheading a project to create a digital archive of Prof. Alexander's large body of work. In recent months, she worked on the selection and preparation of archival material from several historical, low-cost housing CES projects for inclusion in the US Pavilion's exhibition OfficeUS at the 2014 Venice Biennale, as well as selected and prepared archival material for the exhibition ReEnchant the World, an architectural exhibition that opened at La Cite de l'Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, in conjunction with the 2014 LOCUS Award for Sustainable Architecture, under the umbrella of UNESCO. Previously, she spent nine months as a research fellow at the Catherine Clark Gallery, where she was writing about several of the artists in the gallery's innovative media program. Before moving to California for her PhD work, she lived in New York where she was the online contributing editor for the contemporary art magazine Whitewall. She also spent a couple of years working as the head researcher for the Hans Hofmann Catalogue Raisonne Project, after receiving her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History at Christies in New York.
  • Mitch Altman is a hacker and inventor. While at the University of Illinois, Altman co-organized the first Hash Wednesday in Champaign-Urbana in 1977. Altman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986 to work in Silicon Valley. Altman was an early developer of Virtual Reality technologies, working at VPL Research with Jaron Lanier. Altman left VPL Research in protest when it accepted contracts with the United States Department of Defense. Altman co-founded Silicon Valley start-up 3ware in February 1997 with Peter Herz and Jim MacDonald. Altman started Cornfield Electronics as a consulting company. In 2004 Altman released a one-button universal remote control called TV-B-Gone, to be used for turning off TVs in public places. Following extensive involvement in the "Maker" movement and Make magazine, Altman publicly parted ways with the Maker Faire in 2012 after the Maker Faire accepted contracts with the United States Department of Defense. Mitch Altman is an important figure in the international "hackerspace" and "maker" movements. While attending the 2007 Berlin Chaos Communication Camp, Altman and Jacob Appelbaum began discussing the idea of a San Francisco hackerspace, at which time there were no hackerspaces in the United States. In October 2008 he co-founded Noisebridge, one of the earliest hackerspaces in the USA.
  • David Anderson is a Research Scientist at the University of California, Berkeley. His research interests revolve around using the Internet and computer technology to involve the global public in scientific research. He has spearheaded the development of volunteer computing, which has brought Peta-scale computing to scientists in a range of areas. He co-founded SETI@home and is director of the BOINC project, which develops middleware for volunteer computing. Dr. Anderson received graduate degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin. From 1985 to 1992 he served on the faculty of the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department. In addition to volunteer computing, his research interests include distributed systems, real-time and multimedia systems, and computer graphics."
  • Jessica Angel is a New York-based Colombian-American artist who has taken an early leading role in the art and blockchain movement, inspiring, and educating artists, developers, and technology enthusiasts to embrace leading-edge blockchain technologies to create and fund ambitious art projects. Jessica curated #ArtProject2020, a 5-day virtual conference presented through the Vancouver Biennale in the context of her current project Voxel Bridge that gathered the leading minds in the NFT space. Her notable participation in the bridging between the art and blockchain ecosystems has led her to bring projects like Kusama Network, Status, Maker Foundation, the Foundation for Art and Blockchain, Spheroid Universe, amongst others to contribute to artistic initiatives. Angel’s immersive installations that present a physical experience of the virtual world have been showcased across the Americas. She will curate the art related to the conference/hackathon ETHDenver 2022.
  • Kim Anno has been a professor at the California College of the Arts since 1996. She is a painter, photographer, and video artist whose work has been collected by museums nationally and shown internationally, recently she had a solo exhibition at the Marcia Wood Gallery in Atlanta,and at the Goethe Institute, Johannesburg in July 2012. She has also presented a two channel screening and live concert with composer, David Coll at the Kala Art Institute in 2013 of "Water City, Berkeley". Anno has had exhibitions and screenings at in three continents. She was awarded a fellowship by the Zellerbach Foundation and the Open Circle Foundation in 2012-13, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award and the Eureka Foundation's Fleishhaker Fellowship. Her recent interests and expertise has been in the intersection of art and science, particularly in aesthetic issues surrounding climate change, water,and adaptation. She has been granted a Sustainable Arts residency at Kala Art Institute in support of her new interdisciplinary work. She is currently at work on a multi chapter intersdisciplinary video work: Men and Women in Water Cities, with in 2013 Water City:Berkeley in the filming process.
  • Luca Antonucci is a practicing artist and co-founder of Colpa Press. He received his MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2010 and is currently in an Artist in Residence at the Kala Art Institute for Printmaking. He resides in San Francisco and was part of a group show at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery in January. His frequent collaborations with Daniel Small led to their project First Light.
  • Mark Applebaum is Associate Professor of Composition and Theory at Stanford University. His solo, chamber, choral, orchestral, operatic, and electroacoustic work has been performed throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia with notable premieres at the Darmstadt summer sessions. Since 1990 Applebaum has built electroacoustic instruments out of junk, hardware, and found objects for use as both compositional and improvisational tools. Mousetrap Music (1996) and The Bible without God (2005), CDs of sound-sculpture improvisations can be heard on the Innova label. Also on Innova is The Janus ReMixes: Exercises in Auto-Plundering, a CD of eleven electronic works whose source material corresponds exclusively to recordings of the eleven acoustic compositions that constitute his Janus Cycle (1992-1996), as well as Intellectual Property, a CD of hybrid acoustic and electronic works. His orchestral music can be heard on the Innova CD Martian Anthropology; solo pieces appear on the Innova CD Disciplines; and chamber works appear on the Innova CDs 56 1/2 ft. and Asylum, and on the Tzadik CD Catfish. In 1997 Applebaum received the American Music Center's Stephen Albert Award and an artist residency fellowship at the Villa Montalvo artist colony in Northern California. Applebaum is also active as a jazz pianist and builds electroacoustic instruments out of junk, hardware, and found objects for use as both compositional and improvisational tools. His music can be heard on recordings on the Innova, Tzadik, Capstone, and SEAMUS labels. Prior to his current appointment, he taught at UCSD, Mississippi State University, and Carleton College. Additional information is available at www.markapplebaum.com.
  • Salma Arastu, a native of India's Rajasthan, has been creating and exhibiting her paintings internationally since the 1970s. Her work with continuous and lyrical line is influenced by her native culture and her residence after marriage in Iran and Kuwait before coming to the US in 1987. Born into the Sindhi, Hindu tradition in her native India, she later embraced Islam through her marriage. At birth, Ms. Arastu was given the life-defining challenge of a left hand without fingers. Seeing the unity of an all-encompassing God, she was able to transcend the barriers often set-forth in the traditions of religion, culture and the cultural perceptions of handicap. She has almost 40 solo shows to her credit, won several awards including East Bay Community's fund for artists in 2012, three works in public places and two books published with her poems and paintings. She is the author of two books: "The Lyrical Line: Embracing All and Flowing" and "Turning Rumi: Singing Verses of Love Unity and Freedom" (2012).
  • Lucia Aronica is a Lecturer in Nutritional Genomics at the Stanford Prevention and Research Center and at Stanford Continuing Studies. She is is currently leading the epigenetic analysis of the Stanford DIETFITS study by Prof Christopher Gardner — the largest randomized clinical trial ever undertaken to compare low carb vs. low fat diets for the design of personalized weight loss strategies. The focus of her research is investigating how diet affects the epigenome, and whether we can use epigenetic biomarkers to design personalized weight loss plans. Lucia serves also as an advisor for companies active in the personal genomics and precision health field. Lucia received her PhD from the Universitaet Wien, and has research experience from the University of Oxford, University of Southern California, and University Federico II of Naples. She has published research papers in top-ranked peer reviewed journals such as Cell, Genes and Development, and the EMBO Journal.
  • Deborah Aschheim makes drawings, sculptures and installations that try to give form to invisible worlds of the mind and brain. her recent work exploring the subject of memory has led her to collaborate with musicians and neuroscientists on projects that are a mixture of science and poetry. she has exhibited recent projects at the Armory Center and the Pasadena Museum in Pasadena, ca; at the Austin Museum in Texas; the weatherspoon museum in Greensboro, North Carolina; Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis and the mattress factory in Pittsburgh. Aschheim is the Hellman visiting artist at the memory and aging center in the neurology department of UC San Francisco.
  • Albert Russell Ascoli is Terrill Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published widely, and in particular "Dante and the Making of a Modern Author" (Cambridge University Press, 2008). His current work focuses on Giovanni Boccaccio's "Decameron", and Ludovico Ariosto's chivalric epic, "Orlando Furioso". He is a past president of the Dante Society of America.
  • Stephen Auger has worked as a Cross-disciplinary artist and light theorist for over four decades. He trained in physics and neuroscience at Hampshire College and The Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT. Auger's paintings explore the boundaries of visual perception encouraging viewers to experience "sensing" as a conscious mode of perception. His pursuit of the enigmatic sensory qualities experienced in the light of dawn and dusk led him into collaborations with Dr. Margaret Livigstone and Dr. Benjamin Smarr. Auger's exploration time-base perception and self-organizing pattern and form emanate from his work with the dynamic interaction of matter with vibration and elemental forces of nature. Auger's mentors include Edwin Land, Joseph Albers protege Arthur Hoener. His paintings and sculptures are in private, corporate and museum collections internationally, including Yale University, Andrew Lloyd Weber, Malcolm Forbes Jr., The Carnegie Institute of Science. Stephen is currently involved in several collaborative curatorial, teaching, and research projects. Auger lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
  • Jesse Austin and Charles Lee are members of the architecture collective BIOS. Living organisms are distinguished from inanimate objects in that they exhibit metabolism, reproduction, and response to stimuli. Living organisms communicate: depending on feedback to find optimal patterns for their continued existence. They self-organize, living in negative entropy. As designers we find the patterns of life and use them to negotiate the layering of diverse parameters and constraints inherent in architectural design.
  • Lucia Ayala, art and astronomy historian, is currently a postdoc researcher at the Office for History of Science and Technology in the University of California, Berkeley. She accomplished her binational PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin (Germany) and the University of Granada (Spain). She deals with historical as well as contemporary contexts, since her main research field is the visual history of astronomy from early modern period until current astrophysics. She is a team member of Fluid Skies, a collaborative project developed together with the astrophysicist Jaime Forero and the artist Yunchul Kim.
  • Bill Ayton is an XR artist, specializing in large-scale AR public art & VR environments integrating 2D painting & drawing. Ayton teaches 3D Digital Art, as Artist-in-Residence at ASU Meteor Studio, HIDA. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art and has shown art at the UN (NYC & Geneva), in private & public spaces in Europe, US, Canada & beyond.
  • Vivek Bagaria is a doctoral student in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford. His research interests are broadly in algorithms, machine learning and blockchain.
  • Jeremy Bailenson, the founder and Director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) as well as Associate Professor of Communication, is a cognitive psychologist who focuses on digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive Virtual Reality. He is the co-author of "Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life, New Worlds, and the Dawn of the Virtual Revolution" (2011).
  • Stephen Bailey is a project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he leads the software development efforts for current and future cosmology surveys making maps of the universe. He has over 25 years experience in big data, ranging from pre-web matchmaking to particle physics to cosmology. He enjoys converting raw data into useful data in order to study the history and fate of the universe.
  • Lauren Baines is a California-based choreographer, performer, and scholar, who possesses diverse arts management and curation experience. She holds a MFA in Dance from Mills College and a BA and BS from Santa Clara University (triple majoring in Theatre Arts (dance emphasis), Art History, and Psychology). Baines received the Leigh Weimers Emerging Artist Award in 2013 and has been awarded several other grants and residencies both locally and internationally. She has shown work at Dance Mission Theatre, ZERO1 Garage, Montalvo Arts Center, de Saisset Museum, LEVYdance Salon, subZERO Festival, Anne & Mark's Art Party, and in New York festivals. She recently returned from presenting a paper at the Society of Dance History Scholars and Congress on Research in Dance joint conference in Athens, Greece. Baines currently works as an arts consultant and educator for several Bay Area organizations, volunteers on the de Saisset Museum Enhancement Board and genARTS Silicon Valley's Steering Committee, and is producing her dance work throughout the area.
  • Ruzena Bajcsy is director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) at UC Berkeley
  • Amy Balkin is an artist whose work addressees property relations in the context of climate change, considering legal borders and systems, environmental justice, and the equitable sharing of common-pool resources. These include ongoing efforts to permanently open Public Smog, a clean air park in the atmosphere, and the invitation to contribute to A People's Archive of Sinking and Melting (Amy Balkin, et al.), a climate archive of the future anterior, or 'what will have been'.
  • Heather Barnett is an artist, researcher and educator working with living systems. Recent work centres around nonhuman intelligence, collective behaviour and systems for co-enquiry and knowledge distribution, including The Physarum Experiments, an ongoing enquiry with an intelligent slime mould, interventions with an ant colony in Almeria, and Animal Collectives collaborative research with the SHOAL Group at Swansea University where she is an Honorary Research Fellow. Heather is Pathway Leader on the MA Art and Science and Convenor of the Art & Living Systems Lab at Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London), a Visiting Associate Professor at Tokyo Institute of Technology, and founding member of The Slime Mould Collective (http://slimoco.ning.com/). She works with natural phenomena and emergent systems. Employing live organisms, imaging technologies and playful pedagogies, her work explores how we observe, influence and understand multi-species ecosystems. Combining disciplinary methods from art and science, participatory art and practical philosophy, Barnett will share recent work made in `collaboration' with a range of organisms including slime moulds, ants and humans. Her work aims to tease and test our definitions of agency, intelligence and collective behaviour.
  • Fabio Barry is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Stanford University. Originally trained as an architect, his research and teaching still gravitates to this art form, although he is deeply interested in painting and sculpture of all periods as well as archaeology. Much of his published research has concentrated on artistic production in Rome, particularly Baroque architecture, treating themes from liturgy to light metaphysics. His most recent work, published or in press, has been on medieval and antique subjects, particularly sculpture. An ongoing interest, the subject of his PhD, is the imagery of marble in the visual arts and literature from antiquity until the age of enlightenment, in which he attempts to identify the evocative qualities of materials (the "Material Imagination") before the era of mass production and standardization distanced materials from the realm of nature and myth.
  • Indrani Baruah is an artist, architect and cultural researcher, who works at the intersection of visual arts, architecture and cultural studies. She splits her time between India and the Bay Area. She completed her formal training in architecture from School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and later from School of Architecture and Allied Arts, University of Oregon. She further went on to doing the U.C. Berkeley Programs in Art, ASUC Art Studios, and Painting and Art History from Merritt College, Oakland, California. Her recent participation in exhibitions include the Berkeley Arts Center, California (2010), Gensler, San Francisco, California (2010), Venice Biennale of Architecture, 2012: 13th Annual International Architectural Exhibition: Common Ground and INSERT 2014, IGNCA, New Delhi, exhibition curated by Raqs Media Collective titled 'New Models on Common Ground: Re-imagining the Question of Cultural Infrastructure'. She has been a recent speaker at the TEDx India series. Indrani received the Extending Arts Practice Grant from India Foundation for the Arts in 2012 and the Public Art Grant from Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art in 2013. She has received fellowships from the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, University of Oregon. Her work has been published in IASTE, University of California, Berkeley, Society of Architectural Historians and Art and Deal.
  • Ashley Bellouin's work explores the merging of sound art, electro-acoustic composition, and instrument building. She focuses on the studies of sonology, psychoacoustics, and the interaction between sound and architecture. Her compositions emphasize and exploit the sonic potential contained within a single musical gesture, regularly using electronics to develop latent qualities. Spatialization, beat frequencies, auditory illusions, and microtonal tunings are frequent compositional tools. Ashley holds an MFA in Electronic Music from Mills College, where she was awarded the Frog Peak Collective Experimental Music Award. She has presented her work at the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, Soundwave ((5)) Festival, the 26th Annual SEAMUS National Conference, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival, UC Santa Cruz, and Stanford University, among other venues. She has additionally been awarded a YBCAway grant from Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and has held residencies at the Paul Dresher Ensemble Artist Residency Center, the UC Berkeley Center for New Media, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Ashley previously worked for Buchla Electronic Musical Instruments and currently works for Dave Smith Instruments in San Francisco.
  • JD Beltran is an artist, designer, filmmaker, writer, curator, and educator. Beltran taps into hybrids of interactive technology and unexpected materials, forms, and the analog. Her work blends the narrative and the abstract in an ongoing investigation of how materials, in their innate forms, can tell stories. Her films, photographs, interactive sculptures and collaborations with frequent artistic partner Scott Minneman have been exhibited internationally, including at the the MIT Media Lab, the Kitchen NYC, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Walker Art Center, the Getty Institute, the Rotterdam International Film Festival, and multiple Zero1 New Media Biennials. Her work with Minneman, an interactive snowglobe, achieved the New Technological Art Association Award as one of the top 20 Art+Technology artworks worldwide, and she's been awarded grants and fellowships from the Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation, Artadia, Stochastic Labs, the Workshop Residency, the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts.
  • Eti Ben Simon Eti’s work explores the social and emotional consequences of sleep loss on the human brain and body. Using functional MRI and electrical brain recordings she examines the neural processes that underlie emotional dysregulation following lack of sleep and the restoration of these processes after a rested night of sleep. She received her PhD in neuroscience from Tel-Aviv University in Israel and is currently a Research Scientist in The Center for Human Sleep Science, University of California Berkeley, directed by prof. Matthew Walker.
  • Henrik Bennetsen is the CEO of Katalabs and maintains a strong interest in 3D collaborative spaces and open source technology. In a previous life Henrik was a professional musician and still has a strong side interest in creative self expression augmented by technology.
  • Sally Benson , professor of Stanford's Energy Resources Engineering, director of the Global Climate and Energy Project (GCEP), as well as director of the Precourt Institute for Energy, is a leading authority on carbon capture and storage and emerging energy technologies. Prior to coming to Stanford, she was director of the Earth Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. She serves on the boards of directors of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Carbon Management Canada and Climate Central. She is the author of more than 160 scientific publications, as well as the co-founding editor of the journal MRS Energy and Sustainability. In 2007 she was one of thousands of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). scientists to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
  • Stacey Bent is a professor of chemical engineering at Stanford University and the co-director of the Center on Nanostructuring for Efficient Energy Conversion. Her research focuses on semiconductor processing, surface science, nanotechnology, and interface engineering. Her group studies new materials and processes for next generation solar cells, fuel cells and catalysts. Bent has received several awards including the Tau Beta Pi Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2006 and the Allan V. Cox Medal for Faculty Excellence in Fostering Undergraduate Research in 2013, and she is a Fellow of the American Chemical Society and the American Vacuum Society.
  • Blanca Bercial is an artist-scholar working on the field of Sound Studies. She recently graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute with a Master of Arts in History and Theory of Contemporary Art, which culminated with an "Outstanding Thesis Award" from the institution. Originally from Madrid (Spain), she has been living in San Francisco since 2018, when she started her research on the soundscape of this city. She uses sound and poetry as an inquiry about the ways we ignore and overlook common yet unexplored spaces, unutilized hideouts embedded within place, time, and in sound.
  • Uwe Bergmann is a Senior Staff Scientist at SLAC and the Director (interim) of the Linac Coherent Light Source, the world's first X-ray free electron laser. His research activities have focused on the development and application of novel x-ray spectroscopic techniques. His scientific interests include studies of the structure of water and aqueous solution, active centers in metalloproteins in particular the photosynthetic splitting of water, hydrocarbons and fossil fuels and imaging of ancient documents and fossils. Bergmann has done his graduate research at the National Synchrotron Light Source and since worked at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource, and now the Linac Coherent Light Source.
  • Terry Berlier is an interdisciplinary artist who investigates the evolution of human interaction with the natural world, queerness, and ecologies. This results in sculptures that are kinetic and sound based, and multi-media installations. She emphasizes the essential roles played by history, cultural memories, and environmental conditions in the creation of our identities. Using humor, she provides tools for recovering and reanimating our faltering connections with self, queerness, nature, and society. Interweaving movement, sound, and interaction as a metaphor for both harmonious and dissonant interactions, Berlier acts as an archaeologist excavating material objects to challenge our understanding of progress and reveal how history is constructed within a cultural landscape. Berlier has exhibited in solo and group shows both nationally and internationally including Japan, Norway, Spain, and Hungary. Recent exhibitions include the Yerba Buena Center for Arts, Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco, Catherine Clark Gallery, Southern Exposure, Contemporary Art and Spirits in Osaka Japan, Arnoff Center for the Arts in Cincinnati, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Thomas Welton Stanford Art Gallery at Stanford University, Montalvo Arts Center, Weston Art Gallery, Babel Gallery in Norway, Richard L. Nelson Gallery, Center for Contemporary Art in Sacramento, Kala Art Institute Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, Natural Balance in Girona Spain and FemArt Mostra D'Art De Dones in Barcelona Spain. She has received numerous residencies and grants including the Center for Cultural Innovation Grant, the Zellerbach Foundation Berkeley, Artist in Residence at Montalvo Arts Center, Arts Council Silicon Valley Artist Fellowship, Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research Fellow at Stanford University, Recology San Francisco, Hungarian Multicultural Center in Budapest Hungary, Exploratorium: Museum of Science, Art and Human Perception in San Francisco, California Council for Humanities California Stories Fund and the Millay Colony for Artists. Her work has been reviewed in the BBC News Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle and in the book `Seeing Gertrude Stein' published by University of California Press. Her work is in several collections including the Progressive Corporation in Cleveland Ohio, Kala Art Institute in Berkeley California and Bildwechsel Archive in Berlin Germany. Terry Berlier is an Associate Professor and Director of the Sculpture Lab and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University where she has taught since 2007.
  • Liat Berdugo is an artist, writer, and curator who studied mathematics and philosophy at Brown University, and design at Rhode Island School of Design. Berdugo has been exhibited in galleries and festivals nationally and internationally, and her book, The Everyday Maths, was published by Anomalous Press in 2013. She is the net art and special programs curator for Print Screen, Israel's international festival of digital art; co-founder and curator of the Bay Area's Living Room Light Exchange, a monthly new media art salon; co-founder and curator of World Wide West, an annual summit, exhibit, and performative new media event, among others. She collaborates widely with individuals and archives. Her work has won several awards, including fellowships at the Hambidge Center, the Vermont Studio center, and a year-long residency in Tel Aviv, Israel, through the Dorot Foundation. Current research projects include a series of works that interrogate citizen video archives in zones of conflict. Specifically, Berdugo has been researching citizen surveillance and counter-surveillance in Israel/Palestine, and writing a series of essays on the politics of visibility in amateur videography. More at liatberdugo.com.
  • Jennifer Berry is an artist and biologist who works in the ecotone of urban design and wildlife. As a field biologist and educator, Jennifer highlights the adaptations that nature makes to thrive in cities and altered landscapes, and how the decisions humans make for themselves can ultimately create opportunities for partnership or signal doom for urban animal populations. In her art practice, Jennifer builds artificial environments and then invites wildlife to participate to alter sculptural forms in a collaborative partnership. In working with living organisms, Jennifer seeks to encourage her audiences to consider other animals in our race to evolve beyond the corporal and temporal limitations within which we currently struggle as a species.
  • Antara Bhardwaj is a North Indian classical dancer of the Chitresh Das Dance Company, founded by Kathak master Pandit Chitresh Das, with whom she has studied since the age of nine. She has become a leading exponent of Pandit Das' innovation of Kathak Yoga, a mind, body practice that involves the dancer to become her own instrument, a combination of singing, playing the harmonium and dancing complex mathematical permutations all at the same time. Besides the USA, she has toured extensively in India, notably at the National Centre for Performing Arts (Mumbai), Birla Sabhagar (Kolkata), Shaniwar Wada Festival of Pune, and Kathak Kendra (India's National Institution of Kathak Dance). She is also an accomplished musical accompanist, trained vocally by Smt. Shweta Jhaveri (disciple of Pandit Jasraj). She is also a prolific filmmaker and producer. A documentary feature film titled "Upaj: Improvise" brings her two worlds of film and dance together.
  • Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik is an interdisciplinary artist and educator born and raised in the suburbs of Los Angeles to Indian and Japanese Colombian parents. After receiving her B.A. in Studio Art from Scripps College, Sita moved to the Bay Area where she holds an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts and an M.A. in Visual and Critical Studies. She is a lecturer at UC Merced and RayKo Photo Center. Sita has collaborated with organizations such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, The San Jose Museum of Art, SomArts, 18 Reasons, 826 Valencia, Asterisk SF, Whitman College, Cal-State Fullerton, Stanford University, and the Future Food House in Rotterdam. She has been the art features editor for Hyphen magazine, writer for Art Practical, and a board member at Kearny Street Workshop. She is currently a Research Fellow at the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles and a Lucas Artist Program Resident at Montalvo. Her favorite spice is cardamom.
  • Paula Birnbaum (USF) is Associate Professor and Program Director of Art History/Arts Management in the Department of Art + Architecture of the University of San Francisco. She will serve as Academic Director of the new Master of Arts Program in Museum Studies beginning in August of 2013. Paula is a specialist in modern and contemporary art and holds a doctorate in Art History from Bryn Mawr College. She is a former Fulbright Scholar and fellow at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford University. In 2008 Paula received the University of San Francisco, Faculty Union (USFFA) Distinguished Teaching Award (university wide award) and enjoys teaching a variety of classes including Museum Studies - History and Theory, Modern and Contemporary Art, European Art 1900-1945 and Women and Art, as well as curating exhibitions in USF's Thacher Gallery. She also runs the Arts Management Internship Program, and has enjoyed working closely since 2003 with educators from Bay Area Museums including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, SFMOMA, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, among many others. Her research focuses on the impact of gender and ethnicity on modern and contemporary women artists and their self-representation, as well as the role of gender and sexuality in museum exhibitions. She has recently completed two books: Women Artists in Interwar France: Framing Femininities (Ashgate), and a co-edited anthology with Anna Novakov, Essays on Women's Artistic and Cultural Contributions 1919-1939 (Edwin Mellen). Paula's articles appear in a variety of journals including the Art Journal, Aurora, Woman's Art Journal, and The Royal Academy of Art Magazine.
  • John Bischoff, Professor of Music at Mills College in Oakland, is a pioneer of live computer music. He is known for his solo constructions in real-time synthesis as well as his development of computer network music. Bischoff studied composition with Robert Moran, James Tenney, Robert Ashley, and David Behrman. He has been active in the experimental music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 40 years as a composer, performer, and teacher. He has performed all over the world and received numerous awards. He is a founding member of the League of Automatic Music Composers, the world's first computer network band. From 1985 to the present he has performed and recorded with the network band The Hub. In 2004, noted media theorist Douglas Kahn published A Musical Technography of John Bischoff in the Leonardo Music Journal (Vol. 14, MIT Press). Two important retrospective CD packages documenting computer network music were released in 2007 and 2008: The League of Automatic Music Composers: 1978-1983 (New World Records) and 3-CD set of recordings by The Hub titled Boundary Layer (Tzadik). Recordings of his work are also available on Lovely Music, 23Five, Centaur, and Artifact Recordings. A solo CD titled Audio Combine was released a few years ago on New World Records and was picked as one of the "Best of the Year 2012" by WIRE magazine.
  • Andrew Blanton is a media artist and percussionist. He received his BM in Music Performance from The University of Denver (2008) and a Masters of Fine Arts in New Media Art at the University of North Texas (2013). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Media Art at San Jose State University in San Jose California teaching data visualization and a Research Fellow in the UT Dallas ArtSciLab in Dallas Texas. His current work focuses on the emergent potential between cross-disciplinary arts and technology, building sound and visual environments through software development, and and building scientifically accurate representations complex data sets as visual and sound compositions. Andrew has advanced expertise in percussion, creative software development, and developing projects in the confluence of art and science.
  • Lisa K Blatt often works in extreme landscapes and examines site, sight, and social and political issues. Cindy Sherman chose and wrote about Blatt, when asked which one photographer Sherman thought was doing groundbreaking work (Smithsonian Magazine (March 2012)). Blatt's art has been exhibited widely internationally, including many museums. Her work has been in the Shanghai Biennial, China, the Havana Biennial, Cuba, Museo de Tigre, Argentina, Reykjavik Museum of Photography, Iceland (solo), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Contemporary Art Platform and Freud Museum, London, Kunstverein Haus, Germany, Wexner Center, Ohio, Mills College Art Museum Oakland (solo), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, Contemporary Jewish Museum, Bellingham National Museum, Washington, Santa Cruz Museum, San Diego International Airport, Phillips Museum, Washington, DC and Sean Kelly in New York. Her work has received many positive reviews and has been awarded many grants and residencies including from: the National Science Foundation (Antarctica), NASA and Carnegie Mellon, the Kitteredge Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Anderson Ranch, the Neon Museum, The Center for Cultural Innovation Creative Capacity Fund Grant, and the Djerassi Foundation. In 2018, Sandra S. Phillips, Photo Curator Emerita at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, nominated Blatt for both the MACK First Book Award (London) and the Gardner prize (Harvard). Her work is in public and private collections. It has been commissioned for the Sierra Fund's Tribute Trail in California and the J. Michael Bishop Art Collection at University of California, San Francisco, together with 19 other artists including Richard Serra.
  • Helen Blau is the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation Professor and Director of the Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine. Blau's research area is regenerative medicine with a focus on stem cells. She is world-renowned for her work on nuclear reprogramming and the demonstration of the plasticity of cell fate using cell fusion which provided the scientific underpinnings for the modern era of stem cell biology. Blau is also internationally recognized for her discovery of regulators of muscle stem cell function and identification of strategies to rejuvenate the function of endogenous stem cells resident within muscle for the treatment of muscle atrophy due to disease, injury, or aging. Blau has been recognized with a number of awards. She has served as president of the American Society for Developmental Biology and president of the International Society of Differentiation, and as a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers. She is the recipient of Honorary Doctorates from the University of Nijmegen, Holland, and the University of York, England. She has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Blau is co-founder of two biotech companies, Myoforte and Rejuvenation Technologies.
  • Catherine Blish is an Associate Professor of Medicine and Immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine and an Assistant Director of the Stanford Medical Scientist Training Program. Her clinical focus is on infectious diseases. She received her PhD in Immunology from the University of Washington School of Medicine, where she then pursued a fellowship in Infectious Disease, with a research focus on immune correlates of HIV-1 infection. Her current research aims to understand the successes and failures of the immune system in order to better harness it to prevent infections. Her lab is perhaps best known for redefining our understanding of the diversity of human natural killer cells, a critical first line of defense against viruses and tumors. She has received numerous awards for research and mentoring, including the Stanford Immunology Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award, the ICAAC Young Investigator Award from the American Society for Microbiology, the Beckman Young Investigator Award, the McCormick Faculty Award, the Baxter Faculty Scholar, the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation Clinical Scientist Development Award, the Tashia and John Morgridge Faculty Scholar in Pediatric Translational Medicine, and a NIH Director's New Innovator Award.
  • Jasmina Bojic has taught at Stanford University for last nineteen years. She has been working as a journalist more than twenty-eight years, covering many political and cultural events, including the Academy Awards, Cannes, Sundance, Venice and Tribeca film festivals. Jasmina has served on juries at many international film festivals and has extensive connections with filmmakers and the film industry worldwide. She has worked as a producer/director on several documentaries and TV Programs dealing with human rights issues. 18 years ago Jasmina conceptualized and organized one of the oldest international documentary film festivals in the US - UNAFF (United Nations Association Film Festival) at Stanford University. In 2000, UNAFF's mission was broadened to include the UNAFF Traveling Film Festival. Jasmina is Founder and Director of the CAMERA AS WITNESS program which extends the educational use of UNAFF documentaries throughout the academic year at Stanford.
  • Josh Bongard is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont, where he runs the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory, whose work focuses on the role that morphology and evolution play in cognition. Bongard's research centers on evolutionary robotics, evolutionary computation and physical simulation. In 2007, he was awarded a prestigious Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship and was named one of MIT Technology Review's top 35 young innovators under 35. In 2010 he was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by Barack Obama at a White House ceremony.
  • Gary Boodhoo combines videogames and machine learning to create interactive science fiction. A Jamaican-born industry veteran, millions of players around the world use the interfaces he invented for games including Madden NFL, The Sims, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and The Elder Scrolls Online. His work examines how digital environments overlap real ones.
  • Josh Bongard is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Vermont, where he runs the Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Laboratory, whose work focuses on the role that morphology and evolution play in cognition. Bongard's research centers on evolutionary robotics, evolutionary computation and physical simulation. In 2007, he was awarded a prestigious Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship and was named one of MIT Technology Review's top 35 young innovators under 35. In 2010 he was awarded a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by Barack Obama at a White House ceremony.
  • Lera Boroditsky, raised in Minsk in the former Soviet Union, is Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University . Boroditsky's research centers on the nature of mental representation and how knowledge emerges out of the interactions of mind, world, and language. One focus has been to investigate the ways that languages and cultures shape human thinking. Her research has been widely featured in the media. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, from the Marr Prize by the Cognitive Science Society to the NSF Career Award, and was named one of "25 visionaries changing the world" by Utne Reader.
  • Sam Bower is co-founder and executive director of greenmuseum.org, an online museum of environmental art, launched in 2001. Prior to this, Sam created environmental art for 8 years as part of a San Francisco Bay Area collaborative art group known as Meadowsweet Dairy. He helped found Cellspace, a non-profit community art space in San Francisco, and Co-Directed Crucible Steel Gallery. Sam has worked as a solo artist, puppeteer, web designer, in advertising, events planning and the environmental non-profit sector in the United States and in Ecuador.
  • Helen Bronte-Stewart is the John E. Cahill Family Professor in the department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences, and, by courtesy, of Neurosurgery at the Stanford University Medical Center. She is also Director of the Stanford Movement Disorders Center, Division Chief of the Movement Disorders division, and co-director of the Stanford Balance Center. Her expertise in single neuronal electrophysiology in primates has been transferred to the operating room where she performs the intra-operative microelectrode mapping of basal ganglia nuclei during deep brain stimulations (DBS) procedures for the treatment of patients with Movement Disorders. Her research focus is on elucidating the mechanisms of abnormal brain activity that contribute to abnormal movement and balance disorders in Parkinson's disease, tremor and dystonia. She has developed new technology to measure human motor control such as a MIDI keyboard, which has been developed by Intel's division of Healthcare Technology. In the Stanford Human Motor Control & Balance laboratory, her team is investigating the effects of interventions such as DBS and/or exercise on specific aspects of balance and upper extremity movement in Parkinson's disease. In the operating room, she and her colleagues record electrical signals directly from the human brain and have demonstrated that DBS suppresses an abnormal rhythm in the brain and may act like a brain pacemaker. Her passion for understanding how the brain controls movement comes from a background in classical and modern dance.
  • Clair Brown is Professor of Economics, Director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society, and past Director of the Institute of Industrial Relations at the University of California, Berkeley. Clair has published research on many aspects of how economies function, including development engineering, high-tech industries, the standard of living, and discrimination. Today Clair works on how our economic system can provide comfortable, meaningful lives to all people in a sustainable world. At UC Berkeley, Clair teaches an undergraduate seminar on Buddhist Economics, provides an economic framework that integrates global sustainability and shared prosperity along with care for the human spirit. Clair also is a faculty leader in Development Engineering, a program for graduate students to develop their multidisciplinary skills for designing, building, and evaluating new technologies to help regions improve quality of life in a sustainable way. Her books include American Standards of Living, 1919-1988, and Buddhist Economics: An enlightened approach to the dismal science (Bloomsbury Press, 2017). Clair's economic approach and life as an economist is published in Eminent Economists II - Their Life and Work Philosophies (Cambridge University Press, 2013). The Labor and Employment Research Association honored Clair with their Lifetime Achievement Award for her contributions to improving workers' lives. She practices Tibetan Buddhism. Learn more about Clair and listen to podcasts on Buddhist Economics at www.buddhisteconomics.net. See http://buddhisteconomics.net/
  • Stephanie Brown has worked in museums as an executive director, curator, historian, and archivist. Her work has ranged from designing and implementing collections plans to curating exhibitions to institutional strategic planning. She is currently the guest curator for the Haggin Museum's reinstallation and reinterpretation of its permanent art collection. Stephanie's professional and academic interests include curatorial practice, material culture studies, and public history. Stephanie is on the Museum Studies faculty at the University of San Francisco, where she also teaches in the Art History/Arts Management program. Previously, she taught Museum Studies at Johns Hopkins University and was Executive Director of the Chevy Chase Historical Society in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Dr. Brown also served as Associate Curator for American Material Culture and Historian at Hillwood Estate, Museum and Gardens in Washington, D.C. Stephanie has a B.A. in History from Williams College and a Ph.D. in European History from Stanford University.
  • Lark Buckingham is a filmmaker, performance artist, and critical designer. Using humor within a critical queer framework, Lark tackles implications of developing technology, compulsory engagement with social media, and the personal, political and social implications of the dissolving boundary between body and machine.
  • Robert Buelteman calls photography "The language of light" and has spent his life exploring the possibilities of the medium in pursuit of a more responsible relationship with the natural world. Following the publication of two monographs, The Unseen Peninsula, his tribute to the Crystal Springs Watershed on the San Francisco Peninsula in 1995 and Eighteen Days in June, published as a fund-raiser for the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in 2000, he surrendered the use of cameras, lenses, and computers in search of what might lay beyond the traditions of the medium. Working directly with large sheets of photographic film, living plants are used as a filter through which high-voltage electricity and fiber-optically-delivered light are passed. The resulting images open a window on the beauty of natural form, and were compared by the Los Angeles Times with photographs of our universe made by the Hubble Telescope. As a result of this new work, he has had over 60 solo exhibitions in the United States, Canada and Germany, and been the subject of essays published in 26 languages on 6 continents. Buelteman has also enjoyed multiple residencies at venues including Stanford University, Santa Fe Institute, Djerassi Artists Program, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. His art can be found in public and private collections worldwide.
  • Roberta Buiani is an interdisciplinary artist, media theorist and curator based in Toronto, where I co-founded the ArtSci Salon at the Fields institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences. Her work balances theoretical and applied research at the intersection of science, technology and creative resistance. She is interested in exploring the way that scientific and technological mechanisms translate, encode and transform the natural and human world, and in turn how they may be spatially and materially remediated. My work is mobile, itinerant and collaborative. She brings it to art festivals (Transmediale, Encuentro), community centers (Immigrant Movement International), science institutions (RPI) and in the street of Toronto. http://atomarborea.net
  • Patricia Burchat (Stanford Physics Dept) is the Gabilan Professor of Physics at Stanford University. She grew up in a very large family in a very small town in Canada. She studies the Universe at both the smallest and the largest scales, using accelerators to probe the elementary particles and the fundamental interactions, and telescopes to investigate the cosmological evolution of the Universe. In both cases, she asks similar questions: What is the Universe made of? What are the laws of physics that govern the constituents of the Universe? Burchat is part of an international collaboration developing a telescope that will provide the best census of the Universe to date -- the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. Her team will use the gravitational bending of light by "dark matter" to study the evolution of "dark energy", shedding light on the identity of these components that make up the majority of the density of the Universe. Professor Burchat is passionate about teaching and instilling enthusiasm for science in her students. At Stanford, she has received the Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching and the Walter J. Gores Award for excellence in teaching. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently Chair of the National Organizing Committee for the APS Conferences for Undergraduate Women in Physics.
  • Annick Bureaud is an independent art critic, curator and event organiser in the field of art and technosciences. She wrote numerous articles and contributes to the French contemporary art magazine art press. She organised many symposia, conferences and workshops among which Visibility – Legibility of Space Art. Art and Zero Gravity: The Experience of Parabolic Flight, project in collaboration between Leonardo/Olats and the International Festival @rt Outsiders, Paris, 2003. In 2009, she co-curated the exhibition (Un)Inhabitable? Art of Extreme Environments, Festival @rt Outsiders, MEP/European House of Photography, Paris. In 2018, she curated the Bourges Bandits-Mages Festival Mending the Fabric of the World. In 2019, she published-curated the online hypertext video capsule about the artwork Neotenous Dark Dwellers – Lygophilia by Robertina Šebjanic. In 2020, she initiated The Traveling Plant project and ran the Roots & Seeds XXI.Biodiversity crisis and plant resistance project for Leonardo/Olats that ended in 2022 when the project More-Than-Planet started. She is the director-curator of Leonardo/Olats.
  • Sarah Cahill is a pianist who has commissioned, premiered, and recorded numerous compositions for solo piano, and has performed chamber music with several chamber groups including the New Century Chamber Orchestra and the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. She has recorded for the New Albion, CRI, New World, Other Minds, Tzadik, Albany, Cold Blue, and Artifact labels. She has a weekly radio show, Then & Now, in San Francisco. She is on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory and curates a monthly series of new music concerts at the Berkeley Art Museum. Her most recent project, A Sweeter Music, premiered in the Cal Performances series in Berkeley in January 2009 and continued to New Sounds Live at Merkin Hall, Rothko Chapel, and venues around the country, with newly commissioned works on the theme of peace by Terry Riley, Meredith Monk, Yoko Ono, Frederic Rzewski, etc. Composers who have dedicated works to her include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Annea Lockwood, and Evan Ziporyn.
  • Jim Campbell, who studied Mathematics and Engineering at the MIT, is an electronic artist whose work is included in the collections of several museums around the world. In 1992 he created one of the first permanent public interactive video artworks in the USA. He has lectured on interactive media art at many Institutions throughout the world. As an engineer he holds almost twenty patents in the field of video image processing.
  • John Campbell is Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Past, Space and Self (1994) and Reference and Consciousness (2002).
  • Helena Carmena, a former science educator, is the Manager of Teacher Services at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. She has been active in curriculum development for use in the museum and classroom setting and has delivered numerous inquiry-based educational programs for children and adults. Helena has worked with many organizations to develop multi-disciplinary curricula. The most recent project has been focused on art, science, and literacy integration in collaboration with the de Young Fine Arts Museum and the San Francisco Unified School District. Doga Buse Cavdir is an artist, designer, and researcher whose work integrates body movement and expression into music performance. Her artistic process actively engages with kinesthetic, immersive, and shared experiences for inclusivity as a way to bridge diverse abilities. Doga performs with her custom-made instruments solo, in collaboration with dancers, and in an interdisciplinary female-identifying artist group fff Her artistic work has been featured by Bay Area art initiatives such as the Center for New Music and Temescal Arts Center. She is a recipient of the 2021 DARE fellowship from Stanford University where she is currently pursuing her Ph.D. at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
  • Chris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2019, he was International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies The University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Edgard-VarŠse Guest Professor at the Technical University of Berlin. At IRCAM (Paris) and The Banff Centre (Alberta), he has pursued methods for digital synthesis, music performance and real-time internet collaboration. CCRMA's jacktrip project involves live concertizing with musicians the world over. Online collaboration software and research into latency factors continue to evolve. An active performer either on the net or physically present, his music reaches audiences in sometimes novel venues. An early network project was a simultaneous five-country concert was hosted at the United Nations in 2009. Chafe's works include gallery and museum music installations which are now into their second decade with "musifications" resulting from collaborations with artists, scientists and MD's. Recent work includes the Earth Symphony, the Brain Stethoscope project (Gnosisong), PolarTide for the 2013 Venice Biennale, Tomato Quintet for the transLife:media Festival at the National Art Museum of China and Sun Shot played by the horns of large ships in the port of St. Johns, Newfoundland.
  • Vanessa Chang is a writer, scholar, curator and educator who builds communities and conversations about our virtual and physical encounters with new media and technology. She works with artists, dancers, scholars, technologists, coders and musicians to understand how we might live and move in a technologically mediated world with humor, grace, deliberation, responsibility, and a sense of play. Her first book project, Tracing Electronic Gesture: A Poetics of Mediated Movement, focuses on the choreographic coupling of human bodies and new media art of the 21st century. Examining hybrid human-machine gestures in such digital art objects and practices as virtual dance, electronic poetry and musical controllerism, she maps the potential of these kinetic engagements to generate new forms of sensory experience and creative agency. Her current research explores the emerging field of art and artificial intelligence. Bridging cultural representations of early automata and artificial intelligence in film, literature, and performance with the recent deployment of machine learning algorithms in art-making, this project considers how the erotic dimensions of this cultural past have shaped how we build our digital automata. She also writes about circuses, street art, hip-hop, disability, and digital motion capture, and has published essays in Popular Music, Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, American Music and in media res. Vanessa holds a Ph.D. in Modern Thought & Literature from Stanford University, and is a Lecturer in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts. She is a Curator with CODAME ART + TECH. She was a Geballe fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, as well as the coordinator of the Graphic Narrative Project, a Stanford Humanities Center research workshop dedicated to comics, cartoons and other forms of graphic storytelling.
  • Danton Char is Assistant Professor of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine (Pediatric) at the Stanford University Medical Center. Dr. Char's K01 from NHGRI examines the ethical challenges of implementing whole genome sequencing in the care of critically ill children, particularly those with congenital cardiac disease. His long-term goal is to continue to identify and address ethical concerns associated with the implementation of next generation technologies to bedside clinical care, like whole genome sequencing and its attendant technologies like machine learning.
  • Adrian David Cheok, born and raised in Australia, is a Full Professor at Keio University, Graduate School of Media Design. He is Founder and Director of the Mixed Reality Lab, Singapore. He was formerly Associate Professor in the National University of Singapore. He has previously worked in real-time systems, soft computing, and embedded computing in Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, Japan. He has been working on research covering mixed reality, human-computer interfaces, wearable computers and ubiquitous computing, fuzzy systems, embedded systems, power electronics. He was invited to exhibit for two years in the Ars Electronica Museum of the Future, launching in the Ars Electronica Festival 2003. His works "Human Pacman", "Magic Land", and "Metazoa Ludens", were each selected as one of the worlds top inventions by Wired and invited to be exhibited in Wired NextFest 2005 and 2007. He was awarded the Hitachi Fellowship, the A-STAR Young Scientist of the Year Award, and the SCS Singapore Young Professional of the Year Award. He was invited to be the Singapore representative of the United Nations body IFIP SG 16 on Entertainment Computing and the founding Chairman of the Singapore Computer Society Special Interest Group on Entertainment Computing. He was awarded an Associate of the Arts award by the Minister for Information, Communications and the Arts, Singapore. He was awarded as Fellow in Education, World Technology Network. He was awarded a Microsoft Research Award for Gaming and Graphics. He received the C4C Children Competition Prize for best interaction media for children, the Integrated Art Competition Prize by the Singapore Land Transport Authority, Creativity in Action Award, and a First Prize Nokia Mindtrek Award. He received a First Prize in the Milan International InventiON competition. He is winner of Keio University Gijyuju-sho award, awarded for the best research of the year in Keio University, Japan's oldest university. He received an SIP Distinguished Fellow Award which honors legendary leaders whose illustrious lives have positively influenced lives across generations and communities around the globe. He was awarded Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. This honor is bestowed each year by the World Economic Forum to recognize and acknowledge the top young leaders from around the world for the professional accomplishments, commitment to society and potential to contribute to shaping the future of the world. He is Editor in Chief of the academic journals: Transactions on Edutainment (Springer) and ACM Computers in Entertainment. He is of Associate Editor of Advances in Human Computer Interaction, International Journal of Arts and Technology (IJART), Journal of Recent Patents on Computer Science, The Open Electrical and Electronic Engineering Journal, International Journal of Entertainment Technology and Management (IJEntTM), Virtual Reality (Springer-Verlag), International Journal of Virtual Reality, and The Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting.
  • Luciano Chessa is a composer, conductor, performance artist, pianist, and musical saw/Vietnamese dan bau soloist. Recent compositions include the experimental opera /Cena oltranzista nel castelletto al lago/ produced for the TRANSART Festivalin Bolzano, Italy: a work lasting 60+ hours (including55 hours of fasting) accessible in its entirety via a 24hrs/day live streaming; they also include /Squeeze! Squeeze! Squeeze!,/ a large-scale work on Melville's Moby Dick and /A Heavenly Act, /an opera with original video by Kalup Linzy commissioned by SFMOMA. Recent record releases include PETROLIO, a monographic CD issued by Stradivarius, Italy's leading Classical Music Label. Chessa has been commissioned multiple performance projects by both NYC's Performa and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;he presented at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires a series of events to celebrate the Art of Noises Centennial; has been featured in the PSI International at Stanford University; and performed with Ellen Fullman and Theresa Wong at Houston's CAMH.In 2014 he offered three concerts at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, as part of a retrospective dedicated to Italian Futurism; his voice reading Marinetti's 1909 /Manifesto/ and poetry to accompany Jen Sachs' videos has been experienced by all exhibit visitors. Two additional videos by Chessa/Sachs have been on view at LA's Getty Museum for the exhibit WWI: War of Images-Images of War. His Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners (OFNI) was hailed by the New York Times as one of the best events in the arts of 2009 and is touring internationally. Chessa's OFNI appeared in sold-out concerts at the Cleveland Museum of Art and Singapore's ArtScience Museum (2015), RedCat in LA (2013) Berliner Festspiele-Maerzmusik Festival (2011). In 2011 Chessa also conducted the project with the New World Symphony + Lee Ranaldo as part of NYC's Biennial of the Performance Arts Performa's spectacle to celebrate 10 years of Art Basel|Miami Beach. A 2LP dedicated to the OFNI has been released on the label Sub Rosa in 2013 to critical acclaim, and sold out in a matter of months. Chessa's work appeared more than once in /Artforum/, /Flash Art,/ /Art in America/, and /Frieze/; and has been featured in the Italian issue of /Marie Claire/ and in the September Issue of /Vogue Italia/.He has been interviewed twice by the British BBC, and has been the subject of two short documentaries: one produced by RAI World (2014), and the other by Vietnamese State TV VTV1 in the occasion of his first trip in Viet Nam (2015).Chessa is the author of /Luigi Russolo Futurist. Noise, Visual Arts, and the Occult/, the first monograph ever to be dedicated to Russolo and his Art of Noise (University of California Press). Currently he teaches at the SF Conservatory, serves in the Advisory Board of TACET, a research publication dedicated to Experimental Music from the Universite Paris 1 - Panth‚on-Sorbonne; is a member of the Steering Committee of the SF Electronic Music Festival. His music is published by Edizioni Carrara and RAI TRADE.
  • E.J. Chichilnisky is the John R. Adler Professor of Neurosurgery at Stanford University, where he has been since 2013 after 15 years at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He received his B.A. in Mathematics from Princeton University, and his M.S. in mathematics and Ph.D. in neuroscience from Stanford University. His research program focuses on understanding the spatiotemporal patterns of electrical activity in the retina that convey visual information to the brain, and their origins in retinal circuitry, using large-scale multi-electrode recordings. His research also involves physiological experiments with electrical stimulation and computational methods aimed at advancing the design of visual prostheses for treating blindness. He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a McKnight Scholar Award, and a McKnight Technological Innovation in Neuroscience Award.
  • Irene Chien is a PhD candidate in Film and New Media at UC Berkeley. She writes and teaches about race and gender at the intersection of cinema and new media, including a column "Camera Ludica" for Film Quarterly.
  • Adam Chin, who graduated in computer science from Stanford, is a fine art photographer who spent a career as a computer graphics artist for TV and film. He was one of the orginal employees of Pacific Data Images, a pionering computer graphics studio which later became part of Dreamworks Animation, working on such films as Shrek 2, Madagascar, and How to Train Your Dragon. While his first love is traditional b&w photography, Adam also practices using Machine Learning neural networks trained on databases of real photography to render images. By augmenting traditional photography with neural networks, he is exploring how much information is contained in a given photograph, and the implications to accuracy, privacy, and racial bias.
  • Hsiao-Yun Chu is Associate Professor and Graduate Coordinator, School of Design, San Francisco State University. Her interests include design history, user-based research methodology, project-based learning, practice-based research, and the cultural and social implications of design. She is the author of two books on R. Buckminster Fuller and of numerous articles on design and design history. She is also an associate editor with the International Journal of Design. Prof. Chu is the coordinator of the Master's Program in Design at SF State, and the study abroad advisor for incoming students from our six bilateral programs. Ph.D., University of Brighton, Brighton UK; M.S. Eng, Product Design, Stanford University; A.B. cum laude, Harvard University. She published two books: "New Views on R. Buckminster Fuller" (Stanford University Press, 2009) and "Dymaxion Car: Buckminster Fuller" (IvoryPress, 2010).
  • Jerold Chun is Professor, Senior Vice President, and Director of Translational Neuroscience at Sanford Burnham Prebys (SBP) Medical Discovery Institute in La Jolla, CA where he conducts basic and translational research, and oversees development of neuroscience programs having commercial and/or philanthropic potential. He received his MD and PhD (Neuroscience) degrees through the Medical Scientist Training Program at Stanford University School of Medicine with Carla Shatz. Formerly, he conducted research at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research of MIT; at UC San Diego's School of Medicine, where he became Professor of Pharmacology and Neurosciences and directed the Neurosciences Graduate Program; at Merck Research Laboratories; and at The Scripps Research Institute and as an adjunct Professor at UCSD. He has made important scientific contributions including the discovery of genomic mosaicism and somatic gene recombination in the brain. He identified the first member of the lysophospholipid receptor family that underlies multiple current medicines (e.g., to treat Multiple Sclerosis) and has contributed to understanding other diseases including hydrocephalus, schizophrenia, neuropathic pain, infertility, and fibrosis.
  • Caroline Cocciardi is a writer, filmmaker, and interior designer. Cocciardi produced a documentary, “Mona Lisa Revealed,” in 2009, and in 2018 she published “Leonardo’s Knots”, the outcome of 20 years of research on Leonardo DaVinci's paintings.
  • Cindy Cohn is the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. From 2000-2015 she served as EFF's Legal Director as well as its General Counsel. In 1993, EFF she served lead attorney in Bernstein v. Dept. of Justice, the successful First Amendment challenge to the U.S. export restrictions on cryptography. Among other honors, Ms. Cohn was named to TheNonProfitTimes 2020 Power & Influence TOP 50 list, and in 2018, Forbes included Ms. Cohn as one of America's Top 50 Women in Tech. In 2013, The National Law Journal named Ms. Cohn one of 100 most influential lawyers in America, noting: "If Big Brother is watching, he better look out for Cindy Cohn."
  • Sarah Cole is Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Dean of Humanities at Columbia University. A specialist in literary modernism, she is the co-founder of the NYNJ Modernism Seminar and publishes widely on literary modernism and on war and peace. As Dean, she founded and directs the Humanities War and Peace Initiative and the Climate Humanities initiative at Columbia. She is the author of three books, Inventing Tomorrow: H. G. Wells and the Twentieth Century (Columbia, 2019), At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland (Oxford, Modernist Literature and Culture series, 2012) and Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War (Cambridge, 2003), and has published articles in journals such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Modernist Cultures, Modern Fiction Studies, and ELH, and in edited collections. For her work on H. G. Wells, she was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.
  • Grisha Coleman, assistant professor of Movement, Computation and Digital Media at the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and School of Dance at Arizona State University works as a dancer, composer and media artist in performance and experiential media systems and is currently a resident at the Montalvo Arts Center in Silicon Valley. She has created large scale works for a variety of residencies and venues, e.g. the site-specific sound/kinetic installation for public interaction and participation "Reach, Robot", commissioned by the Robotics Institute.
  • Brian Conrad (Stanford) received his PhD under the guidance of Andrew Wiles at Princeton, and since 2008 has been a Professor of Mathematics at Stanford. He works on problems involving symmetry that emerges from number theory, and co-organizes the semi-annual Public Lecture series organized by the Stanford Math department.
  • Lia Cook, Visual Artist, Professor of Art, California College of the Arts works in a variety of media combining weaving with painting, photography and digital technology. Her current practice explores the sensuality of the woven image and embodied memories of touch and cloth. Working together with neuroscientists she investigates the nature of the emotional response to the tactile quality of woven faces and uses the laboratory experience with both process and tools to stimulate new work. Lia Cook exhibits her work nationally and internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include: "Neuro Nets + Net Works" Perimeter Gallery, Chicago "Icones Jacquards" Les Drapiers , Liege, Belgium and "Weaving and Innovation: Digital Fibers Converse with Neural Networks" at University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her works are in the permanent collection of the MOMA, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Cooper Hewitt; Museum of Arts and Design, NY; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Cleveland Museum of Art; Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC; The National Collection, France; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Musee Bellerive, Switzerland; National Gallery of Australia; Zhejiang Art Museum and the National Silk Museum, Hangzhou China
  • Alan Cooper is an emeritus scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey and consulting professor at Stanford. He has 28 years experience working on Antarctic studies and heads the Antarctic Seismic Data Library System for Cooperative Research under the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. He has published more than 250 research papers. Alan is also co-concertmaster of the California Pops Orchestra and performs with the Left Bank trio and Fiume di Musica.
  • Anna Couey works at the intersection of art, communications, information and social justice, using participatory media tools and story-collecting methods to re-imagine and restructure power. During the 1980s-1990s, she helped develop art telecommunications projects such as the Art Com Electronic Network and Arts Wire, as well as producing temporary cross-cultural communications events as social sculpture. Since the mid-1990's, Anna has applied social sculpture strategies outside the art world, collaborating with alternative media makers; librarians, educators, and youth; and poor and working class communities of color organizing for social justice. Her communication sculptures have been exhibited at digital art festivals internationally, including ISEA and SIGGRAPH.
  • Stanley Corngold has published widely on modern German writers and thinkers (e.g.,Dilthey, Nietzsche, Musil, Kraus, Mann, Benjamin, Adorno, among others), but for the most part he has translated and written on the work of Franz Kafka. With Benno Wagner and Jack Greenberg, he co-edited, with commentary, a translation of Kafka’s main office writings, which describes the place of these documents in the history of worker’s compensation insurance as well as their importance for an understanding of Kafka’s novels and stories. On his retirement in 2009, Corngold received the Howard T. Behrman Prize for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities at Princeton. In fall 2009, he conducted four seminars on his own work at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a Visiting Fellow; in fall 2010, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. Together with Benno Wagner, he published "Franz Kafka: The Ghosts in the Machine", which again highlights Kafka's professional experience as an influential insurance lawyer. In 2011 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Between 2009-2012, together with Michael Jennings, Corngold founded and directed the Princeton Kafka Network with Oxford and Humboldt Universities. With Jennings, he also co-edited a special issue of Monatshefte devoted to papers given at the Kafka Network at Princeton in 2010. With Ruth Gross, Corngold co-edited a volume of essays in 2011 on Kafka titled Kafka for the Twenty-First Century; in 2012, he translated Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther. Since then, he has published a Norton Critical Edition of the same eighteenth-century novel (2012) and a Modern Library edition of Kafka’s Metamorphosis (2013). In 2018, Princeton brought out his intellectual biography "Walter Kaufmann—Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic"; and he recently published two new books: "The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton" (Princeton University Press, 2022) and "Weimar in Princeton: Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). His latest book, titled "Expeditions to Kafka", consisting of new and selected essays, appeared with Bloomsbury Academic in 2023. He now writes regularly for the journal First of the Month.
  • Stephan Crawford works across different media, from sculpture and mixed media to cross-disciplinary collaborations. His work often reflects humanity’s interaction with the environment. He founded and co-leads The ClimateMusic Project (CMP), a multi-disciplinary collaborative communicating the urgency of action on climate change by combining climate science with the emotional power of music to drive action. Since its inception in 2015, CMP has reached thousands of people via live concerts in the U.S. and abroad, and has garnered international media coverage, including profiles by the BBC, The Verge, La Reppublica, Citylab, and NEON. Stephan holds graduate degrees in environmental management and international affairs. He left a distinguished parallel career in public service in 2017 to focus on CMP and his studio practice. Please visit www.climatemusic.org and www.sc2arts.com
  • Mathias Crawford is a researcher in IFTF's Technology Horizons program. Mathias has written extensively about changing patterns of urban mobility, the future of education, and using games to change real world behaviors. He has participated in research into the technological forces that are contributing to changing structures of community support; the nature of collaboration, especially as it is practiced in open source communities and by youth; and the future of mobile communications devices. Mathias has also been integrally involved in development of the Foresight Engine, IFTF's platform for massively collaborative thought experiments that address provocative scenarios about the future.
  • Jim Crutchfield is Professor of Physics at the University of California, Davis, where he is helping to start up its new Center for Computational Science and Engineering. Until recently he was Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, where he ran the Dynamics of Learning Group, and Adjunct Professor of Physics in the Physics Department, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. Before coming to SFI in 1997, he was a Research Physicist in the Physics Department at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1985. He also has been a Visiting Research Professor at the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology, University of California, San Francisco; a Post-doctoral Fellow of the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UCB; a UCB Physics Department IBM Post-Doctoral Fellow in Condensed Matter Physics; a Distinguished Visiting Research Professor of the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and a Bernard Osher Fellow at the San Francisco Exploratorium.
  • Miguel Angel Novelo Cruz is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer. His work combines emerging media, playful semiotics, and a deep exploration of geopolitical and cybernetic space. Novelo graduated from Escuela Universitaria TAI in 2013 and attained a BFA from SFAI in 2018, followed by an MFA from Stanford University in 2022. His pieces have been exhibited in various institutions, including the de Young Museum, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, as well as at various international film festivals. Miguel's interdisciplinary practice explores the convergence of time-based media, expanded cinema, performance, participatory sculpture, poetry, and installation. His work invites audience engagement, employing serious play as a medium for exploring non-human perspectives and speculative narrative.
  • John Cumbers is the founder of SynBioBeta, a network for synthetic biology startup companies. He runs conferences, introductory courses in synthetic biology, a news digest and a podcast series. The goal of SynBioBeta is to support the fledgling industry and to help new startups partner and raise capital. John also works at NASA Ames Research Center in the synthetic biology program where he works on mission design, space resource utilization, life support and food production. John has a Ph.D in Molecular Biology, Cell Biology, and Biochemistry from Brown University and a MS.c in Bioinformatics from the University of Edinburgh.
  • Elizabeth Currid-Halkett is the James Irvine Chair in Urban and Regional Planning and professor of public policy at the University of Southern California's Price School of Public Policy. She teaches courses in economic development, the arts, and urban policy and urban planning. Her research focuses on the arts and culture, the American consumer economy and the role of cultural capital in geographic and class divides. She is the author of "The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City" (Princeton University Press 2007); "Starstruck: The Business of Celebrity" (Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and "The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class" (Princeton University Press, 2017), which was named one of the best books of the year by The Economist. She is a member of the World Economic Forum's Expert Network and Industry Strategy Officers and has been a member of the WEF Global Future Councils. Currid-Halkett's work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, Salon, the Economist, the New Yorker, and the Times Literary Supplement, among others. She has contributed to a variety of academic and mainstream publications including the Journal of Economic Geography, Economic Development Quarterly, the Journal of the American Planning Association, the Journal of Planning Education and Research, the New York Times, and the Harvard Business Review. Author Website: www.elizabethcurridhalkett.com
  • Nina Czegledy (Ontario College of Art & Design University, Toronto) is an artist, curator, educator, works internationally on collaborative art & science & technology projects. The changing perception of the human body and its environment as well as the paradigm shifts in the arts informs her collaborative projects. She has exhibited and published widely, won awards for her artwork and has initiated, researched, lead and participated in forums and symposia worldwide. Her installations have been exhibited in Finland, Hungary, Poland, Spain, New Zealand, Mexico, Italy, Brazil besides Canada and the USA. Czegledy lectures internationally, curates international exhibitions, develops collaborative art projects and initiates, co-organizes educational forums and workshops for educational institutes and international symposiasuch as the Media Art Histories conference series, and ISEA International Society of Electronic Arts symposia. She teaches Art and Design at theUniversity in Toronto, and is research collaborator for the Hexagram International Network for Research Creation in Montreal as well as senior fellow of the Hungarian University of Fine Arts and honorary fellow of the Moholy Nagy University of Art and Design, both in Budapest. She is a board member of the International Association of Art Critics of Canada, member of the governing board of Leonardo/ISAST, board member of the Subtle Technologies Festival in Toronto, chair of Interrelate.org in New Zealand and president of the Critical Media Art Society.
  • Beatriz DaCosta is an Associate Professor of Arts, Computation, Engineering at the University of California, Irvine. A former collaborator of Critical Art Ensemble and a co-founder of Preemptive Media, she works at the intersection of contemporary art, engineering, politics, and the life sciences.
  • Sharon Daniel is an Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media and Chair of the Digital Arts and New Media MFA program at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she teaches classes in digital media theory and practice. Her research involves collaborations with communities that focus on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion.
  • Marcy Darnovsky is the Executive Director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a public affairs organization working to encourage responsible uses and effective societal governance of new reproductive and genetic technologies. She speaks and writes widely on the politics of human biotechnology, focusing on their social justice and public interest implications. Her articles have appeared in The Nation, Democracy, Harvard Law and Policy Review, The American Interest, Alternet, Science Progress, The Journal of Life Sciences, Modern Healthcare, Contraception, Bioethics Forum, Tikkun and many others. She has appeared on dozens of television, radio, and online news shows and has been interviewed and cited in hundreds of news and magazine articles. She has worked as an organizer and advocate in a range of environmental and progressive political movements, and taught courses at Sonoma State University and at California State University East Bay. Her Ph.D. is from the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
  • Anna Davidson is currently pursuing her M.F.A. in art studio for sculpture/biological arts at UC Davis. In 2014 she received her Ph.D. in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis where she studied ecophysiology of trees. She teaches at the intersection of art and science and her research incorporates both disciplines.
  • Cere Davis is a acousto-kinetic sculptor, engineer, musician and dancer with a background in computer systems architecture, physics and vocal improvisation. Her work crosses the boundaries between engineering, soulful expression, and laboratory experimentation, inviting the audience to vicariously re-experience and re-explore our everyday experience of science and technology through a new lens. http://ceredavis.com .
  • Joe Davis is an artist-researcher who has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for 29 years. He has been a Research Fellow and Lecturer at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies and for most of the past two decades, he has been a Research Affiliate at MIT Biology in the laboratory of Alexander Rich. Joe is noted as a pioneer in the field of art and molecular biology. He was the 2008 recipient of a Rockefeller Fellowship in New Media and has widely published in both artistic and scientific venues.
  • Mel Day is an interdisciplinary artist and educator, currently at San Jose State University, and previously at UC Berkeley, Santa Clara University, and University of Toronto Mississauga and Sheridan College. Recent work explores the role of singing in civic engagement, deepening dialogue among potentially insular groups. Day is currently building a "Wall of Song" with artist Michael Namkung, a massed singing of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, which has been exhibited nationally, most recently at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Her work has also been exhibited and screened in venues such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Film Festival, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley Art Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, ZERO1 Biennale, and Peak Gallery in Toronto. She has participated in residencies nationally and internationally including Stanford University's Experimental Media Arts Lab, Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, Oberpfaelzer Kuenstlerhaus (Schwandorf, Germany), The Lab, SF and she recently co-founded an IDEO-awarded Youth Fellowship program at Djerassi. Other honors include San Francisco Foundation's Murphy Fellowship in the Fine Arts and the Eisner Prize in the Creative Arts from UC Berkeley.
  • Primavera De Filippi is a legal scholar at Harvard University, as well as an Internet activist and artist exploring the intersection between law and technology, focusing specifically on the legal and political implications of blockchain technology. Her artistic practice instantiates the key findings of her research in the physical world, creating blockchain-based lifeforms that evolve and reproduce themselves as people feed them with cryptocurrencies. Her works have been exposed in various museums, galleries and art fairs around the world including Ars Electronica (Austria), Furtherfield Gallery and Kinetica Art Fair (UK), Centre Pompidou, Grand Palais, Gaité Lyrique, and Le Cent Quatre (France), Fort Mason Center For Arts & Culture (San Francisco), as well as festivals such as Burning Man (Nevada) and Fusion Festival (Germany).
  • Terrence Deacon, Professor of Biological Anthropology and Neuroscience at the University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University and formerly a neurologist and anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, is the author of the seminal book "The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of language and the brain" (2007). His research combines Neurolinguistics, Evolutionary Biology, Anthropology, Semiotics and Complex Systems Theory. His work extends from laboratory-based cellular-molecular neurobiology to the study of semiotic processes underlying animal and human communication, especially language.
  • Dave Deamer is Research Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He recently published First Life: Discovering the Connections between Stars, Cells, and How Life Began (University of California Press, 2011). Deamer also co-edited Origins of Life with Jack Szostak, published by Cold Spring Harbor Press, 2010. Deamer's research focuses on molecular self-assembly processes related to the structure and function of biological membranes, and particularly the origin and evolution of membrane structure. In collaborative work with colleagues at NASA Ames, Deamer showed that photochemical reactions simulating those occurring in the interstellar medium give rise to soap-like molecules that can self-assemble into membrane structures. This confirmed earlier studies in which Deamer demonstrated that microscopic vesicles were produced by similar molecules present in carbonaceous meteorites. These results led to a new hypothesis about how primitive forms of cellular life could appear on the early Earth, which will be described in his talk.
  • Lydia Degarrod, who teaches Critical Studies and Diversity Studies at the California College of the Arts, is both a visual artist and a cultural anthropologist who creates installations that blur the line between ethnography and art in order to convey experiences of extraordinary nature and address issues of social justice. Her latest work, Geographies of the Imagination, explored the inner images of exile. As a cultural anthropologist, she has conducted research and published on shamanism and dream interpretation among the Mapuche, one of the native peoples of Chile, and also studied popular cultures among urban Chileans. As a visual artist, Lydia has exhibited nationally and internationally. She has received awards for her work from the Wing Luke Memorial Museum of Art, Saint John's University, and the Ministry of Culture of Chile. She has been an artist in residence at California State University at Chico, de Young Museum of Art, and the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts. She has taught at Occidental College, Bowdoin College, and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
  • Abigail DeKosnik Abigail De Kosnik is an Assistant Professor in the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and the Department of Theater, Dance & Performance Studies (TDPS). She has written two books: The Survival of Soap Opera - Strategies for a New Media Era (essay collection, co-edited with Sam Ford and C. Lee Harrington) from the University Press of Mississippi and Illegitimate Media - Minority Discourse and the Censorship of Digital Remix Culture from the University of Georgia Press. She testified before the US Copyright Office at their hearings regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, in favor of an exemption to the DMCA's ban on the circumvention of digital copyright technologies that would allow non-Film Studies college professors to rip DVDs for the purpose of screening clips of film and television in their courses. She organized a conference on Open Source and the Humanities, sponsored by the Berkeley Center for New Media.
  • Paul DeMarinis has been working as an electronic media artist since 1971 and has created numerous performance works, sound and computer installations and interactive electronic inventions. One of the first artists to use computers in performance, he has performed internationally, at The Kitchen, Festival d'Automne a Paris, Het Apollohuis in Holland and at Ars Electronica in Linz and created music for Merce Cunningham Dance Co. His interactive audio artworks have been exhibited at the I.C.C. in Tokyo, Bravin Post Lee Gallery in New York, The Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco and the 2006 Shanghai Biennale. He has received major awards and fellowships in both Visual Arts and Music from The National Endowment for the Arts, N.Y.F.A., N.Y.S.C.A., the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and was awarded the Golden Nica for Interactive Art at Ars Electronica in 2006. Much of his recent work deals with the areas of overlap between human communication and technology. Major installations include "The Edison Effect" which uses optics and computers to make new sounds by scanning ancient phonograph records with lasers, "Gray Matter" which uses the interaction of flesh and electricity to make music, "The Messenger" that examines the myths of electricity in communication and recent works such as "RainDance" and "Firebirds" that use fire and water to create the sounds of music and language. Public artworks include large scale interactive installations at Park Tower Hall in Tokyo, at the Olympics in Atlanta and at Expo in Lisbon and an interactive audio environment at the Ft. Lauderdale International Airport. He has been an Artist-in-Residence at The Exploratorium and at Xerox PARC and is currently a Professor of Art at Stanford University in California.
  • Ilke Demir's research focuses on generative models for digitizing the real world, analysis and synthesis approaches in geospatial machine learning, and computational geometry for synthesis and fabrication. She earned her B.S. degree in Computer Engineering from Middle East Technical University with a minor in Electrical Engineering, and her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Purdue University, with her dissertation discussing geometric and topological shape processing approaches for reconstruction, modeling, and synthesis. Afterwards, she continued her research at Facebook on deep learning approaches for human understanding in virtual reality, geospatial machine learning for map creation, and 3D reconstruction at scale. In addition to her publications in top-tier venues (SIGGRAPH, ICCV, CVPR), she has organized workshops, competitions, and courses in deep learning, computer vision, and graphics (DeepGlobe, SkelNetOn, WiCV, SUMO, OpenEDS, etc.). She received numerous awards and honors such as Jack Dangermond Award, Bilsland Dissertation Fellowship, and Industry Distinguished Lecturer, in addition to her best paper/poster/reviewer awards. She has also been actively involved in women in science organisms for the past 10 years, always being an advocate for women and underrepresented minorities.
  • Shane Denson is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and, by Courtesy, of German Studiesand of Communication at Stanford University, where he also serves as Director of the PhD Program in Modern Thought & Literature. His research interests span a variety of media and historical periods, including phenomenological and media-philosophical approaches to film, digital media, and serialized popular forms. He is the author of Post-Cinematic Bodies (2023),Discorrelated Images (2020), and Postnaturalism: Frankenstein, Film, and the Anthropotechnical Interface (2014). See shanedenson.com for more information.
  • Bonnie DeVarco is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer and curator and Media X Distinguished Visiting Scholar. With an academic background in cultural anthropology, dance ethnology and archives management, she writes and lectures on Design Science, virtual worlds, next generation geographic information systems, information visualization and the culture of cyberspace. She is currently co-authoring Shape of Thought, on the history and evolution of visual language with Eileen Clegg and is co-editing a book on Ludic Cartographies with Matteo Bittanti and Henry Lowood of the Stanford University's Humanities Lab.
  • Daniel Dever is a research instructor in Dr. Matthew Porteus' lab at Stanford University in the Department of Pediatrics. While completing his postdoctoral work, Dr. Dever helped develop a CRISPR-Cas9-based gene targeting methodology in CD34+ hematopoietic stem cells. This research led to Dr. Dever and others in the Porteus Lab to successfully target more than 15 genes in primary blood cells that are associated with hematopoietic diseases. Dr. Dever focuses on using CRISPR-Cas9 to study gene targeting mechanisms in human hematopoietic cells. The hope is that this research will lead to the development of novel therapeutics for blood and immune system diseases. Dr. Dever is currently heading an Investigational New Drug (IND)- enabling study for FDA approval for the first human trials to treat severe sickle cell disease using CRISPR-Cas9-based targeting techniques.
  • Rohini Devasher, based in India, is a media artist who works with video, painting, printmaking, drawing and installation. Her expansive projects create worlds that emerge from deep research and scientific explorations, illuminating and complicating the subjects at hand. Her work has been shown at the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, San Francisco (2024), Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco (2024), Kunsthalle Bern, (2024), Museum Catharijneconvent Utrecht, Netherlands (2024), Tai Kwun Contemporary (2023), Macao International Art Biennale (2023), Collegium Helveticum, Zurich (2023), Warehouse 421, Abu Dhabi (2023), Rubin Museum of Art in New York (2021–22); the Sea Art Festival in Busan, South Korea (2021); the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (2021); Kunst Leuven City Festival in Belgium (2021); Sharjah Biennial 14: Leaving the Echo Chamber in the United Arab Emirates (2019); Kaserne Basel (2019); the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2018); 7th Moscow International Biennale of Contemporary Art (2018); Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas (2018, 2016); Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Mumbai City Museum (2018, 2016); Lisbon’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT) (2016); ZKM Karlsruhe (2016); Singapore’s ArtScience Museum (2016); London’s Whitechapel Gallery (2016); 5th Fukuoka Asian Art Triennial (2014); and the first Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India (2012). Devasher is the first Indian artist to be honored by Deutsche Bank as 'Artist of the Year' for 2024. She was recently a 2023 dual resident in Arts at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, Switzerland, and at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS-TIFR) in Bengaluru, India as part of Connect India, a collaboration between Arts at CERN and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. Devasher’s past residencies include Cove Park, in Cove, Scotland (2022); London’s Open Data Institute (2021–22); Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas (2016); the Anthropocene Campus at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HWK) (2016); the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (2014); the Glasgow Print Studio (2014); and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2012). In 2018, she spent 26 days as an artist-in-residence on an oil tanker traveling from Fiji to Singapore as part of The Owner’s Cabin Residency Program.
  • Jennifer Dionne is a sculptor of light at the nanoscale. She develops optical methods to detect and direct molecules, emphasizing critical challenges in global health and sustainability. As a Professor of Materials Science and of Radiology at Stanford, and a Chan-Zuckerberg Biohub Investigator, her research has developed culture-free methods to detect pathogens and their antibiotic susceptibility; methods to image and direct photo-chemical reactions with atomic-scale resolution; and materials that enable direct visualization of cellular forces. She is also co-founder of Pumpkinseed – a company dedicated to improving personal and planetary health through protein sequencing. She frequently collaborates with visual and performing artists to convey the beauty of science to the broader public. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards. She is also Senior Associate Vice Provost of Research Platforms at Stanford University, and Director of the Department of Energy's "Photonics at Thermodynamic Limits" Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC).
  • Ewa Domanska is Professor of Human Sciences at the Faculty of History, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. She is a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Since 2002, she has been affiliated with the Anthropology Department, the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) at Stanford. Her teaching and research interests include history and the theory of historiography, comparative theory of the humanities and social sciences as well as the environmental humanities, ecocide and genocide studies. After her doctoral studies at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, she was a Fulbright fellow at UC Berkeley (1995-96), a fellow of the Center of Cultural Studies of UC Santa Cruz (1996), a fellow of The School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (1998), and a fellow at Stanford University (2000-2001). Domanska is President of the "International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography" and member of the editorial boards of several scholarly publications in Europe, China and India. Her recent publications include: "Unbinding from Humanity: Nandipha Mntambo's Europa and the Limits of History and Identity" (Journal of the Philosophy of History), "The Environmental History of Mass Graves" (Journal of Genocide Research) and "Prefigurative Humanities" (History and Theory). She envisions prefigurative art as art that pre-shapes the impending future while, at the same time, participating in building various scenarios of the future (realistic utopias).
  • Yizhou Dong is a Professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. His research focuses on the design and development of biotechnology platforms for the treatment of genetic disorders, infectious diseases, and cancers. Dr. Dong has authored over one hundred papers and patents. Several of his inventions have been licensed and are currently under development as drug candidates for clinical trials. He serves as a scientific advisory board member for Oncorus Inc, Arbor Biotechnologies, and FL85. Dr. Dong is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE).
  • James Doty is the Founding Director of Stanford's Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education) as well as a Clinical Professor in the Department of Neurosurgery, where his research focuses on the development of technologies using focused beams of radiation in conjunction with robotics and image-guidance techniques to treat solid tumors and other pathologies in the brain and spinal cord. He is an inventor, entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is actively involved in charities for HIV/AIDS support, blood banks, medical care in third world countries and peace initiatives. He is the Chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation. is on the Board of Directors of a number of non-profit foundations and is on the International Advisory Board of the Council for the Parliament of the World's Religions. He is the author of "Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon's Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart" (2016) and "Mind Magic: The Neuroscience of Manifestation and How It Changes Everything" (2024).
  • Brad Drda is the environmental manager for Recology San Francisco. He manages energy efficiency and renewable power projects at Recology San Francisco facilities and is an adjunct instructor at the University of San Francisco's Environmental Management program.
  • Paul Dresher is one of the foremost composers of the post-minimalist generation. He has composed opera, chamber and orchestral works, live instrumental electroacoustic music and scores for theater, dance, and film. Paul's many honors include a 2006-07 Guggenheim Fellowship and commissions from the Library of Congress, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Spoleto Festival USA, the Kronos Quartet, the San Francisco Symphony, Zeitgeist, San Francisco Ballet, Chamber Music America, among others. Compositions include: the post-minimalist classics Liquid and Stellar Music (1981) and Channels Passing (1982), the trio Double Ikat (1989); the "American Trilogy" (1985-90), three operas in collaboration with writer Rinde Eckert; the evening-length collaboration with choreographer Margaret Jenkins "The Gates" (1994); the Concerto for Violin and Electro-Acoustic Band (1997); the solo percussion work "Schick Machine" (2009), created for percussionist Steven Schick and performed on a set huge invented musical instruments and sound sculptures; the Concerto for Quadrachord & Orchestra (2012), "Sound Maze" (2015), a hands-on sound installation of twelve invented musical instruments that toured the USA in 2017; and the multidisciplinary piece "Molded by the Flow" in collaboration with playwright Rinde Eckert and faculty and students at the University of Southern Maine, where Paul has been appointed USM Libra Professor for the 2016-17 academic year. He has had a long time interest in the music of Asia and Africa, studying Ghanian drumming, Hindustani classical music, Balinese and Javanese music. His music has been performed throughout North America, Asia and Europe. His recordings include: This Same Temple & Liquid and Stellar Music (Lovely Music, 1984), Dark Blue Circumstance (New Albion), Opposites Attract (New World), Slow Fire (Minmax), and Casa Vecchia (Starkland).
  • Meredith Drum creates experimental cinema as fictions, essays and documentaries in the form of linear videos, interactive installations, printed books, place-based movement research and mobile media projects. Her work has been supported by grants and residencies from a range of institutions including the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, iLand, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Wassaic Project, the Experimental Television Center, Wave Farm Transmission Arts, ISSUE Project Room, HASTAC and the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Meredith exhibits frequently in New York City, and has also recently been included in international exhibitions in Dubai, Mexico City, Rio, Brighton (UK), Manizales (CO), Paris, Copenhagen, and Valencia (ES).
  • Ian Duncan studied at King's College, Cambridge (B.A., 1977) and Yale University (Ph.D., 1989), and taught for several years in the Yale English department, before being appointed Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Oregon in 1995. He came to Berkeley in 2001, and was appointed to the Florence Green Bixby Chair in English in 2011. He is a recipient (2017) of the university's Distinguished Teaching Award. Duncan is the author of Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel (Cambridge, 1992), Scott's Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, 2007), and "Human Forms: The Novel in the Age of Evolution" (Princeton, 2019). He is currently writing a short book on Scotland and Romanticism. Fields of research and teaching include the theory and history of the novel, British literature and culture of the long nineteenth century, Scottish literature, literature and the natural sciences, and literature and other storytelling media (opera, film). Duncan is a Corresponding Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a member of the editorial board of Representations, a General Editor of the Collected Works of James Hogg, and co-editor of a new book series, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Romanticism. He has held visiting positions at the Universities of British Columbia and Konstanz, Bogazici University, LMU Munich, Princeton University, and Aix-Marseille University.
  • Aja Duniven, who studied astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, is founder and CEO of Animate Inc as well as founder of Global Peace Train and president of the Coalition for Collaborative Development. Aja has led media production and community empowerment teams on 5 continents and designed products and eCommerce platforms for those communities. Aja rides the cutting edge of emerging cryptocurrency, augmented, virtual and mixed reality technologies and is dedicated to implementing these technologies in creative gameplay that brings benefit to all beings of our world. She has worked with women in the slums of Kenya, the Lakota of Pine Ridge Reservation, the homeless population in the US, youth transitioning out of gangs, those suffering with mental illness, survivors of abuse, animals and more. Aja has developed Augmented Reality applications that are available on itunes and google play stores, she produces and directs 360 video content and is the Founder and Creative Lead for the Presentville Game. Aja thrives leading teams creating 2D video, animation, 360 video, augmented, virtual and mixed reality content that benefits the world. Her passion in these emerging technologies includes apps for meditation, nonprofits, empathy building, altruistic games, personal development, art and mixed reality (device free) storytelling.
  • Kristina Dutton is a composer and new media artist who crafts unconventional connections between art and science. Her work, which has received awards from organizations like New Music USA and The Andy Warhol Foundation, strives to create a balance between our sensory experiences and intellectual curiosity, often exploring the complex relationships between humans, animals, and the environment. Drawing upon her conservatory education, she has explored various musical genres, contributing to more than 50 recordings and performing at such venues as Chicago's Symphony Center, The MCA, BAMFA, The Pritzker Pavilion, and The David Letterman Show. With a background that includes concert performance, music education, and science journalism, Kristina bridges diverse mediums and disparate subject matters in her composition and filmmaking. Her current film project, Nanoscapes Films, has screened at more than 35 venues worldwide. Kristina grew up in Chicago, lives in the forest, and loves to collaborate.
  • Miriam Dym is a visual artist who messes around with systems. Dym's system inquiries range from the mildly lyrical-can they make a fictitious map convincing?-to problem solving-how could they transform all their household trash into new, raw material? Dym's work comes from a pleasure in discovering what's connected, what's not, and why simple answers don't resolve anything. For years, Dym found it challenging to share their sprawling systems projects, mostly because they didn't understand they were working with sprawling systems: This isn't (yet) a category on, say, grant applications, or in art departments. When they figured it out, it was an epiphanic moment. While printing textiles, Dym invented an embodied, algorithmic system they've named Decision Fields. Through the actions of conscious agents, Decision Fields fosters the emergence of infinitely variable patterns on a plane. This has been their main focus since 2018. Dym has shown at museums and galleries in the USA and abroad, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art and SFMOMA, which has one of their pieces in the permanent collection, Susanne Vielmetter, POST-LA, and Pierogi. Residencies include The Watermill (Long Island), Cite' des Arts (Paris), Kala Art Institute (Berkeley) and Stanford University Digital Art Center. In 2018, several drawings Dym created in the 1990s were in "Contraption" at the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Dym is a 2020 LABA East Bay Fellow.
  • Carina Earl has shown her work in various galleries in Washington DC. During a brief time in Philadelphia she asked to lead and execute a mural with the Philadelphia Mural Arts Commission and Keep Pennsylvania Beautiful. In San Francisco she has been deeply involved with Trickster Arts Salon which has presented opportunities to show at Mission Control and Aspect Gallery. She has also shown numerous times at the Diego Rivera Gallery in N. Beach, presented a solo show at Hive Mind Gallery in Oakland in 2011, and exhibited several pieces at SFAI's Vernassage in 2012. Carina began a serious interest in art when she received her first canvas and paint set in 1986. She has always felt that through painting she has been able to access portals into other times and dimensions. Currently she is working on a body of large scale paintings called Labyrinth of Infinite Doorways which focuses on a period about 4 billion years from now when the Milky Way will merge with neighboring Andromeda. Her concepts are based on a principle that intention is stronger than fear, that life is a structural component of physics, and that eventually life will penetrate both star systems to form a galactic biosphere.
  • Robert Edgar is a digital media producer presently living in the Bay area. Robert creates and employs software engines to examine mediated artifacts forged at his zone of proximal development. His engines include Memory Theatre One (1985), Living Cinema (1988), Sand, or How Computers Dream of Truth in Cinema (1992), Memory Theatre Two (2003), and Simultaneous Opposites (presently under development). He holds an MFA from Syracuse University College of Visual and Performing Arts, presently works at Stanford University, and teaches at the Art Institute of Sunnyvale.
  • John Edmark teaches design, color theory, and animation at Stanford University. His creative investigations range from geometric kinetic works and transformable objects, to products for storage, kitchen, and creative play. Previously, he researched 3-D virtual environments at Bell Laboratories. He has Masters degrees in Product Design (Stanford), and Computer Science (Columbia), and is named inventor on nine U.S. utility patents. His other interests include hyper-stereo landscape photography, ultra-light backpacking, and throat singing.
  • Rachel Beth Egenhoefer is an artist, designer, writer, and educator. Her work explores the intersections between textiles, technology, and the body on historical, constructional and conceptual levels; and often incorporates tactile elements such as candy, knitting, and machines to represent intangible computer codes and conceptual spaces. Egenhoefer is currently an Assistant Professor in Design in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco.
  • Ken Eklund is a game designer and a thought leader in the area of serious games and collaborative gameplay for the social good. He is the creator of World Without Oil, a landmark massively collaborative alternate reality game, and currently team lead on EVOKE, "a ten-week crash course on changing the world." Ken has long been interested in the positive social effects of games and open-ended, creative play. Ken and his partner on ZOROP, Annette Mees, both seek ways to use technology to create new narrative forms and experiences - he approaches it as a game designer, she is a director of immersive theater in London. Both believe "participation through play can make stories more personal, meaningful and adventuresome."
  • Mona El Khafif is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Project Coordinator of the CCA URBANlab, who holds a doctorate in urban design from the TU Vienna. El Khafif worked in architectural offices in Germany and Vienna, on projects which received important urban design awards including the Otto Wagner Urban Design Award for the BUSarchitecture Homeworkers project and the Ortner & Ortner Museumsquartier. El Khafif is a founding principal of phase 1 Fox_El Khafif_Nuhsbaumer, a co-author of URBANbuild local global, and has recently published Staged Urbanism: Urban Spaces for Art, Culture and Consumption in the Age of Leisure Society in Germany.
  • Hasan Elahi is an assistant professor at San Jose State University's CADRE laboratory for New Media. He is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, borders and frontiers. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues worldwide.
  • Tamira Elul is an Associate Professor at Touro University California and a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at UC Berkeley. She teachers Cell Biology, Histology and Biophysical Neurobiology, as well as Art of Observation and Vision and Art. Her research focuses on molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying the structural development of the nervous system. In recent years, she has pursued several interdisciplinary research projects determining novel patterns in nature and art. She received her B.A. and Ph.D in Biophysics from the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Jan English-Lueck, Professor of Anthropology at San Jose State University, and a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future, has written "Chinese Intellectuals on the World Frontier" and "Cultures@SiliconValley" and received the American Anthropological Association's 2006 Diana Forsythe Prize. Her latest book, "Being and Well-being: Health and the Working Bodies of Silicon Valley", was published in 2010.
  • Cosana Eram is an assistant professor of French Studies at the University of the Pacific. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in French and Humanities at Stanford (2010), a Fulbright at New York University, as well as undergraduate and graduate studies in Romania, where she holds a Doctorate Magna Cum Laude in Philology (2003). As a literary scholar and translator, she has publications on modern and postmodern fiction, cultural studies, and global social issues. Her current research interests encompass transatlantic avant-garde, modern and contemporary French literature, ethics of technology and the human, and digital humanities. She is currently working on a book with the title "ScanDADAL" about the French avant-garde logic of dispute and conflict.
  • Jessica Feldman is Assistant Professor of Biology at Stanford and leads her own laboratory. She originally studied the genetic regulation of centrosome structure, function, and positioning and the mechanisms dictating internal cellular organization using the unicellular alga Chlamydomonas. She went on to characterize the role of the centrosome during epithelial polarization in C. elegans, working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. She started her Stanford lab in the Biology Department in 2014. Her lab studies structural changes that occur at the cellular level during normal development and in disease. In particular, they are interested in understanding how microtubules become spatially organized in different cell types during cell differentiation.
  • Mark Feldman is a scholar of US culture and a lecturer in Stanford University's Program in Writing and Rhetoric, with interests in urban studies, environmental humanities, ecocriticism, and visual culture. In 2009-10 he was a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, pursuing initial research for "Urban Ecology: New York City's Visionary Urbanism." "Urban Ecology" explores how artists, landscape architects, and educators are reimagining New York City, greening the streets and changing perceptions of nature. A native New Yorker, this project stems from his long-standing fascination with this city and environmentalism. Mark's first book manuscript ("Still Wild: The Human and the Animal in American Literary Naturalism") reconsiders literary naturalism's preoccupation with animality, arguing that it was part of a serious and modern attempt to rethink what it meant to be human in an evolutionary age. Mark teaches "The Rhetoric of Urban Life" (an introduction to thinking and writing about cities) and "Speaking About Art: Narrating the Cantor's Collections." Mark also directs, along with John Peterson, a sustainability blog, SUSSingSustinability@Stanford that fosters creative communication (written and visual) of environmental issues.
  • James Ferrell is Professor of Chemical and Systems Biology and of Biochemistry at Stanford University. He was Chair of the Dept. of Chemical and Systems Biology from its inception in 2006 until 2011. The Ferrell lab is working to understand the design principles of biochemical switches, timers, and oscillators, especially those that control the cell cycle. We make use of quantitative experimental approaches, modeling, and theory.
  • Mauro Ffortissimo was born in Argentina in 1962, and emigrated to the USA in 1981. He has been living, working and making art in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area since that time. Trained in classical piano, self-taught in painting and sculpting, he has worked in multiple media’s including, sheet metal and, most prominently: de-constructed piano assemblages. Mauro has pioneered the “Piano Liberado”; bypassing the keyboard and playing directly on the strings to liberate the instrument from the traditional constraints of the 12-tone scale. He is a co-founder of the music/arts organization Sunset Piano.— a live performance company that takes pianos and places them into unexpected naturalistic and urban outdoor spaces. For three years running he has co produced a major summertime piano installation in the San Francisco Botanical Garden called Flower Piano. His work is the subject of the documentary film "Twelve Pianos" by Storyfarm's Dean Mermell, highlighting Mauro's work. The film premiered as the closing film at Green Film Festival in SF’s Castro theater and will soon be available online. Mauro also writes poetry and hosts a poetry and music salon at Specs Bar in North Beach, the second Wednesday of each month.
  • Jeanne C Finley, a Professor of Media Studies at the California College of the Arts, is a media artist who works in experimental and documentary forms including film, video, photography, installation, internet, and site specific public works. Her work has been exhibited in international institutions including the Guggenheim Museum, SF and NY Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum and the George Pompidou Center. She has been the recipient of many grants including a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Cal Arts/Alpert Award, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Since 1989 she has worked in collaboration with John Muse on many installation and video projects including Flatland, 2007, Clockwork, 2006, and Catapult, 2005. Finley's film and video credits include: Lost, 2006, Loss Prevention, 2000, O Night Without Objects, a Trilogy, 1998, A.R.M. Around Moscow , 1993, Involuntary Conversion, 1991 and Nomads at the 25 Door, 1991. These tapes have won awards at international festivals such as the San Francisco, Atlanta, Berlin Video Festival, Toronto, and World Wide Video Festival.
  • Fabrice Florin is a multimedia innovator who has worked with innovators such as Apple and Macromedia. He now consults on worthy projects, with a focus on content strategy, community engagement and product development. He previously worked as movement communications manager at the Wikimedia Foundation, where he managed and edited the Wikimedia blog -- and helped nurture a 'culture of kindness' across Wikipedia communities. Prior to that, he was product manager, leading the development of many new tools for Wikipedia, such as Notifications, Media Viewer and Thanks. His previous ventures include: NewsTrust.net, a nonprofit social news network, helping folks tell apart fact from fiction; Handtap / GoComics, a wireless content provider for mobile devices; Shockwave.com, a web entertainment site we started at Macromedia; Zenda Studio, award-winning multiplayer game developer; Apple Computer's Multimedia Lab, a research and development group; Videowest, a producer of rock journalism and entertainment for young adults.
  • Bruno Fonzi is cofounder of Codame, an art and tech platform and organization founded in 2010 in San Francisco with Jordan Gray. Codame has staged public events such as festivals and exhibitions that have cemented a community of more than 200 artists and inventors. Fonzi has been in the software industry since he was a teenager, selling his first software product when he was 15. Born in Italy, he studied in London and Sydney before landing in Silicon Valley where he founded his first start-up, Lanica, a mobile gaming solution. He is currently a Director of Engineering at Salesforce.
  • Bettina Forget is the director of SETI Institute's Artist-in-Residence program, where she was an artist in residence for three years. She is a visual artist, gallery owner, art educator, and researcher. Born in Germany, Bettina has studied at Central St-Martins School of Art in London, England and at Curtin University in Perth, Australia and Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore. She lived and worked for many years in Montreal, Canada, while pursuing a PhD in Art Education at Concordia University. Bettina's creative work a focuses on space sciences, inspired by her avid engagement with amateur astronomy. She has exhibited her artwork in the USA, Canada, Germany, Iceland, Singapore, and Nicaragua. In 2018 she joined the Convergence , Perceptions in Neuroscience Initiative as Vice President and Director of Fine Art.
  • Peter Foucault creates works on paper, videos, and installations that are fueled by his love of drawing and mark making. He has created a series of Drawing-Projects, which utilize systems developed by the artist that produce complex abstract compositions. Viewer interactivity plays an integral part in his drawing installations, large-scale artworks in which participants influence the outcome of a drawing that is created by a small robot over the duration of an event or exhibition. Foucault has participated in numerous exhibitions nationwide and has curated several art events.
  • Anne Fougeron has provided architectural services in the Bay Area since her graduation from the Masters program in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley 25 years ago. Currently her firm's work ranges from feasibility studies to new construction projects in the commercial, health care and residential sectors. Some of her major projects include: the two phase remodel of Planned Parenthood MacArthur Clinic started in 1996 and completed in 2003 (winner of several awards), a 2005 award-winning vacation house in Big Sur, mixed-use housing developments and urban planning studies, and supervising the redevelopment effort for San Jose's downtown area. Fougeron has taught architectural design to both undergraduate and graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and at the California College of Arts.
  • Curt Frank is a Professor in Chemical Engineering at Stanford and the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in the School of Engineering. He was the founding Director of the Center on Polymer Interfaces and Macromolecular Assemblies, a Materials Research Science and Engineering Center sponsored by the National Science Foundation, from 1994 to 2010. He was also the Chairman of the Department of Chemical Engineering from 2001 to 2006. His research interests are in polymer materials science, and he has current collaborations with the School of Medicine directed at development of an artificial cornea and toward hydrogel-based arrays for study of primary hepatocytes, with Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Light Source on the development of proton and anion exchange membranes for fuel cells, and with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering on developing bio-based composites and foams for applications in the construction industry. In collaboration with his wife Sara Loesch-Frank, a calligrapher, artist, and art teacher, Curt has taught an Introductory Sophomore Seminar on "Art, Chemistry, and Madness: the Science of Art Materials" for the past six years. Curt lectures on a series of historical palettes: Paleolithic, Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, and Contemporary.
  • Loren Frank is a Professor in the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did post-doctoral research at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital before joining the faculty at UCSF in 2003. His research seeks to understand the nature of memory, and has provided critical insights into how memories are stored and how memories are used to guide decisions. His findings have established a causal link between a specific pattern of brain activity and memory, and he and his colleagues are currently developing new tools that will make it possible to study and interact with memory processes throughout the brain. His long term goal is to understand these processes well enough to develop approaches to treating memory-related problems including learning disabilities and Alzheimer's disease. He has received numerous awards for his scientific discoveries and his mentoring, including fellowships from the Sloan, McKnight and Merck foundations as well as the the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award, the UCSF Faculty Mentoring award, and the College Mentors for Kids Inspire Award.
  • Edward Frenkel is a professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley, author, and filmmaker. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and the winner of the Hermann Weyl Prize in mathematical physics (2002). Frenkel's new book "Love and Math" was a New York Times bestseller, has been named one of the Best Books of the year by both Amazon and iBooks, and is currently being translated into 14 languages. Frenkel has also co-produced, co-directed and played the lead in the film "Rites of Love and Math," which French newspaper Le Monde called "a stunning short film... offering an unusual romantic vision of mathematicians."
  • Laurie Frick draws from neuroscience to construct intricately hand-built works and installations to explore the nature of pattern and the mind. Formerly an executive in high-technology, using her background in engineering and high-technology she explores science, compulsive organization and the current culture of continual partial attention. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Amerian Academy in Rome, McColl Center for Visual Art, The Lower East Side Printshop, Djerassi Fellowship and the Headlands Center for the Arts. The body of work from her Spring 2011 show at Edward Cella in Los Angeles are experiments in brain rhythm using time studies of daily activity logs and sleep charts. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Frick lives and works in Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, New York.
  • Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, specializing in blockchain and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, a co-curator of Ender Gallery (an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft), an alumna of the Recurse Centre (a retreat for programmers), an organiser of Our Networks (a conference on all aspects of the distributed web), an advisory board member for Circles UBI (a blockchain-based community currency that aims to lead to a more equal distribution of wealth), a co-founder of Bitspossessed" (an art and software development consultancy that operates as a coop), and has been the technical lead for Culturestake (a project that uses quadratic voting to lead to better decisions about arts funding).
  • Ellen Fullman is a composer and performer based in Berkeley, California. Born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, as a teenager she became inspired by the sounds native to her region: Delta blues music. At the age of one, she was kissed by Elvis, who said to her, "Hi-ya baby!" Fullman studied sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute where she learned of the work of Harry Partch. Inspired by Alvin Lucier's Music on a Long Thin Wire, she suspended long wires in her loft studio in St. Paul, Minnesota and experimented with different forms of manual articulation. Through an accidental discovery of the longitudinal mode of vibration, in 1980 Fullman invented the Long String Instrument, which has remained at the core of her creative life. The process of refining and articulating this instrument has led her to experimenting with wire alloys and gauges; designing resonators and tuning capos; creating a graphic notation form that defines time by distance walked; and the study of natural tuning and North Indian vocal music, among many other things, in her quest to "Let the strings sing their own song." She has recorded extensively with this unusual instrument and has been the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and residencies including: The DAAD Berlin Residency (2000) and Center for Cultural Innovation Investing in Artists Grants for Artistic Innovation (2013) and Artistic Equipment and Tools (2008). Releases include: Through Glass Panes (Important), Fluctuations, with trombonist Monique Buzzart‚ (Deep Listening) and Ort, recorded with Berlin collaborator J”rg Hiller (Choose Records). For more info go to: www.ellenfullman.com
  • Linda Gass is an Artist in Residence at the Palo Alto Cubberley Studios. Textiles have been an important part of her life since childhood when her grandmother taught her to sew doll clothes. In her early adult life, she took a detour through the software industry. Linda returned to making textiles 14 years ago, this time for the wall, and now exhibits her work internationally in galleries and museums. She is an avid backpacker and travels extensively in the wilderness areas of the West where she finds much of the inspiration for her work.
  • Michal Gavish is a Bay Area Multimedia artist and art writer. With an MFA from SFAI and a PhD in Physical Chemistry she bases her current work on scientific collaborations with Prof. Brandman from Stanford University. She exhibited her work recently at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the last Zero1 Biennale and an extensive solo museum show in Budapest, Hungary. Gavish also lectures extensively in the Bay Area on contemporary art issues and writes art reviews on the blogs Square Cylinder and SF Artnews.
  • Evelyne Gayou is a researcher and electroacoustic composer with a master degree in cinema and a PhD in musicology at the Sorbonne. She is editor in chief of the collection "Portraits Polychromes" books and multimedia documents for INA in Paris. Involved in audiovisual activities as an editor for Radio France for many years, she also performs in concert and lectures at universities. As a GRM member since 1975 she has had the opportunity of collaborating with the experimental musical milieu in Europe, from Pierre Schaeffer to Karlheinz Stockhausen, and in the USA especially with the computer music pioneers, Max Mathews, John Chowning, and many others. She published a history of the discovery and development of Musique Concrete under the title "GRM, Groupe de Recherches Musicales, 50 ans d'histoire" (2007).
  • Adam Gazzalay (UCSF/ Neuroscience Imaging Center) is Professor in Neurology, Physiology and Psychiatry at the UC San Francisco, the Founding Director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center, and Director of the Gazzaley Lab, a cognitive neuroscience laboratory that he established in 2005 focused on studying the neural mechanisms of memory, attention and perception. A major accomplishment of his research has been to expand our understanding of alterations in the aging brain that lead to cognitive decline. He obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, completed clinical residency in Neurology at the University of Pennsylvania, and postdoctoral training in cognitive neuroscience at UC Berkeley. Dr. Gazzaley is co-founder and Chief Science Advisor of Akili Interactive, a company developing therapeutic video games, and is also a co-founder and Chief Scientist of JAZZ Venture Partners, a venture capital firm investing in experiential technology to improve human performance. Additionally, he is a scientific advisor for over a dozen technology companies including Apple, GE and Nielsen. Dr. Gazzaley has filed multiple patents for his inventions, authored over 100 scientific articles, and delivered almost 500 invited presentations around the world. His research and perspectives have been consistently profiled in high-impact media. He wrote and hosted the nationally televised, PBS special "The Distracted Mind with Dr. Adam Gazzaley". Dr. Gazzaley has won a number of awards throughout his career, including the Krieg Cortical Scholar Award (1997), Morris Bender Award in Clinical Neurology (1998),Laird Cermak Award (2005), Pfizer/AFAR Innovations in Aging Award (2005), Ellison Foundation New Scholar Award in Aging (2006), Harold Brenner Pepinsky Early Career Award in Neurobehavioral Science (2012), and the 2015 Society for Neuroscience - Science Educator Award.
  • Eri Gentry is the founding President and Executive Director of BioCurious, the Bay Area's first bio-hackerspace, where members come to think and create in a collegial, informal setting. Her mission is to make positive change in the world by enabling innovation in science through collaboration and education. Eri serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of SynBERC and is a Citizen Science blogger at MAKEzine. She enjoys forex trading, sailing, and swinging kettlebells. Eri was previously CEO of Livly, a nonprofit biotech on a mission to cure cancer, and received a bachelor's in Economics at Yale.
  • Margot Gerritsen is the Director of the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. She launched a program at her department called "ICME Artiste" to bring art into the working areas with the goal to show how art and math can impact and stimulate each other. Initial exhibitions featured Francois Miglio, Alison Holt, and Michael Scott. Originally from the Netherlands, she escaped in 1990 to search for hillier and sunnier places. She received a PhD in Scientific Computing from Stanford University in 1996 and joined Auckland University, New Zealand, as a faculty member. In 2001 she returned to Stanford's Department Energy Resources Engineering. Since 2010, she is the director of the Institute for Computational & Mathematical Engineering at Stanford. Her research focuses on the design of highly accurate and efficient parallel computational methods including applications to petroleum engineering, search algorithms and coastal ocean simulation that are extremely challenging because of the very strong nonlinearities in the governing equations. She teaches both energy-related topics (reservoir simulation, energy, and the environment) and mathematics for engineers. She also initiated a consulting course for graduate students in ICME, which offers expertise in computational methods to the Stanford community and selected industries. She also teaches at Bergen University in Norway and she contributes as editor to the Journal of Small Craft Technology.
  • Zann Gill started her career as a researcher for Buckminster Fuller. Early interest in Fuller's concepts for "World Game" to achieve environmental sustainability and "design science" sparked her focus on cross-disciplinary innovation, including a networked system of urban innovation as a complex adaptive system. She moved to Australia in 1989 to work on a proposal from the Japanese government to the Australian government to build an IT "city of the future", the so-called Multifunction Polis (MFP). At NASA she developed plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and the astrobiology program for NASA University. Zann is currently working with Australia's National ICT Center Excellence (NICTA) to reposition the "eco-sustainable city of the future" initiative to harness smart systems technology, ubiquitous computing, and social networks.
  • Madeline Girard (Berkeley) is currently a graduate student in Erica Bree Rosenblum's lab at UC Berkeley, studying communcation and sexual selection in peacock spiders of the Maratus genus. Laser vibrometry, microspectrophotometry, and optic flow analysis are tecniques that she uses to record and analyze male spiders during courtship in order to characterize and quantify display traits. The goal of her current research is to test the hypothesis that in species where males emit complex signals, females base mating decisions on combinatorial suites of traits that provide more information than any one signal element alone.
  • David Glowacki is a Royal Society Research Fellow presently based in San Francisco. He holds joint appointments at Stanford University and the University of Bristol (UK). With a Master of Arts in cultural theory and a PhD in chemical physics, he has a growing international reputation spanning both computational nano-physics and interactive digital art, with a growing number of high-profile publications in both areas. David is also the creator of danceroom Spectroscopy (dS), an interactive digital framework that fuses his multi-disciplinary interests, which has been used to create a dance piece entitled Hidden Fields. dS has been displayed at leading European cultural institutions, including Germany's ZKM Centre for Art and Media, London's Barbican Arts Centre, and the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad. For more information, see www.glow-wacky.com
  • Ken Goldberg is an artist and professor UC Berkeley. Ken is a pioneer in internet-based robotic telepresence and Cloud-Based Robotics / Automation and has published over 200 peer-reviewed technical papers on algorithms for robotics, automation, and social information filtering; his inventions have been awarded eight US Patents. He is Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), Co-Founder of the African Robotics Network (AFRON), Co-Founder of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM), Co-Founder and CTO of Hybrid Wisdom Labs, Co-Founder of the Moxie Institute, and Founding Director of UC Berkeley's Art, Technology, and Culture Lecture Series which has hosted over 150 presentations by artists and curators. Ken's artwork has?been exhibited at Ars Electronica, ZKM, Centre Pompidou, ICC Biennale, Kwangju Biennale, Artists Space, The Kitchen, and the Whitney Biennial.
  • Christian Gonzenbach is an experimenter and an explorer at the edge between the normal and the bizarre. It is the unexpected, the little weird thing, that the artist focuses on. Hence he has created installations in which a landscape is made out of corn flakes, a video in which all the people are pickles, that play soccer, go for a dance or a boxing match, etc. His works look familiar but always disorient the viewer.
  • Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children's learning and is the author of over 100 articles and several books including the bestsellers "The Scientist in the Crib" and "The Philosophical Baby; What children's minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life". She has also written for Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist and Slate. She has three sons and lives in Berkeley, California.
  • Deborah Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford. She studies collective organization by investigating the ecology and behavior of ant colonies, including a population of harvester ant colonies in Arizona, the invasive Argentine ant in northern California, and ant-plant mutualisms in tropical forests in Central America. She is the author of two books, Ants at Work (2000) and Ant Encounters:Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior (2010). She has been awarded fellowships from Guggenheim and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences. She is interested in analogies between ant colonies and other distributed networks such as brains, the immune system, the internet, and distributed robotic systems.
  • Sean Gourley, Quid co-founder and CTO, did research into the mathematics of war for his PhD thesis at Balliol College, Oxford. His findings appeared as the featured article in "Nature" (December 2009) and were the subject of a popular TED talk (2009). His work on statistical analysis, probability, and algorithm development applied to complex systems and large datasets inspired the creation of Quid. Sean is a Rhodes Scholar PhD in Physics (Complexity) from the University of Oxford; his is undergraduate degree in Physics is from the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.
  • Laura Granka is a User Experience Researcher at Google, Inc, and is working towards her PhD at Stanford University. She has spent the past seven years studying how people look for information, specifically in online search environments. Laura has approached information discovery through several research methodologies, including the behavioral (eyetracking), the implicit (clickthrough data), and the qualitiative (ethnography). Laura has applied these key learnings towards improving UI design and result ranking algorithms while at Google. She has authored over 20 publications and presentations on this topic.
  • John Granzow is a Canadian artist, instrument designer and music researcher. He studied classical guitar with Dale Ketcheson and constructed his first instrument (a flamenco guitar) under the instruction of luthier George Rizsany in Nova Scotia. In 2006 he took began research in auditory perception, completing a Masters of Science in Psychoacoustics at the University of Lethbridge in the lab of Dr. John Vokey. At the Analogous Fields: Arts and Science residency at the Banff Centre in 2009 John explored instrumentation in artistic and scientific practice with artist Denton Fredrickson. A generative construction process was devised to produce a series of daxophones from a single plank of cherry, each instrument undergoing an imposed mutation with timbral consequences. These daxophones were played in networked performances in Portugal and Italy as well as at The Center For Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University, where John now pursues his Ph.D in Computer Based Music Theory and Acoustics. In more recent research, he investigates applications of computer aided design and digital fabrication to new organologies. Rapid prototyping techniques are leveraged to produce performance-specific musical instruments. Outcomes from this research have been presented at concerts and sound installations in Canada, France, and the United States.
  • Jordan Gray is cofounder of Codame, an art and tech platform and organization founded in 2010 in San Francisco with Bruno Fonzi. Codame has staged public events such as festivals and exhibitions that have cemented a community of more than 200 artists and inventors. Fonzi has been in the software industry since he was a teenager, selling his first software product when he was 15. Born in Italy, he studied in London and Sydney before landing in Silicon Valley where he founded his first start-up, Lanica, a mobile gaming solution. He is currently a Director of Engineering at Salesforce. Gray has pioneered digital distribution of music and manga. Under the staRpauSe alias Jordan performs audiovisual sets. He licenses his output under the Creative Commons to encourage remix culture. staRpauSe sause has been reused in movies, games, VR, and multimedia installations. Jordan's work has featured in New York Times, Vice, Engadget, and more. Jordan has also led technology, prototyping, and innovation projects for Fortune 500 companies including Walmart, AT&T, Wells Fargo, Intel, Tesla, and Google.
  • Kathelin Gray, artistic director, Theatre of All Possibilities, is known for her wide-ranging interdisciplinary collaborations involving performance, music, science and installations. She is co-founder of October Gallery and Institute of Ecotechnics in London, October Galley in London, Synergia Ranch in Santa Fe, Caravan of Dreams Performing Arts Center in Texas, and more. Theatre of All Possibilities is a 35-year-old international performance and event production company (www.allpossibilities.org). She has traveled all over the world, organised 30 interdisciplinary conferences, been selected as one of the most innovative CEO's by the Tarrytown 100, served on the board of directors to the Biosphere 2 project.
  • Hank Greely is the Deane F. and Kate Edelman Johnson Professor of Law and Professor, by courtesy, of Genetics at Stanford University. He specializes in ethical, legal, and social issues arising from advances in the biosciences, particularly from genetics, neuroscience, and human stem cell research. He chairs the California Advisory Committee on Human Stem Cell Research and the steering committee of the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics, and directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences and the Stanford Program in Neuroscience and Society. He serves as a member of the NAS Committee on Science, Technology, and Law; the NIGMS Advisory Council, the Institute of Medicine's Neuroscience Forum, and the NIH Multi-Center Working Group on the BRAIN Initiative. Professor Greely graduated from Stanford in 1974 and from Yale Law School in 1977. He served as a law clerk for Judge John Minor Wisdom on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and for Justice Potter Stewart of the United States Supreme Court. He began teaching at Stanford in 1985. He is a member of Bio-X, the Child Health Research Institute, the Stanford Cancer Institute, and the Stanford Neurosciences Institute. His book "The End of Sex and the Future of Human Reproduction" was published in 2018 by Harvard University Press.
  • Bathsheba Grossman is a mathematical sculptor, instantiating her own designs as well as scientific illustrations as 3D physical objects. She is a pioneer in the use of freeform fabrication in metal for art, as well as 3D laser etching in glass.
  • Rosanna Guadagno is a social psychologist who conducts research at Stanford's Peace Innovation Lab and who teaches Emerging Media and Communication at the University of Texas at Dallas. She was previously at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at UC Santa Barbara and served as a Program Director at the National Science Foundation for three programs. Her work has been widely published in scholarly journals and covered by mass media. Her forthcoming book is "Why We Click: The Psychology of Social Media."
  • Thomas Haakenson is Associate Provost at California College of the Arts, as well as Vice President of the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Alumni Association. Haakenson is coeditor of the series German Visual Culture, co-coordinator of the Visual Culture Network of the German Studies Association, and vice president of the Northern California Chapter of the Fulbright Association. He has been published widely, including in New German Critique, Cabinet, Rutgers Art Review, German Studies Review, and the anthologies Legacies of Modernism and Memorialization in Germany Since 1945. He has received awards and fellowships from the United States Fulbright Program, the Social Science Research Council, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, and the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, among others.
  • Yoon Chung Han is an interactive media artist, award-winning interaction designer and educator. Over the past ten years, she has created a wide range of interactive 2D/3D audiovisual art installations including biologic art, data visualization and sonification, generative art, and audiovisual interface design. Her recent research focus was on multimodal interactions using body data, in particular on creating a personalized experience in media arts using biometric data visualization and sonification. Her works have been presented in many international exhibitions, conferences and academic journals such as ACM SIGGRAPH Art gallery, Japan Media Arts Festival, London Science Museum, Media City Seoul, ZKM, NIME, ISEA, ACM Multimedia, ACM SIGCHI, IEEE Vis, and Leonardo Journal. She earned her bachelor and the first Master degree at the Seoul National University, and her second Master degree at Design | Media Arts, University of California, Los Angeles. She worked at Samsung Electronics in S.Korea as a graphic designer and was a visiting researcher/data visualization specialist at SENSEable City Lab, MIT in Cambridge, MA. She holds Ph.D. in Media Arts and Technology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently an assistant professor in the department of design in the San Jose State University.
  • Don Hanson is an Internet artist, electronic musician, hardware hacker, graphic designer, visual jockey, gif maker, and new media art researcher based in Oakland. In 2020 Hanson created the online exhibition space newart.city that has been used for major exhibitions of online art by Gray Area and SJSU CADRE.
  • Juniper Harrower studies the complexities of species interactions under climate change as both an ecologist and an artist. As a PhD candidate in Environmental Studies at UC Santa Cruz, her research focuses on the symbiotic interactions between Joshua trees, their soil fungi, and moth pollinators in Joshua Tree National Park. She uses current science methods and a multi-media place based art practice to investigate the outcomes of human influence on ecological systems. By approaching her study system through art and science, she hopes to better understand the form and function of the organisms she studies as well as share the hidden beauty of these threatened species interactions with others. Harrower's research is published in both science and art scholarly journals, and has contributed to shaping environmental policy and advising the Department of Fish and Wildlife's review of Joshua trees for endangered species status. Her work is exhibited locally and internationally in galleries and museums, and her research and artistic products have received broad exposure in popular media such as National Geographic, the associated press, podcasts, music festivals and conferences.
  • Minna Harri received an MFA in Performance and Theory from Theater Academy Helsinki in her native Finland, relocated to San Francisco in 2008 via Amsterdam in the Netherlands (2003-2008) and has since created several choreographies in different locations in the Bay Area, as well as danced for choreographers Laura Arrington, Jesse Hewit (Goldie winner 2010) and Macklin Kowal. Her previous projects have included dance: Life Sustenance, Raja, Everything Under Control that represented Theater Academy Helsinki in Warsaw Theater Schools Festival in 2003, singing in the group Calle Real (2003-2006), three solo shows in galleries in Helsinki (1998, 1999, 2001), published articles in Finnish periodicals and by Theater Academy, and co-curating a performance art salon in Helsinki (2003).
  • Steve Harris lectures at the Department of History of San Francisco State Univ and has researched revolutions in history. His focus is modern European history considering ideas, institutions and practices in a global context. He co-leads with Professor Trevor Getz the "History of the 21st Century" project to re-conceive introductory college history courses. His interests focus on legal and political activities and ideas as expressed in the system of states and empires and their shared culture. This encompasses such issues and topics as international law, sovereignty, revolution and how states and their economies/societies interact. His dissertation "Between Law and Diplomacy: International Dispute Resolution in the Long 19th Century" addressed the development and implications of public international arbitration as a tool of the states' system from the end of the 18th century to World War I. He is currently working on the use of pre-printed, fill in the blank treaties by the British during the "Scramble for Africa" in the late 19th century.
  • Hanna Haslaahti is an artist based in Finland who creates new participatory narratives for the age of avatar with AI and face capturing technology. Together with an international network of artists, technologists and producers, she is striving towards an imaginative, ethical and empowered integration of technology in our lives. She is based in Helsinki and studied in Medialab at Aalto University (MFA 2003). Her recent installation "Captured" premiered at BFI London Film Festival Expanded in 2022 and is currently touring the world.
  • Rachel Haurwitz is the President and CEO of Caribou Biosciences, a genome editing company she co-founded with UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna. In 2014, she was named by Forbes Magazine to the "30 Under 30" list in Science and Healthcare, and in 2016, she was named by the San Francisco Business Times to their "40 Under 40" list. She is also a co-founder of Intellia Therapeutics, a gene therapy company, where she is a member of the board of directors. Rachel is an inventor on several patents and patent applications covering multiple CRISPR-derived technologies, and she has co-authored scientific papers in high impact journals characterizing CRISPR-Cas systems.
  • Katharine Hawthorne is a San Francisco based choreographer and dancer working at the intersection of art and science. She has performed with Hope Mohr Dance, Liss Fain Dance, and Ledges and Bones, among others. Her choreography has been presented widely in the San Francisco Bay Area, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Belgium, Greece, and Argentina. Katharine holds a B.S. in Physics and Dance, with honors, from Stanford University.
  • Marti Hearst is a professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She received BA, MS, and PhD degrees in Computer Science from UC Berkeley and was a Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC from 1994 to 1997. A primary focus of Dr. Hearst's research is user interfaces for search.She just completed the first book on the topic of Search User Interfaces and she has invented or participated in several well-known search interface projects including the Flamenco project that investigated and the promoted the use of faceted metadata for collection navigation. Professor Hearst's other research areas include computational linguistics, information visualization, and analysis of social media.Prof. Hearst has received an NSF CAREER award, an IBM Faculty Award, a Google Research Award, an Okawa Foundation Fellowship, two Excellence in Teaching Awards, and has been principle investigator for more than $3M in research grants.
  • Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison are an artist team, emeritus professors from the University of California San Diego, Department of Visual Arts. They are pioneers in the development and evolution of what can be described as ecologically-based art from a systems perspective.
  • Matt Heckert has been working as an engineer, as well as a performance and sound artist, since 1978. He operates his own design-build shop where he does design, fabrication and machining. One of the founding directors of Survival Research Laboratories, he has built robots and designed soundtracks for performances and films. In 1989 he conceived and developed a group of sound producing machines know as the Mechanical Sound Orchestra and toured it in the United States and Europe. Matt is obsessed with making sound-noise-music with the mechanical devices he builds.
  • Taraneh Hemami is an Iranian-born artist who relocated to the USA after the Iranian revolution of 1979. Hemami's work examines the liminality of her existence, of being of two world that are continuously and contentiously at odds with one another. Through her projects she explores personal and collective stories and histories while creating spaces for creative exchange and dialogue.
  • Lynn Hershman Leeson, Chair of the Film Department at the San Francisco Art Institute and Emeritus at the University of California at Davis, is a multimedia artist whose works include the first interactive laser artdisk, three award-winning feature films, photographs, sculptures, and interactive installations that use the Internet and artificial intelligence software. "The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson" was published by the University of California Press in 2005. "Women Art Revolution" (2010), based on her own archives recently acquired by Stanford Univ, is a documentary history of the feminist art movement that took 42 years to complete. She was honored by the Digital Art Museum in Berlin with the most distinguished honor for lifetime achievement in the field of new media.
  • Cherie Hill aka IrieDance is a choreographer, dancer, teacher and scholar, whose art explores human expression and how it is conveyed through the body in collaboration with nature, music and visual imagery. Her choreographic works juxtapose alternative and cosmic existence with "real-life" experience to provide insight into the causes and rationalities of the universe's time and space continuum. IrieDance works have been showcased at the Live Oak Theatre, Shotwell Studios, the African American Cultural Center, the Black Choreographer's Festival, Anschultz Theatre, Bao Bao Festival, P.L.A.C.E Performance, the San Francisco Cathedral, Omni Oakland Commons, Kinetech Arts, and the Dance A World of Hope Festival in Holland, MI. A lover of dance research, Cherie has published essays in Gender Forum, The Sacred Dance Journal, and In Dance, is the creator of the Sacred Dance Guild's blog, Sacred Dance Trends, and has presented at multiple conferences including the International Conference on Arts and Humanities, the Black Dance Conference, and the National Dance Education Organization Conference. She is currently on faculty at Luna Dance Institute, and a research assistant for hip-hop dance legend Rennie Harris. Learn more at www.iriedance.com .
  • Craig Hobbs is currently Associate Professor of Digital Media Art at San Jos‚ State University in San Jos‚, California. His video projection mapping projects involve collaboration with artists, students, and communities working across cultures and borders. Using workshops and peer-to-peer learning to develop community-based public artworks, his projects address issues of globalization, migration and technology. Hobbs' recent collaborations include Robin Lasser, Migratory Cultures, 2014-2019, 3rd Space Labs, Social Weavers, 2016-18, and Hidden Lily, 2018-19, and Yannick Jacquet of AntiVJ, VPM3D, 2015-2017. Since 2014, he has worked with artists, students, and cultural institutions to create video mapping projects in the cities of Bangalore, Panjim, Vadodara and Chennai, India, and across the wider Bay Area. Hobbs produces large-scale public art, projection mapping projects and films. His past collaborators include Natalie Jeremijenko, Usman Haque, Blast Theory, Andrea Polli, Yung-Ta Chang, AntiVJ, Robin Lasser, Thomas Dolby and fabric | ch, among others. His films include Solatrium and We Won't Bow Down. Hobbs received his BFA from California Institute of the Arts and his MFA from the Digital Arts and New Media program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He has served as a visiting professor at Conservatoire National des Arts et M‚tiers in Paris, France and as researcher and lecturer at the University of California, Santa Cruz and California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
  • Ian Hodder was trained at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London and at Cambridge University where he obtained his PhD in 1975. After a brief period teaching at Leeds, he returned to Cambridge where he taught until 1999. During that time he became Professor of Archaeology and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. In 1999 he moved to teach at Stanford University as Dunlevie Family Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center. His main large-scale excavation projects have been at Haddenham in the east of England and at Çatalhöyük in Turkey where he worked from 1993 to 2018. He has been awarded the Oscar Montelius Medal by the Swedish Society of Antiquaries, the Huxley Memorial Medal by the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Fyssen International Prize, the Gold Medal by the Archaeological Institute of America, and has Honorary Doctorates from Bristol and Leiden Universities. In 2019 he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the Queen's Honor List. His main books include Spatial analysis in archaeology (1976 CUP), Symbols in action (1982 CUP), Reading the past (1986 CUP), The domestication of Europe (1990 Blackwell), The archaeological process (1999 Blackwell), The leopard's tale: revealing the mysteries of €atalh”yk (2006 Thames and Hudson), Entangled. An archaeology of the relationships between humans and things (2012 Wiley Blackwell).
  • Rhonda Holberton is an interdisciplinary artist. Her recent installation work addresses the circuitry of power and investigates the game-like structures that direct systems of desire and control. The work relies on a displaced scientific/corporate language to question systems of commerce, capitalism, consumption, corporate futures, media, and resource supplies. Recently Rhonda co-organized the Rising Tide Conference, a joint effort between CCA and Stanford to bring together an international gathering of artists, scientists, policy-makers, and business professionals to engage in conversations about the intersections of ethics, aesthetics, and environmentalism.
  • Cynthia Hooper's videos, essays, paintings, and research-based projects examine infrastructural landscapes in the United States and Mexico. Her detailed investigations patiently capture the incidental and emblematic activities that define these complicated places, and also advocate for the efforts of regional laborers, activists, and researchers who tactically refashion their complex geography. Exhibitions and screenings include the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, Centro Cultural Tijuana, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, and MASS MoCA. Published work includes Places Journal and Arid: A Journal of Desert Art, Design and Ecology. Residencies and grants include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Djerassi Resident Artists Program, the Graham Foundation and the Gunk Foundation. Cynthia currently lives in northern California.
  • Robert Horn, who in 2015 was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Thomas Gilbert Award from the International Society for Performance and Instruction, and the Donald N. Michael Award, is a political scientist with a special interest in public policy, organizational strategy, and knowledge management. Bob was a visiting scholar at Stanford University, where he wrote Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century. Bob has also taught at Harvard and Columbia, American, and Sheffield (U.K.) universities. Previously, he was the founder and CEO of Information Mapping, Inc., an international consulting and software company. He is also a member of the International Futures Forum, a policy think tank, and president of the Meridian International Institute on Governance, Leadership Learning and the Future. He is a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and a Woodrow Wilson Fellow.
  • Carrie Hott (Media Artist) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. Through her practice, she works to find origins, connect tangents, and locate invisible histories. Her research interests include whales, artificial light, blackouts, lace, nets, tools, and the systems often employed to learn about our surroundings. Hott was born in Fort Collins, Colorado and grew up in the southwestern United States between Arizona, Colorado, and California. She received her BFA in Painting with a minor in Psychology from Arizona State University in 2003, and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. In addition to working in installation, video, and drawing, she regularly completes related projects that include mixed media presentations, classes, and various collaborative endeavors. She is a past founder of Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland and Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn. She is currently one half of JOAN 5000.
  • Jesse Houlding has exhibited nationally and locally, including at SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Center, San Diego Institute Museum of the Living Artist, Stanford University, San Francisco State University, Kala Art Institute, the LAB, and Root Division. As a recipient of the 2009 American Psychoanalytic Association Academic Fellowship he spent a year researching psychoanalytic theories relating to his practice. In October of 2011 he became the Print Shop Manager at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley. Jesse was recently interviewed in the art practice interview blog, In The Make http://www.inthemake.net/Jesse-Houlding
  • William Hsu is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University. His interests are in interactive computer music, computer architecture and performance evaluation.
  • Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather have been working together for over 10 years as the collaborative Hughen/Starkweather. These San Francisco visual artists create abstract artworks based on data. Each project focuses on a specific location or topic and begins with extensive research including current and historic maps and photographs; scientific and numerical data; and interviews with local community members and specialists from a variety of backgrounds. Based on this gathered information, Hughen/Starkweather create abstract artworks that layer past, present, and future narratives to create complex new forms. By allowing the artworks to resonate with the collected data without presenting it in a didactic way, the artists do not attempt to offer concrete information, but hope to prompt questions and new perspectives.
  • Jeff Hull's aim, As a street artist and guerrilla events producer, was "to infuse more variability and play into the civic realm" and to create opportunities for real cultural exchange in negative urban space. The result was Oaklandish, a decade strong grassroots community arts organization with 21 consecutive "Best of the East Bay" Awards to its credit. Having dabbled in many creative professions, he was not satisfied until he invented his own job; Creative Director at Nonchalance, a hybrid arts consultancy with an expertise in Situational Design. Their mission is to provoke discovery through visceral experience and pervasive play.
  • Suzanne Husky is a French American visual artist that has been living and practicing in the Bay Area since 2000. She obtained my MFA from the Beaux-Art school of Bordeaux, France, spending half of the program duration at CCAC. The socialist ideologies and the rural environment of 1970s France molded her upbringing and became important components of her work. Our intimate relations with plants, animals, the earth, and how we interact together in poetic and political ways, are examined through sculpture, installation, drawing, documentary photography, and film. Problems relating to the exploitation of natural resources, landscape use and globalization are the persistent backdrop of her multimedia practice.
  • Javier Ideami (2023 bio) creative drive and innovation has spanned multiple areas across technology, art, science and media. From founding and driving tech startups to producing award winning creative productions in a wide diversity of areas, Javier Ideami's ventures, projects and creations have covered areas like: AI, generative art, AR, VR, Interactive tech and installations, wearable tech, filmmaking direction, production, VFX and post, software development of creative and design apps, music composition, pro photography and retouching, ideation and edtech, innovation methodologies, writing and publishing, acting, creative performance and presenting, and many more. Javier Ideami’s projects and talks have taken him from Silicon Valley to the jungles of Bali, including Stanford University and UC Berkeley, the United Nations FAO HQ, the financial center of London, the International Cultural Diplomacy Conference in Berlin and many others locations worldwide. (check ideami.com to explore the latest he is doing)."
  • Javier Ideami is a Spanish-born multidisciplinary artist and founder of Ideami Studios. With studies in both artistic (Painting, Photography, Filmmaking, Design and Music) and technical fields (Computing Engineering), Javier has been blending the arts and the sciences, being awarded numerous awards for his work across different disciplines. Javier has exhibited his creative work in many galleries in both Europe and the USA. Javier collaborates regularly with artists, architects, engineers and other creative minds in innovative projects around the world. He is one of the founders of the creative group RAN, winner of an award by the Spanish museum of art and technology Laboral. He was also the founder of the Web 2.0 online application Ewidi, an online social network in 33 languages. In 2008 Javier co-founded Flaii, a Silicon Valley startup in the social networking and gaming space. Javier later launched the interactive creative application Posterini. Javier is also an award-winning filmmaker, screenwriter, and director who occasionally works as well on the photography and music of his films. His filmography includes the films: 2011. The Weight of Light (HD), 2010. The Long Goodbye (Red One 4K), 2010. Erase Love (Red One 4K), 2008. La Ultima Cena (HD), 2007 - El Cuadro (HD), 2006 - Magic Mountain (35mm, Dolby Digital), 2005 - The Moontamer, 2004 - Ego. They won awards at the London International Sci-Fi Film festival, at the Ourense International Film Festival, at the Gaudi Prizes in Barcelona, and at the San Francisco International SFShorts Film Festival. He has also won awards for his photography and music He has also produced the illustrated book for children "The Moontamer" (2010).
  • Amy Ione, an international lecturer, painter, and writer, is presently the Director of the Diatrope Institute in Berkeley. She has published several books, most recently Innovation and Visualization: Trajectories, Strategies, and Myths (Rodopi, 2005), and is working on a special issue for the Journal of the History of Neuroscience on Visual Images and Visualization.
  • David Israel received his BA in Philosophy from Harvard College (1965) and his PhD in Philosophy (focusing on Philosophy of Logic, Language and Mathematics) from UC Berkeley in 1973. After nine years in academia, (and that explains why it took so long to finish his PhD) he entered the wonderful world of contract research in Artificial Intelligence, a world in which most contracts are let by DARPA (the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency) and now IARPA (DARPA's much younger sibling in the Intelligence Community). Over the past decade or so, he has been Principal Investigator (PI) of the AQUAINT Project (Advanced Question-Answering for Intelligence; sponsored by ARDA, a predecessor of IARPA); PI of Halo Phase I; Senior Advisor, Halo, Phase II (Halo was focused on representing and reasoning scientific knowledge, e.g., from Intro College Textbooks in Chemistry, Physics and Biology; it was funded by Vulcan Research, a component of Vulcan, founded by Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft); Chief Scientist, CALO Project (DARPA; CALO was inarguably the largest AI research project in history, focused on building personal assistants for "knowledge workers" ); PI, GALE Project, Phase I; co-PI, Phase II (DARPA; focused on machine translation from both text and speech, in Chinese and Arabic); PI, Mobius Project (DARPA; a very large exploration of the possibilities for Machine Reading), Years 1 and 2; Senior Technical Advisor, Bootstrapped Learning Project (DARPA) and PI of the Machine Reading Project (DARPA; the full follow-on to the Mobius exploration).
  • Lucia Jacobs is a cognitive neuroscientist whose research addresses fundamental questions about the evolution of the brain and cognition. The goal of her research is to understand how a mind is created from the building blocks of learning, memory and the causal links among events and how cognitive primitives expand, duplicate, exapt and specialize over developmental and evolutionary time. Jacobs trained in animal behavior (1978 B.S., Cornell), behavioral ecology (1987 Ph.D., Princeton) and neuroscience (postdoctoral positions: Universities of Toronto, Pittsburgh and Utah). She joined the University of California, Berkeley faculty in 1993 and is currently Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. Academic awards and honors include the 1995 Herbert Spencer Lecture at Oxford, 1999 Prytanean Prize, 2004 Santa Fe Public Lecture and the 2013 Michigan State Distinguished Lecturer in Cognitive Science. Her work focuses on the evolution of spatial navigation and the hippocampus, with studies exploring species, sex and developmental differences in the expression of this trait, culminating in the publication of the 2003 parallel map theory of hippocampal function (Psychological Review). She has published over 40 scientific articles in the field of animal behavior, cognitive psychology and neuroscience and is currently writing a book on olfaction and the evolution of navigation for Princeton University Press.
  • Mark Jacobson is Director of the Atmosphere/Energy Program and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University. He is also a Senior Fellow of the Woods Institute for the Environment and Senior Fellow of the Precourt Institute for Energy. He received a B.S. in Civil Engineering with distinction, an A.B. in Economics with distinction, and an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University, in 1988. He has been on the faculty at Stanford since 1994. His work relates to the development and application of numerical models to understand better the effects of energy systems and vehicles on climate and air pollution and the analysis of renewable energy resources. He has published two textbooks of two editions each and over 120 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles. He received the 2005 American Meteorological Society Henry G. Houghton Award for "significant contributions to modeling aerosol chemistry and to understanding the role of soot and other carbon particles on climate." He co-authored a 2009 cover article in Scientific American with Dr. Mark DeLucchi of U.C. Davis on how to power the world with renewable energy. He is also on the Energy Efficiency and Renewables Advisory Committee to the U.S. Secretary of Energy.
  • Elizabeth Jameson is an artist who specializes in the intersection of art, science, and medical technology. She transforms her brain scans, particularly MRIs, into provocative images that challenge how society views the brain, and illness. Since her diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, she has continually undergone brain scans to track the progression of her disease. Initially the sterile black and white images of the MRIs of her brain were terrifying - she refused to look at them. She began using art to reinterpret these images. Her work invites people to discuss what it means to live in an imperfect body, and to stare directly at the beauty and complexity of the imperfect brain with curiosity. She has spent over a decade transforming her MRIs, and is now focused on the advanced technology of Diffusion Tensor Images (DTIs). She also uses storytelling, technology, and design to focus on expanding the narrative of illness. She is currently working on untapped potential of time spent in waiting rooms of clinics, using portraiture, interactive art, and collecting stories to broaden and deepen the narrative around illness. Currently, Elizabeth creates her work with the aid of her artist's assistant, Catherine Monahon.
  • Tito Jankowski (Biocurious) is one of 6 co-founders of BioCurious, the first world's first community biotech lab in Sunnyvale. He is a proponent of open source hardware, biotech hackerspaces, and synthetic biology and his work is covered by the New York Times, Wired, Nature, and GQ France, and "Maker Pro" by Maker Media. He's also the co-founder of Pearl Biotech, which makes tools for working with DNA, and an evangelist with Crowd Supply, helping open source products get crowdfunded.
  • Christina Jauernik is an architect, artistic researcher and performance artist based in Austria. She studied contemporary dance at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Amsterdam, choreography and visual arts practices at Dartington College of Arts (UK), art and architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the University of Arts Berlin. She is Senior Scientist at the Institute for Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Currently, she collaborates with Wolfgang Tschapeller and Vicki Kirby on the artistic research project „Unstable Bodies“ funded by the Austrian Science Funds.
  • Li Jiang (Stanford/ Robotics) is the director of Stanford AIRE (AI, Robotics and Education). Dr. Jiang has been working in the field of Robotics and AI for more than 2 decades. His current research focuses on how AI and robotic technologies will impact our education system and how we need to adjust our education system to accommodate the coming era of robotics and AI. Dr. Jiang was the top award,"Best of Innovations Award" winner for 2014 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Innovation Awards and he is a board member of International Robotic Expert Committee for China. Dr. Jiang has more than 50 U.S and international patents granted and pending. He holds a Master degree on Innovative Design and Ph.D on Robotics from Stanford University.
  • Jeff Johnson is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of San Francisco. He is also a principal at Wiser Usability, a consultancy focused on elder usability. After earning B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Yale and Stanford Universities, he worked as a UI designer, implementer, manager, usability tester, and researcher at Cromemco, Xerox, US West, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun. He has previously taught at Stanford University, Mills College, and the University of Canterbury. He is a member of the ACM SIGCHI Academy and a recipient of SIGCHI's Lifetime Achievement in Practice Award. He has authored articles on a variety of topics in HCI, as well as the books GUI Bloopers (1st and 2nd eds.), Web Bloopers, Designing with the Mind in Mind (1st and 2nd eds.), Conceptual Models: Core to Good Design (with Austin Henderson), and Designing User Interfaces for an Aging Population (with Kate Finn).
  • Terry Johnson has a master's degree in chemical engineering from MIT and is currently teaching Bioengineering at UC Berkeley. He hopes that by doing so, he will be giving students the tools that they will need to repair him as he gets older. He teaches courses in a wide range of subjects, displaying a versatility that has prevented him from achieving any actual expertise. In 2010 he received the Golden Apple Award for Outstanding Teaching, and was one of the recipients of Berkeley's 2013 Distinguished Teaching Awards. He is also co-author of the popular science book "How to Defeat Your Own Clone (and other tips for surviving the biotech revolution)."
  • Caroline Jones is Professor of art history, Director of the Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, and Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives in the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, as well as its interface with science. Dr. Jones has curated exhibitions such as Sensorium (2006), Video Trajectories (2007), and Hans Haacke 1967 (2011) at the MIT Visual Arts Center; her solo-authored publications include Machine in the Studio (1996/98), Eyesight Alone (2005/08), and The Global Work of Art (2016). She has edited Picturing Science, Producing Art (1998), Sensorium (2006), and Experience (2016). Her current research into bio-art and planetary symbiosis will result in an exhibition and publication Symbionts: Contemporary Artists and the Biosphere, slated for October 2022. Jones received her MA/PhD from Stanford University. She has been a fellow at the Institut national d'histoire de l'art in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Susan and Donald Newhouse Center for the Humanities at Wellesley College, and the Wissenschaftskolleg and Max-Planck-Institut fr Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. Jones has received Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Humanities awards, and her films and exhibitions have appeared at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Arts in Tokyo, the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
  • Suyash Joshi is a creative technologist, magician and STEAM evangelist based in San Francisco. He has been passionate about magic and technology since childhood and has blended the two in a one of a kind "STEAM Magic Show" for online and in-person performance at schools, maker faire, hackerspaces, and industry conferences. His magic involves emerging technologies - AI, IoT, Augmented Reality with optical illusions, and math-based tricks that not only entertain but also inspire audiences about STEAM subjects. He brings twelve years of work experience as a senior software engineer in Silicon Valley at companies like Oracle and RingCentral.
  • Shamit Kachru (Stanford) is a Professor of Physics at Stanford University and at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. He obtained his A.B. from Harvard University in 1990 and his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1994. He was a Research Associate at Rutgers University in 1996-1997. He became an Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley in 1997, and moved to Stanford in 1999. He was also a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton in 1999. Dr Kachru won an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in 1998, the Bergmann Memorial Award in 1999, and a Packard Foundation Fellowship in 2000. In 2008, he was awarded the 2008 American Chapter of the Indian Physics Association (ACIPA) Outstanding Young Physicist Prize "for fundamental contributions shedding light on the nature of string theory ground states, and on the origin of dark energy in string theory, leading to an accelerating universe." Dr. Kachru is interested in the physics of string theory and M theory. His previous work has focused on stringy modifications of geometry, duality and exact results in supersymmetric compactifications, and supersymmetry breaking. Most recently, he has been doing research at the interface between string theory and cosmology.
  • Eran Kahana is an experienced attorney concentrating his practice on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and intellectual property law. He counsels clients on a wide variety of matters related to cybersecurity, privacy, technology law, artificial intelligence, trademarks, patents, and copyright issues. In addition, Eran is a fellow at Stanford Law School and an advisory board member of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Law Society. He also serves in a variety of cybersecurity thought-leadership roles in which he publishes and lectures on the intersect between the law and artificial intelligence and is the co-author of the book The Law of Artificial Intelligence and Smart Machines, a publication of the American Bar Association. Eran is a graduate of the FBI's Citizen Academy and works closely with the FBI, Department of Justice, Secret Service, and colleagues from the private and academic sectors to promote and sustain cybersecurity best practices. To that end, Eran serves as general counsel of InfraGard (Minnesota Chapter), and as a member of the governance committee of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, a public-private sector organization affiliated with the FBI. He also serves on the Advisory Board of MN Cyber, an organization dedicated to position Minnesota as a national leader in cybersecurity. Eran has been interviewed on artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, privacy, and technology law for Bloomberg Law, BBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), KABC Radio, WCCO Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, Star Tribune, TheStreet.com, Stanford University Radio, KZSU FM, Twin Cities Business magazine, and Quartz.
  • Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: providing Universal Access to All Knowledge. He is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, one of the largest libraries in the world. Soon after graduating from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied artificial intelligence, Kahle helped found the company Thinking Machines, a supercomputer maker. In 1989, Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), later selling the company to AOL. In 1996, Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, which helps catalog the Web, selling it to Amazon.com in 1999. The Internet Archive, which he founded in 1996, now preserves 25 petabytes of data-the books, Web pages, music, television, and software of our cultural heritage, working with more than 450 library and university partners to create a digital library, accessible to all.
  • Rebecca Kamen's work explores the nexus of art and science. Her recent large- scale sculpture installation, Divining Nature: An Elemental Garden has been informed by wide ranging research into chemistry, cosmology, spirituality and philosophy. She has also investigated rare books and manuscripts at the libraries of the American Philosophical Society and the Chemical Heritage Foundation, utilizing these scientific collections as a muse in the creation of her work. She has exhibited and lectured both nationally, and internationally in China, Hong Kong, and Egypt. She has been the recipient of a Virginia Museum of Fine Arts Professional Fellowship, a Pollack Krasner Foundation Fellowship, a Strauss Fellowship, and a travel grant fellowship from the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Her work is represented in many private and public collections such as, KPMG Peat Martwick Corporation, Gannett Corporation, IBM, Capital One and the Institute for Defense Analysis.
  • Virj Kan is a designer, engineer, media artist, and entrepreneur. Her work investigates new paradigms for design, through transdisciplinary research and technology development. Whether it is in the domain of business, technology or art, her work centers on reshaping human relationships with the environment and each other. Currently she is the CEO of Primitives Biodesign, a biomaterials b-corp that produces functional, intelligent, and biodegradable materials to combat environmental issues in ocean conservation, plastics pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and food waste. Before getting involved with Primitives Biodesign, she designed IoT and mobile computing products at Samsung Design Innovation Center and 3D human-robotic interfaces at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Virj holds a Master of Science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Bachelor of Science from Art Center College of Design. Her work has been recognized with the Green Award at the Greentech Festival, SXSW Interactive Innovation award, Best Paper Award at the ACM SIGCHI, Honorable Mention Awards at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), Fast Company Innovation by Design, Ars Electronica, SXSW, and Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
  • Jaroslaw Kapuscinski is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at Stanford University. Trained first as a pianist and composer at the Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw (1987, 1991), Jaroslaw Kapuscinski developed an intermedia idiom during residencies and studies at Banff Centre for the Arts (1988-89), National Audiovisual Institute (INA) in Paris (1991-92), and doctoral studies at the University of California, San Diego (1992-97). His work was presented among others at New York MOMA; ZKM in Karlsruhe; Centre Pompidou in Paris; and Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid. He received awards at the UNESCO Film sur l'Art festival in Paris (1992), VideoArt Festival Locarno (1992, 1993), and Festival of New Cinema and New Media in Montr‚al (2000). He has taught at McGill University in Montreal (2000-01) and Conservatory of Music at the University of the Pacific (2004-08) and lectured internationally.
  • Pantea Karimi (Media Artist) has lived, studied, and worked in Iran, the UK and the US and presently resides in San Jose, California. She is a printmaker and painter and also holds a professional degree with work experience in graphic design, all of which have influenced her fine art aesthetic and practice. Karimi earned her MFA in printmaking and painting from San Jose State University in 2009. She also holds an International Diploma in printmaking and glassworks from Hastings College of Arts and Technology in England in 2004 and an MFA in graphic design from the University of Art in Tehran, Iran, in 1999. Karimi's fine arts and graphic works have been featured in several publications in Iran, Italy, the UK and the United States. Her prints and digital works have been exhibited in various venues in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Mexico, the UK, and the United States, including the de Young Museum and the Yerba Buena Art Center in San Francisco, 2012 ZERO1 Biennial, the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, the Peninsula Museum of Art in Burlingame, the Google Company in Mountain View, the NASA Research Center in Sunnyvale, the San Jose City Hall, the New Bedford Art Museum in Massachusetts, and Platform in Munich, Germany. She is the recipient of the 2016-2017 Kala Fellowship-Residency Award; the 2010 Distinguished Artist Award by the City of Cupertino Fine Arts Commission; and the 2011 Multicultural Arts Leadership Initiative Fellowship. Karimi's current work is an exploration into the pages of medieval and early modern scientific manuscripts, particularly, Persian, Arab and European and the long-term exchange of knowledge across these cultures. She works with a wide range of materials and uses installation and 2-dimentional forms as well as video projection to create a novel and dynamic visual interpretation of the scientific concepts and ideas presented in the manuscripts.
  • Amy Karle is an internationally award-winning ultra-contemporary artist specializing in emerging and exponential technologies. She creates new, hybridized forms of art synthesizing physical, biological, and computational systems. Karle employs science and tech tools to create expertly crafted, emotionally engaging, intellectually stimulating artworks that offer a glimpse into the potential of technology to shape our future. Karle has exhibited worldwide including at: Ars Electronica (Austria), Centre Pompidou (France), FILE (Brazil), Media Arts Biennale (China), Mori Art Museum (Japan), Museum of Contemporary Art (Taiwan), The Smithsonian (USA), and Triennale Milano (Italy). She is frequently invited to share her insights and innovations as an expert speaker and participant in think tanks, and to foster dialogue on the impact of deep tech, AI, and the future of human enhancement. She was honored as one of BBC’s 100 most inspiring and influential women in the world.
  • Drue Kataoka is a visual artist based in Silicon Valley. Artworks integrate Asian brush painting techniques with mirrors, time dilation and brainwave (EEG) data. New art forms developed by Drue are Magic Boxes and Membranes. Has done numerous corporate and private commissions, and collaborated with over 20 organizations. Featured at the first art exhibit in zero gravity at the International Space Station. Has presented at the Annual Meetings in Davos (thrice) and in Dalian & Yangon. Solo Art exhibition in the Congress Center in Davos in 2012. Recent work also featured on CNN, CBS, ABC, Barrons, Wired Magazine and others. Since 2001, has endowed the Drue Kataoka Art Scholarship for Youth. Young Global Leader, World Economic Forum. Recipient of numerous awards including the Martin Luther King, Jr Research & Education Institute Award for extensive community service. Co-founder of Aboomba.com, the destination for Intelligent Style, integrating art, science and social responsibility with fashion.
  • Acclaimed as a "poet of ideas" by The New Yorker and a "multimedia philosopher-prophet" by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer based in the United States and Italy. Recently he opened the first restaurant for plants, serving gourmet sunlight to rose bushes at the Crocker Art Museum. He has also exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork at the Judah L. Magnes Museum, and attempted to genetically engineer God in collaboration with scientists at the University of California. Exhibited internationally, his projects have been documented by PBS, Reuters, and the BBC World Service, garnering favorable attention in periodicals ranging from Science to Flash Art to The Economist. He is most recently the author of "Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age", published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and "Virtual Words: Language on the Edge of Science and Technology", published by Oxford in 2011. His fiction includes "The Book of the Unknown", published by Random House, awarded the American Library Association's Sophie Brody Medal in 2010. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.
  • Andra Keay is the Managing Director of Silicon Valley Robotics, an industry group supporting innovation and commercialization of robotics technologies. Andra is also founder of Robot Launch, global robotics startup competition, cofounder of Robot Garden hackerspace, mentor at hardware accelerators and startup advisor. As well as being an active angel investor in robotics startups, Andra is a Director at Robohub.org, the global site for news and views on robotics. Andra graduated as an ABC film, television and radio technician in 1986 and obtained a BA in Communication from the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Australia, in 1998, where she taught interaction design from 2009 to 2010. She obtained her MA in Human-Robot Culture at the University of Sydney, Australia in 2011, building on a background as a robot geek, STEM educator and film-maker and was selected as an HRI Pioneer in 2010. Andra has keynoted at major conferences in USA, China, Australia, Canada, etc. She is also a Visiting Scholar with the UC's CITRIS People and Robots Research Group.
  • Stuart Kendall, who currently teaches in the graduate design program at the California College of the Arts, is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of modern and contemporary poetics, visual culture, ecology, and design. His books include The Ends of Art and Design, Georges Bataille, and eleven volumes of translations of poetry, philosophy, and visual and cultural criticism. His edited or co-edited works include Clayton Eshleman: The Whole Art, Terrence Malick: Film and Philosophy, and a special issue of Boom: A Journal of California devoted to contemporary California design. Jerome Rothenberg praised his version of the Mesopotamian Gilgamesh poems as the "exemplary version for our time." Stuart has degrees in philosophy, comparative religious studies, and comparative literature. He has taught at SUNY Stony Brook, Boston University, Stanford University, and the California College of the Arts and given lectures at colleges, universities, conferences, and colloquia around the United States. Stuart is currently the President of the Design Studies Forum, a College Art Association Affiliated Society that promotes the study of design history, theory and practice.
  • Elizabeth Kessler is a lecturer in American Studies and Art History at Stanford University. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and has been awarded fellowships by NASA-Society for the History of Technology, Stanford University, and the Smithsonian Institute National Air and Space Museum. Her first book, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime (University of Minnesota), on the aesthetics of deep-space images, was published in 2012. She is currently working on new project about time capsules.
  • Oussama Khatib, Head of the Stanford Robotics Lab. received his Doctorate degree in Electrical Engineering from Sup'Aero in France in 1980. He is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He is Co-Editor of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics series, and has served on the Editorial Boards of several journals as well as Chair or Co-Chair for numerous international conferences. He co-edited the Springer Handbook of Robotics, which received the PROSE Award for Excellence in Physical Sciences & Mathematics and was also the winner in the category Engineering & Technology. He is the President of the International Foundation of Robotics Research (IFRR) and a recipient of the Japan Robot Association (JARA) Award in Research and Development.
  • Cosmo Kichman, nee Dr. Daniel Grupp, is a well-published and patented nanotechnology physicist and entrepreneur. Prior to making art, he was most recently a Visiting Scholar at Stanford in the Electrical Engineering department. His transistor technology is currently being developed at Sematech. He has always sought to maintain a sense of play, evident in activities from costuming to fire performances, to scientific innovation, and now to sculpture. His current work will be on exhibit and visitors can participate in creating art while he is the Artist in Residence for the month of March 2009 at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
  • Catherine King, Executive Producer at Global Fund for Women, has a passion for the power of media and the arts to create awareness and action on social justice issues. As Vice President of Exhibitions and Programs at the International Museum of Women from 2007-2014, she was responsible for developing award-winning online media projects, social media advocacy campaigns, pop-up installations, public programs, and international partnerships. Major projects included Muslima: Muslim Women's Art & Voices, MAMA: Motherhood Around the Globe, Economica: Women and the Global Economy, and Women, Power and Politics. Prior to IMOW, Catherine served for six years as Chief Curator of Exhibitions and Programming for the San Francisco Public Library. Before that she led content development for several of the first online education brands including Dummies.com and HungryMinds.com. In previous positions she directed digital storytelling for emerging mobile media platforms at Visible Interactive and Antenna Audio for clients including the Smithsonian Institution, Lucasfilm, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Catherine has consulted to the Bay Area Video Coalition, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, and was on staff at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She holds a degree in Art History from Smith College and studied at the Universit‚ de Paris (La Sorbonne) and Institut d'tudes Politiques.
  • David A. Kirby is Chair of the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies in the Liberal Arts and Director of the Science Technology & Society Program at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. Previously he was Professor of Science Communication Studies in the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. His research examines how movies, television, and computer games act as vehicles of scientific communication, trying to understand how the stories told about science in media products impact the construction of ideas and our perceptions of science as a social, cultural, and political force. Several of his publications address the relationship between cinema, genetics and biotechnology. He has also explored the collaboration between scientists and the entertainment industry in his book "Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema" (MIT Press, 2011), which was named one of Physics World magazine's top 10 best popular-physics books of 2011. He is currently writing a book titled "Indecent Science: Religion, Science, and Movie Censorship".
  • Shona Kitchen is an international multidisciplinary artist/designer. Graduating in Architecture at the Royal College of Art in London, she continued for several years within the Interaction Design Department, while running her own London-based design partnership KRD (Kitchen Rogers Design) until 2004. Now Residing in California, Kitchen is a parttime professor of Digital Media Art at San Jose State University's "CADRE Lab" and serves as a thesis advisor at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. Most recent works are a multi-site electronic installation DATA NATURE (Hooker & Kitchen) centered at San Jose International Airport, conceptual housing project ELECTROPLEX HEIGHTS (Hooker & Kitchen) part of a touring exhibition commissioned by Vitra Design Museum & Art Center Pasadena, DOMESTIC WILDERNESS CHANNEL (Shona Kitchen) a site-specific exhibition at Montalvo Arts Center, DREAMING F.I.D.S., commissioned for San Jose International Airport, and THE GREEN CORRIDOR for Deptford Creek in East London, a 328-foot long, 10-foot high solar-powered billboard.
  • Walter Kitundu is an artist and designer, instrument builder and photographer. He is a Senior Design Developer for the Studio Gallery at the Exploratorium. In this capacity he helps to design and build environments for learning, develops and facilitates activities, and provides artistic direction. As an artist he has created hand built record players powered by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves. Walter has performed and been in residence at art centers and science museums internationally. He has performed with the renowned Kronos Quartet, bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, the electronic music duo Matmos, and the legendary Marshall Allen - in venues from Carnegie Hall to a high school library in Egilstaadir, Iceland.
  • Since November of 2011, Margot Knight is Executive Director of the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, her seventh job in the arts and humanities in 35 years. Each position has incorporated the things she loves--history, challenges, artists, scholars, education and access. She has the privilege to oversees one of the foremost artist communities on the planet AND is encouraged to pursue her own literary pursuits. Previous positions include the presidencies of United Arts of Central Florida and United Arts of Raleigh & Wake County, executive director of the Idaho Commission on the Arts and Washington State University's Oral History Office and staff positions with the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies and Washington Commission for the Humanities. She serves on the Private Sector Council for Americans for the Arts and is a proud recipient of the Michael Newton Award. A frequent consultant, speaker and grants panelist, she has also served on over 25 chamber of commerce, tourism, regional planning and cultural boards, including the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, Visit Orlando, and Florida Cultural Alliance.
  • Brian Knutson is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Stanford University. His research focuses on the neural basis of emotional experience and expression. He investigates the topic with a number of methods including self-report, measurement of nonverbal behavior, comparative ethology, psychopharmacology, and neuroimaging. His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience, and to explore the implications of these findings for the assessment and treatment of clinical disorders as well as for economic behavior. Knutson is a fellow of the Academy for Behavioral Medicine Research as well as the Association for Psychological Science. He received a PhD in experimental psychology from Stanford University, and has conducted postdoctoral research in affective neuroscience at UC-San Francisco and at the National Institutes of Health. He recently proposed a "deep science" approach capable of linking neural, affective, and motivational levels of analysis. Although traditionally considered separately, there are links between affect, motivation, and choice. To examine these links, "deep science" frameworks that seek to explicitly connect levels of analysis may complement more popular "broad science" approaches that seek to more exhaustively characterize a single level of analysis (e.g., at the circuit, experiential, or behavioral levels). In recent years, Brian Knutson's team has shown that brain activity is a good predictor of which videos will go viral, which crowdfunding campaigns are the most likely to succeed, and even of what stock prices will do.
  • Sachiko Kodama is a Japanese artist who links emerging natural phenomena with plastic art to create mixed media works that reference the relationship between organic form/motion and light/sound. After graduating in Physics from the Department of Science at Hokkaido University, Sachiko enrolled in the Fine Arts program at the University of Tsukuba, where she obtained her master and PhD in Art and Design. Currently she is an associate professor of Art the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo. In 2000 Sachiko began work on a ferrofluid art project that she named "Protrude, Flow". The main expressions of her ferrofluid sculpture can be seen in the generation of organic forms and movement using ferrofluid, to present growing forms, atrophy, rhythm, composition of curved surface and light, and other texture generation. The contradictory nature of ferrofluid (hard/soft, beautiful/ugly, growth/atrophy, attraction/repulsion, and rise against gravity/fall due to gravity) can communicate similar contradictory concepts and ideas in living organisms. In 2009-10 she studied digital design techniques in New York to create new media artworks. Her work has been exhibited in major Japanese, US and European museums. In 2020, for her open studio program at the Fuchu Art Museum, she created a light-based artwork and two "magnetic fluid sculptures". The program's title, "Pulsate - Melting Vision and Melting Moment, Rhythm in Motion", reflects the manner in which the forms in the magnetic fluid and kinetic light lose their shape and melt, to swell and reappear.
  • Randal Koene heads the organization carboncopies.org, which is the outreach and roadmapping organization for action towards Advancing Substrate-Independent Minds (ASIM). Dr. Koene is a neuroscientist and neuroengineer, and he is director of the Analysis team at the nanotechnology company Halcyon Molecular in Silicon Valley. Between 2008 and 2010, Koene was director of the Department of Neuroengineering at Tecnalia, the third largest private research organization in Europe. Dr. Koene has been involved with organized research in artificial general intelligence (AGI) since the first AGI conference in 2008.
  • Christian Kohler is the department head for Building Technologies at Berkeley Lab. For over 20 years he has been involved in all aspects of building energy efficiency research such as simulation, measurement and technology development. He has been deeply engaged in software development for various windows related tools, e.g., THERM, WINDOW, and Optics5. He has also led the development of new technologies for highly insulating and dynamic windows. His activities include algorithm development, user support, training, developing embedded controllers and experimental work on highly insulating and dynamic windows. His major work with industry has included being an elected Member of the Board of Directors of the National Fenestration Rating Council and the past Research Chair and Committee Chair Fenestration Technical Committee, American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). Prior to that he was working at the LBNL Infrared Thermography research facility.
  • Goran Konjevod has been folding paper for over 25 years. He started by following instructions in origami books. In a clear moment in 2005, after having puzzled about it on and off for 10 years, he reverse-engineered an abstract folded piece that he had seen in a book. From then on, he hsa been folding almost exclusively my own designs. He has been exhibiting my works since 2008. In addition to folding paper, he has been working with thin sheets of copper and stainless steel, using a combination of techniques developed by paperfolders and metalsmiths. Recently, he has also experimented with casting bronze and iron sculptures based on paperfolded patterns. His background is in mathematics and computer science (B.S. in Mathematics, University of Zagreb 1995, Ph.D. in Mathematical Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University 2000). He has worked as a professor (of computer science, at Arizona State University) and as a research scientist (at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory). He has used paperfolding as a tool to teach, because it is unique in bridging mathematics, engineering, art and science.
  • Piroska Kopar, with a background in philosophy and history of science, obtained her MD from Emory University's School of Medicine. Following training at Dartmouth Medical School and at Yale School of Medicine, Kopar conducted research at Harvard Medical School's Division of Medical Ethics, focused on developing ethics education for surgery residents, a direction she further pursued as a Fellow of the Association for Surgical Education. Kopar joined the faculty of Washington University in Saint Louis School of Medicine in 2018 as assistant professor in Trauma, Acute and Critical care surgery and was named director for the Center for Humanism and Ethics in Surgical Specialties (CHESS), where she is currently developing a Surgical Ethics Fellowship, the first of its kind. Kopar serves as the president of the Consortium for Surgical Ethics, a national nonprofit organization dedicated to ethics research in surgery. She co-edits the web-based Ethics in Surgery Community of the American College of Surgeons and reviews ethics articles for several journals. In June 2020 she coauthored the paper Ethics in the Time of Coronavirus: Recommendations in the COVID-19 Pandemic" .
  • Michal Kosinski is a psychologist and data scientist. His research focuses on studying humans through the lenses of digital footprints left behind while using digital platforms and devices. He is an Assistant Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Michal holds a PhD in Psychology from University of Cambridge, an MPhil in Psychometrics, and a MS in Social Psychology. Michal coordinates the myPersonality project, which involves global collaboration between over 200 researchers, analyzing the detailed psycho-demographic profiles of over 8 million Facebook users. While at Cambridge University, he started an open-source online adaptive testing platform Concerto and ApplyMagicSauce.com predictive engine. Previously, Michal was the Deputy Director of the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and a post-doc at Stanford's Computer Science Department.
  • Sam Kriegman is a computer scientist with a joint postdoctoral appointment at the Wyss Institute at Harvard and the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. His research draws inspiration from the origin and subsequent evolution of life, and applies the underlying mechanisms of self-organization ("order for free") and natural selection ("survival of the fittest") to the creation of novel autonomous machines: robots, in all manner of shapes and sizes, that act on their own, without remote control. These machines can in some cases perform useful work, or they may be used as scientific tools to understand how animals evolve, grow, move, sense, and think. A Cozzarelli Prize recipient, he is the co-creator of the world's first computer-designed organisms ("xenobots"), co-developer of the ultra-low-cost robot kit Voxcraft, and a leading expert on AI-driven design as applied to robotics and biology.
  • Ken Krimstein is a graphic novelist, a writer, a biographer, and a cartoonist for The New Yorker. His 2018 book The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt has been translated into nine languages and won a Bernard Brommell award for biography, the first graphic narrative to do so. His 2021 book When I Grow Up - The Lost Autobiographies of Six Yiddish Teenagers was named an NPR Best Book of the Year, and is coming out in France in January. His next book, Einstein in Kafkaland - How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up with the Universe comes out later this year. He has been full-time faculty in the College of Communication at DePaul University, and has taught at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, The School of Visual Arts in New York, and The Spertus Institute. He earned a BA in History at Grinnell College and a MA from Medill at Northwestern.
  • Annie Kritcher is the design lead for the first ever fusion ignition experiment in a laboratory at the National Ignition Facility in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). She is also team lead for integrated modeling and is part of the Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) leadership team at LLNL. Annie received her BS from the University of Michigan Nuclear Engineering department in 2005, and MS and PhD from the UC Berkeley Nuclear Engineering department in 2007 and 2009. Annie was first employed at the Lab as a summer intern in 2004, as an LLNL Lawrence Scholar during her time at UC Berkeley, as a Lawrence postdoctoral fellow in 2009 following completion of her Ph.D from UC Berkeley, and as technical staff in 2012. Annie has served on various committees such as the chair of the Strategic Initiative and Exploratory Research High Energy Density Science LDRD technical review committee, the Lawrence Fellow selection committee, Dynamic Compression Sector proposal selection committee, and the LCLS MEC peer review panel.
  • Leah Krubitzer heads the Laboratory of Evolutionary Neurobiology in the Center for Neuroscience at the University of California, Davis. She is also a faculty member of the Department of Psychology at UC Davis. Leah Krubitzer's cross-species comparative studies illuminate the relationship between brain organization and brain function. Her primary experimental focus is on somatosensory regions of the cerebral cortex that control such things as touch, vibration, and position sense. Additionally, she has compared the organization of sensatory cortex in a wide variety of species, including star-nosed moles, platypuses, flying foxes, and several nonhuman primates. These studies show important similarities and differences between species in the cortical structure and in connections to underlying brain regions and provide vital clues about the evolutionary forces driving brain adaptation. Krubitzer's research provides new insights into the development of the cerebral cortex and the evolutionary forces driving brain adaptation. She has published numerous book chapters and articles in such journals as the Journal of Comparative Neurology, Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.
  • Andrey Kurenkov is a graduate student in Stanford's Computational Vision and Learning Lab. He conducts research at the intersection of robotics and computer vision, and is co-advised by Silvio Savarese and Ken Goldberg. Besides robotics (particularly, intelligent robotics that can interact with humans), his interests include: programming (especially embedded programming), energy/climate change (the reason behind his EE degree), photography, video games (mostly narrative-driven, indie, Mass Effect-type games), cinema (Tarkovsky, Aronofsky, Kaufman, Kurosawa, Bergman, Carruth, Kon, Miyazaki, Zvyagintsev, etc), and hard science fiction.
  • Gregorij Kurillo received B.Sc. (2001) and Ph.D. degrees (2006) from School of Electrical Engineering, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. From 2002-2006 he was a Research Assistant with the Laboratory of Robotics and Biomedical Engineering with the research focus on the application of human and robotic grasping for rehabilitation of upper extremity. Dr. Kurillo was a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of California, Berkeley, from 2006-2009. Since 2009 he has been Lead Research Engineer at Teleimmersion Lab at UC Berkeley. He is currently also holding a joint appointment as Assistant Researcher at UC Davis Medical School. Dr. Kurillo's research interests include geometric and photometric camera calibration, 3D vision, robotics, technology & healthcare, rehabilitation engineering, tele-medicine, and collaborative virtual reality.
  • Fred Kuttner is currently Lecturer in Physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds degrees in physics from MIT and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is coauthor with Bruce Rosenblum of Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness, published by Oxford University Press.
  • Therese Lahaie (Artist) is a visual artist and consultant working with light and technology. For over 25 years she has used glass and light as reflective and refractive canvas. Her research into the nature of glass, spans the micro and the macro view of this material. She has made photogram studies of life inside the air bubbles of sheets of glass and has used architectural glass as an integral aspect of her video installation work. She recently completed a public art project in Emeryville, CA where she shifted focus from glass to working with programmed LED lighting technology. The project called "Crossing Signal Mosaic" is a ceiling mounted sculpture made of programmed, DMX-controlled LED boxes that play a pulsing array of icons based on crossing signal imagery. The piece, which can be viewed once the sun goes down, plays continuously through the night in conversation with the rhythms of the adjacent busy intersection. She is represented by Heller Gallery in NY and has exhibited nationally and internationally. She currently has a site-specific installation in at the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, Denmark. The installation, "Forgotten Ocean" is a video projection through architectural glass based on Fregatten Jylland the largest wooden ship in the world, moored next door to the museum.
  • Miu-Ling Lam is a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA California NanoSystems Institute. Her research interests include Robotics, Computational Geometry, Pattern Formation, Complex Systems and Bioinformatics. She received the Best Student Paper Award in the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, the Croucher Fellowship and the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship.
  • Robert Lang, after a 15-year career doing research and development in semiconductor lasers and optoelectronics, became a full-time origami artist devoted equally to the art of origami and its practical applications. He is the author, co-author, or editor of 9 books on origami and his work has been exhibited in shows worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
  • Patricia G Lange is an Anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Visual and Critical Studies at California College of the Arts (CCA). Her work focuses on technical identity performance and use of video to express the self. She is the author of Kids on YouTube: Technical Identities and Digital Literacies (Routledge, 2014). She also produced and directed the film Hey Watch This! Sharing the Self Through Media (2013) which provides a diachronic look at the rise and fall of YouTube as a social media site. Hey Watch This! was screened in Paris at Ethnografilm (2014), an international film festival showcasing films that visually depict social worlds. Her work has appeared in seminal collections such as The YouTube Reader and Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, as well as numerous publications and journals. She was also named an early influential vlogger and invited to reflect on her work in the Online Lives 2.0 issue of Biography. She also teaches undergraduate courses in: digital cultures; anthropology of technology; new media and civic action; space, place & time; and ethnography for design.
  • Jaron Lanier pioneered Virtual Reality in the early 1980s and was the Lead Scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative (1997-2001). Lanier's compositions, that include the symphony "Mirror/Storm" (1998), the triple concerto "The Navigator Tree" (2000) and the ballet "Earthquake" (2006) have been performed worldwide. His book "You Are Not A Gadget" (2010) was named one of the 10 best books of the year in the NY Times. Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010.
  • Wayne Lanier is earned his PhD degree in microbial genetics at the University of Chicago. Wayne professed these, and similar subjects at New York University, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School, and London Polytechnic. He has been Research Director in Biotechnology and a Consultant in Clinical Studies. Finally, Wayne gracefully retired and now wanders the San Francisco Bay salt marsh, examining the natural history of life at the bottom of the food chain. "Hidden Ecologies" is the title of his program.
  • Jennie Lavine (Emory Univ) received her PhD in biology from Penn State University with thesis advisor Ottar Bjornstad. Her research interests lie at the intersection of immunology, pathogen evolution, population dynamics and disease. Current work focuses on COVID-19, influenza and herpesviruses, with a keen interest toward how the robustness and complexity of the immune system shapes and constrains pathogen evolution. Recently Lavine, alongside Pennsylvania State University Entomology Professor Ottar Bjornstad and Emory Biology Professor Rustom Antia, developed a model to predict the conditions under which an emerging coronavirus like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, might become endemic (see the paper)
  • John Law (Cacophony Society, Burning Man) was a member of the Suicide Club, a primary member and principal organizer of the Cacophony Society, and a co-founder of the Burning Man festival. He co-authored "Tales of the San Francisco Cacophony Society" (2013) and has spoken internationally about the San Francisco counterculture.
  • Evie Leder is a two-time winner of San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant. She is also the recipient of the Princess Grace Award, a New York Expo of Short Film Jury Award and a grant from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Leder is a member of "A Simple Collective" in San Francisco and a founding member of "the lesbian film collective". Leder's art concerns itself with the tensions inherent within the moving image: It's seductive nature, the flickering light, the voyeurism, the acts of looking and being seen and the power of the gaze. Her work focuses on recontexualizing gender and the socially agreed-upon constructs that hold up our gender and sexuality systems. Leder's work has screened internationally at film festivals and galleries including; Black and White Projects, The Kinsey Institute, The Sundance Channel, Tampere International Short Film Festival, Frameline, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival, South By Southwest, New York Expo of Short Film and Video, The New Festival, Mix NY, Outfest LA, SOMArts Cultural Center, Euro Underground Film Festival and Art Matters, among many others. Evie Leder is represented by Black and White Projects. In 2016 she was selected as a charter tenant at the Minnesota Street Project Studio Program. She holds a BA from Hampshire College and an MFA from UC Davis.
  • Christine Lee (San Diego-based Visual Artist) works on functional design, sculptural objects and installations to explore the latent potential of mundane, surplus, and other disregarded materials. She experiments with multiple configurations and patterns to transform these overlooked materials. Lee has also been collaborating with engineer John F. Hunt of the USDA Forest Service Forest Products Laboratory on naturally bonded non-toxic interior composite panels. Currently she is the visiting faculty in the Wood/ Sculpture Program at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at ASU.
  • George Legrady is an internationally-acclaimed multimedia artist and Professor of Interactive Media at UC Santa Barbara. He has previously held fulltime appointments at the Merz Akademie, Institute for Visual Communication, Stuttgart, the Conceptual Design/Information Arts program, San Francisco State University, University of Southern California, and the University of Western Ontario. A pioneer of interactive digital art, Legrady's installations have featured in festivals around the world, from China to Europe, since the 1980s. A complete list can be found on his website http://www.georgelegrady.com His creative work has received numerous awards both in North America and Europe.
  • Sasha Leitman is an inventor, composer, sound artist, and teacher. She is currently the Technical and Projects Manager at the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics where she teaches courses and workshops on interactive sound art.
  • Cheryl E. Leonard is a composer, performer, and instrument builder whose works investigate sounds, structures, and objects from the natural world. Her projects cultivate stones, wood, water, ice, sand, shells, feathers, and bones as musical instruments, and feature one-of-a-kind sculptural instruments and field recordings from remote locales. Leonard is fascinated by subtle textures and intricacies of sounds, especially very quiet phenomena. She uses microphones to explore aural worlds within her sound sources, and develops compositions that highlight the unique voices she discovers. Her recent projects focus on climate change and extinction of species. Leonard's music has been performed worldwide and is available on multiple record labels. She has received grants from the NSF's Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, New Music USA, American Composers Forum, American Music Center, ASCAP, Meet the Composer, and NYSCA. Leonard's commissions include works for SFMOMA, Kronos Quartet, Hope Mohr Dance, Illuminated Corridor, and the La Jolla Historical Society. Leonard has been awarded residencies at Kunstnarhuset Messen, Djerassi, Oberpf„lzer Ku"nstlerhaus, the Arctic Circle, Villa Montalvo, and Engine 27. She has contributed to books on music and sound art, and her instruments, recordings, and graphic scores have been exhibited in galleries and museums in the U.S. and abroad.
  • Margaret Levi is the Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford and Professor of Political Science as well as Professor Emerita of International Studies at the University of Washington. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University. She held the Chair in Politics, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, 2009-13. At the University of Washington she was director of the CHAOS (Comparative Historical Analysis of Organizations and States) Center and formerly the Harry Bridges Chair and Director of the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies. She became a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015, the American Academy of Political and Social Science (AAPSS), inducted 2017, the American Academy of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow in 2002. She served as president of the American Political Science Association from 2004 to 2005. Levi is the author or coauthor of numerous articles and six books, including Of Rule and Revenue (University of California Press, 1988); Consent, Dissent, and Patriotism (Cambridge University Press, 1997); Analytic Narratives (Princeton University Press, 1998); and Cooperation Without Trust? (Russell Sage, 2005). The book In the Interest of Others (Princeton, 2013), co-authored with John Ahlquist, explores how organizations provoke member willingness to act beyond material interest. Her research continues to focus on how to improve the quality of government. She was general editor of Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics and is co-general editor of the Annual Review of Political Science. Levi serves on the boards of the: Social Science Research Council (SSRC); Center for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (CEACS) in Madrid; Berggruen Institute; and Scholar and Research Group of the World Justice Project. Levi and her husband, Robert Kaplan, are avid collectors of Australian Aboriginal art. Ancestral Modern, an exhibition drawn from their collection, was on view at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) in 2012. She has lectured in Australia, China and Europe (Germany, Hungary, England). She periodically serves as a consultant to the World Bank. She is the recipient of the 2014 William H. Riker Prize for Political Science.
  • Caroline Lewis and Robert Davis are Artists in Residence at the Montalvo Arts Center. Caroline Lewis is a lecturer in Social Science teaching, Psychology, Sociology and Social Policy. She trained as a Psychologist at University of Wales and University of London, where she followed a masters program in Counselling and Psychotherapy. She is currently leading a multi disciplinary team from San Jose State University (SJSU) as part of the San Jose Climate Clock Initiative. Robert Davis is a software developer, engineer, and artist who currently works as Systems Developer at Goldsmiths College, University of London. For the last sixteen years he has been actively involved in research in the field of Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. He has also created interactive installations with particular emphasis on ways in which adaptive systems interact with each other, whether biological or mechanical in substrate.
  • Sydell Lewis is a painter and printmaker. Educated in chemistry, she conducted biomedical research as a mass spectrometrist before becoming a fulltime artist. Her background in science and dance is reflected in her work with its juxtapositions of hard edge rendering and sensual organic forms. In 2005 She pioneered the concept of "Rotating Paintings" to enable viewers to fully comprehend a 2 dimensional abstract work of art. As a printmaker, she was one of the first proponents of the new technique of acrylic monotypes. She is a member of the California Society of Printmakers. Her work has been shown in Los Angeles and the Bay Area in numerous galleries and venues including the San Francisco Arts Commission and Triton Museum. Her work is in numerous private and corporate collections on both coasts.
  • Jiabao Li is a media artist who graduated from Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master of Design in Technology with Distinction and best thesis award, and from National University of Singapore with a Master of Electrical Engineering. She is currently a prototyping designer at Apple, inventing and exploring new products, interfaces, and technologies. Li creates new ways for humans to perceive the world. Her research-based projects range from wearables, projections, drones and installations to scientific experiments, and they explore how technology is transforming our perception, identity, emotion, and sensation. Jiabao's work has been featured in Domus, TechCrunch, Yahoo, CCTV, Yanko Design. Her work has been shown in Milan Design Week, Dubai Design Week, ISEA, CHI, Leonardo, SIGGRAPH, AR in Action, Codame, and PRIMER. She is the winner of Core77, FastCoDesign, iF Design Award, Future Cities Contest, and ISWC Design Award.
  • Darlene Lim is a research scientist at the NASA Ames Research Center and is the Principal Investigator of the Pavilion Lake Research Project (www.pavilionlake.com). She has conducted field work from the Arctic to the Antarctic and specializes in limnology (study of freshwater) and geobiology.
  • Charles Lindsay is is a conceptual artist-adventurer whose work synthesizes ideas about technology, time, eco-systems and semiotics. He creates immersive environments, sound installations, sculptures built from salvaged aerospace and bio-tech equipment. He is an explorer, balancing studio time with extended periods in remote natural environments where he captures audio / visual field recordings. Most recently these juxtapositions landed Lindsay in China, where he is showing, curating, lecturing, and merging the frontier of new media art with archeological and historical explorations. Educated as a geologist, Lindsay worked in the Canadian Northwest Territories before becoming a photojournalist in southeast Asia. From 1986 to 1995 he focused on environmental issues. During this period he was based in Tokyo. Charles' first book Mentawai Shaman (Aperture 1992) chronicles his years living with a stone age shaman in Indonesia. His full time art practice dates to approximately 2005. Lindsay was the SETI Institute's first artist in residence. "Code Humpback" resulted from his collaboration with SETI scientist Dr. Laurance Doyle, whose algorithms determined that humpback whale communications exhibit syntax, very strongly suggesting the whales have language. The Sound of a Quantum Computer Thinking resulted from Lindsay's audio recordings of the D-Wave Two quantum computer, one of three projects he carried out in laboratories at NASA Ames. Lindsay now directs SETI AIR, pairing mid-career artists with leading astro-scientists. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, formerly artist in residence at Imagine Science Films and the innovator behind OSA EARS: a project designed to deliver real time sound from one of the world's most bio-diverse eco-systems to anyone anywhere. Lindsay's eighth book of photographs, Recipes for the Mind, was recently released by Terranova / MIT Press. His work has been profiled by WIRED, Motherboard, ARTonAIR.org, Viralnet, NPR and CNN International. He has lectured and shown widely, most recently at MIT Media Lab's Beyond the Cradle: envisioning a new space age conference and at Kansas State University's Beach Art Museum, where FIELD STATION 4 runs live through October, 2020.
  • Jules Litman-Cleper is a new media artist and theorist born and raised in the Bay Area. Jules is interested in unpacking simulation as a way of knowing, the formation and deformation of patterns in organic systems, perceptual and mathematical aspects of randomness and ecologies: their flows of information, spatial dynamics and protection. These inquiries unfold through visual art, mixed-media installation, writing, sound, research and experimentation. They have taught classes and exhibited work at Krowswork, Aggregate Space, New York Studio School, with performances at The Lab, ATA, CCRMA and more.
  • Jessie Liu (UC Berkeley), David Moses & Sean Metzger (UCSF) work in the lab of UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang. They have developed a "speech neuroprosthesis" that decodes the signals sent by the brain to the vocal tract and turns them into words displayed on a screen, and then uses statistical language models to improve accuracy. The brain implant and the related A.I. software has enabled a man with severe paralysis to communicate in sentences, although limited to a vocabulary of 50 words.
  • Sara Loesch-Frank is an exhibiting artist and educator working in the Bay Area. Her work has been included in the book, " Art and Craft of Hand Lettering," " Writing Beyond Words," and Letter Arts Review magazine. Her work has been shown at the Southern Highland Craft Guild in Asheville N.C. and at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. Along with Chinese artists, Sara exhibited her work in Chengde and Qufu, China in a joint exhibition. Filoli Gardens and the Triton Museum of Art have often shown her artwork. Sara team teaches a Sophomore Seminar Series at Stanford University: "Art Chemistry and Madness: the Science of Art Materials." in Chemical Engineering with her husband.
  • Tania Lombrozo is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as an affiliate of the Department of Philosophy and a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Dr. Lombrozo's research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work investigates explanation and understanding, conceptual representation, categorization, social cognition, and causal reasoning. Recent projects have focused on the role of explanation in learning and how explanations guide inference, with related strands of work in both children and adults. Dr. Lombrozo is the recipient of numerous early-career awards including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the Spence Award from the Association for Psychological Science, and a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, as well as a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She is also the Psychology Director for a project funded by the Templeton Foundation on "Varieties of Understanding: New Perspectives from Psychology, Philosophy, and Theology," which will begin in the summer of 2013, and she blogs about psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science at Psychology Today and for NPR's 13.7: Cosmos & Culture.
  • Daiane Lopes Da Silva is a dancer, choreographer and the artistic director of Kinetech Arts. Her work has been performed in Brazil, France, Belgium and the U.S.A. In Portugal, she worked with Lisbon Dance Company, Almada dance Company and Dan‡Arte. In the Bay Area, Daiane performed with Labayen Dance, KUNST-STOFF Dance Company, Robert Moses' Kin, among others. Her residencies include R.A.D., R.A.W., and Marin Headlands Center for the Arts. Daiane studied with full scholarship at the Escola Municipal de Bailados de Sao Paulo and P.A.R.T.S. (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios), directed by Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker in Brussels. She graduated with a B.A. in Psychology, Alpha Beta Kappa, from SFSU.
  • Chip Lord (Media Artist) holds a M.Arch degree from Tulane University, and was a founding partner of Ant Farm in 1968. With Ant Farm he produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame and the public sculpture, Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo Texas. His work moves between video, photography and installation, often in collaboration with other artists. Video works by Lord are in the collections of MOMA, New York; SFMOMA; The Pompidou Centre, Paris; the Tate Modern, London; LACMA; the FRAC Centre, Orleans, FR; and other museums. He lives in San Francisco and is Professor Emeritus in the Film & Digital Media Department at U C Santa Cruz.
  • Bernie Lubell's interactive installations have evolved from his studies in both psychology and engineering. As participants play with his whimsical wood machines, they become actors in a theater of their own imagining. Since the early 1980's his installations have been shown in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Florida, China and Europe. "A Theory of Entanglement" and other large scale installations were recently featured at FACT, Liverpool, UK and v2 in Rotterdam, NL., and "Party of the First Part" in Paris, France. Recent awards include a Guggenheim Artists Fellowship in 2011, an Adolph & Esther Gottlieb artists grant in 2009, a Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in 2002 and an Award of Distinction for Interactive Art from Ars Electronica in 2007. Lubell's work includes a stone age digital computer, a rainstorm of chaos and nostalgia, a phone booth-confessional network, a mechanism to measure Intimacy, room sized simulations of the human heart, the brain and breathing, a giant cooperative knitting machine, and a mechanical computer that allows people to work together furiously to accomplish nothing. For more information see -- http://bernielubell.com
  • Liqun Luo is the Ann and Bill Swindells Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and Professor, by courtesy, of Neurobiology at Stanford University. He grew up in Shanghai, China, and earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Science & Technology of China. After receiving his PhD at Brandeis University and postdoctoral training at UCSF, Dr. Luo started his own lab at Stanford University in 1996. Together with his postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, Dr. Luo studies the development and function of neural circuits in fruit flies and mice. He is also an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He teaches neurobiology to undergraduate and graduate students. His single-author textbook "Principles of Neurobiology" (Garland Science 2015) is widely used for undergraduate and graduate courses across the world. Dr. Luo is a recipient of several awards and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
  • Adegboyega Mabogunje is an engineering-design scientist at the Center for Design Research in Stanford University, where he explores the interplay between the activities of designing, learning, engineering, innovation, and capital formation. He conducts empirical studies of design teams using Video Interaction Analysis, Immersive Virtual Reality and Computer Simulation to identify formative performance metrics which are then used to guide the development of practices for accelerating the rate of innovation and capital formation. He has done field observation in Nigeria, India, Missouri, and California.
  • Hideo Mabuchi, Professor of Applied Physics at Stanford University, received an A.B. (Physics, 1992) from Princeton University and a Ph.D. (Physics, 1998) from Caltech. He is currently serving as the Chair of his Department at Stanford. His scientific research focuses on quantum engineering and single-molecule biophysics, but recently he has begun to explore applications of his technical training in the artistic realm of studio ceramics. Related interests include craft theory and the development of new educational approaches in higher education that integrate science, culture and art.
  • Damian Madray is the founder and creative director at TheGlint, an experimental lab for artists to explore and play with all modalities of art to create experiences that can transform and connect. Here he's a culture anthropologist who is (re)designing the art of dialogue with experiences and a social alchemist creating experiences that is meant to break down social barriers, bring guests into vulnerability and connect them in meaningful ways. He's the founder of Presence, a startup aimed at altering the way we gather to be truly social with a platform for artists to create intentional experiences. He moved to the Bay Area six years ago coming from Canada where he studied design and is originally from Guyana, a small Caribbean country. Damian has an amazing career in design that spans a decade and is considered one of the leading design thinkers in Silicon Valley. He's a design partner at DXLabs where he heads up design and help fortune 500 companies discover and launch new business ideas using exponential technologies. As a student of design, philosophy and culture, he's exploring the intersection of these topics having written many thought pieces on designing culture. His work has been featured in 500 Startups, New York Times, Bold Italics, Huffington Post, Slate, WSJ & Financial Times.
  • Pattie Maes is a professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and until recently served as academic head. She runs the Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces research group, which aims to radically reinvent the human-machine experience. In 1995 Maes developed the pioneering ALIVE (Artificial Life Interactive Video Environment) system. Coming from a background in artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction, she is particularly interested in the topic of cognitive enhancement, or how immersive and wearable systems can actively assist people with memory, attention, learning, decision making, communication, and wellbeing. Maes is the editor of three books, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. She has received several awards: Fast Company named her one of 50 most influential designers (2011); Newsweek picked her as one of the "100 Americans to watch for" in the year 2000; TIME Digital selected her as a member of the "Cyber Elite," the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title "Global Leader for Tomorrow"; Ars Electronica awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council. She has also received an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, and her 2009 TED talk on "the 6th sense device" is among the most-watched TED talks ever. In addition to her academic endeavors, Maes has been an active entrepreneur as co-founder of several venture-backed companies, including Firefly Networks (sold to Microsoft), Open Ratings (sold to Dun & Bradstreet) and Tulip Co (privately held). Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.
  • Laura Maguire is Director of Research for the nationally syndicated public radio show Philosophy Talk. Originally from Dublin, Ireland, Laura has called San Francisco home for many years. After graduating with distinction from Trinity College Dublin, she moved to the Bay Area to pursue her doctoral studies at Stanford University. She received her PhD in Philosophy in 2005, and since then has been teaching at Stanford in the Department of Philosophy, and in the Introduction to the Humanities and Structured Liberal Education programs. Her philosophical interests are situated at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and psychology.
  • Maria Makela is Professor of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts. She has published and lectured widely on aspects of German nineteenth and twentieth century visual culture, and was the co-curator of the 1996/97 retrospective exhibition of the photomontages of Hannah Hoech ((Walker Art Center, Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and co-author of the accompanying catalogue. The recipient of numerous awards, including among others an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship, an American Philosophical Society Grant, a Fulbright Fellowship, a DAAD Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Humanities grant, her work has focused in recent years on gender and sexuality in modern German culture and, as well, on the materiality of German avant-garde art and fashion.
  • Roger Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, and currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology, and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche, for the CNRS in France. He founded the ArtSciLab at UT Dallas. In 2012-13 Malina chaired the National Science Foundation funded study "Steps to an Ecology of Networked Knowledge and Innovation". He previously served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique of Marseille and was NASA Principal Investigator for a project at the University of California, Berkeley. Malina is an elected member of the International Academy of Astronautics. He has served on the Comite National of the French CNRS for Astronomy and on the French National Commission on Cosmology. He has received a number of prizes and awards including the International Academy of Astronautics Social Sciences Award, several NASA Public Service Awards, "Laser d'or " Prize, from the International Video Art Organization. Since 1982 he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He is Chairman Emeritus of Leonardo ISAST (International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology).
  • Adriana Manago is an assistant professor in the psychology department at UC-Santa Cruz. She earned a PhD in developmental psychology from UCLA in 2011 with an interdisciplinary certificate from the FPR-UCLA Center for Culture, Brain, and Development. Previously, she was an assistant professor of psychology at Western Washington University and a post-doctoral fellow in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. Manago's research focuses on communication technologies as cultural tools for human social life that shape social development in the transition from adolescence to adulthood. She has published empirical studies and books chapters on the role of MySpace, Facebook, and mobile devices in identity, sexuality, friendship, social capital, values, and sociocultural change. Manago maintains a long-term field site in a Maya community in Mexico studying the impact of the Internet and mobile devices on social development and also collaborates with Israeli, Japanese, and French colleagues examining cross-cultural differences in communication technology use and social development. In 2016, the Society for Research on Adolescence recognized Manago with an Early Career Research Award for the breadth and scope of her interdisciplinary work and contributions to diverse research literatures.
  • Peter Maravelis is a native San Franciscan with a life-long involvement in the art and literary scenes. He programs the events calendar at City Lights Bookstore and is editor of San Francisco Noir and San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics. He produces the noir reading and performance series, Subterranean SF. Together with international and academic partners he has produced numerous festivals celebrating the European avante-garde. These include Dada World Fair, Carnival Pataphysique, Fantomas By The Bay, Haunted Reflections: Walter Benjamin in San Francisco, Subtle Channels: An Oulipo Laboratory, Trajectories of the Catastrophic: The Life and Work of Paul Virilio, and others. He's been known to occasionally moonlight with private investigators.
  • Micheline Marcom is a Saudi Arabia-born novelist who grew up in Lebanon and then Los Angeles. Her first book and the beginning of a trilogy of novels, Three Apples Fell from Heaven (2001), about the Ottoman government's genocide of the Armenian population, was named as one of the best books of the year by both The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Her second book in the trilogy, The Daydreaming Boy (2004), earned her the 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction. The trilogy's third chapter, Draining the Sea (2008), deals with the Guatemalan Civil War. These were followed by "The Mirror in the Well" (2008) and "A Brief History of Yes" (2013). She teaches Creative Writing at Mills College.
  • Reuben Margolin was raised in Berkeley, California. A love of math and physics propelled him to Harvard, where he changed paths and got a degree in English. He then went on to study traditional painting in Italy and Russia. In 1999 he became obsessed with the movement of a little green caterpillar, and set out to make wave-like sculptures. In 2004 he moved to his current studio in Emeryville and began making a series of large-scale undulating installations that attempt to combine the logic of mathematics with the sensuousness of nature. He has since made about 20 of these mechanical mobiles and shown them internationally. He also makes pedal-powered rickshaws and has collaborated on a couple large-scale pedal-powered vehicles.
  • Margarita Marinova's main research interests are in characterizing extreme environments, and understanding the surface of Mars. She has worked at NASA Ames Research Center on understanding extreme environments and the limits of habitability for Earth life. Margarita received her PhD in Planetary Science from Caltech in 2010, where she examined planetary-scale impacts and their implications for the early history of Mars and the solid Solar System planets. Her research interests focus on understanding interesting processes and features on Mars through simulations and field measurements. Her study sites range from the High Arctic, to the Sahara Desert in Egypt, the bottom of a lake in British Columbia in Canada, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, and to the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.
  • Christine Marie is an inventor and creator of installations, performances, and experiences. She seamlessly integrates performers, objects and special effects to elicit connections with concepts, phenomenology and history in emotional and visually stimulating experiences. Christine Marie strives to break new ground within her form while being intrinsically tied to ancient art forms and the metaphysical exploration of light. She is pioneering the use of large-scale 3D shadows by reinventing the stereoscope and casting up to 40' shadows into cubic space. Her work has appeared at the REDCAT, the Geffen Playhouse, Southcoast Repertory, Z Space, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the Exploratorium, Pop-Up Magazine, Sundance New Frontier and others and has received support from the Jim Henson Foundation, MAP fund, the Zellerbach family foundation, the Paul Dresher Residency, Intersection for the Arts, Cal Arts Center for New Performance and others. Christine Marie received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Integrated Media, Puppetry and Theater. Christine Marie is a TED Fellow. Engaging The Unknown, TED talk. Marie has taught shadow animation at Pixar and DreamWorks studios. She studied Wayang Kulit traditional shadow puppetry in Bali and is a former 15-year member of ShadowLight theater. She lectures and conducts workshops at universities, schools and at juvenile hall. She has worked with shadows for decades and has a life-long commitment to continuing working with light. She is currently creating a series of light toys.
  • Laura U. Marks works on media art and philosophy with an intercultural focus and an emphasis on appropriate technologies. She is the author of four books, most recently Hanan al-Cinema: Affections for the Moving Image, and her Enfolding-Unfolding Aesthetics: From Your Body to the Cosmos is under contract with Duke University Press. Marks is co-founder of the Substantial Motion Research Network. She led the research group Tackling the Carbon Footprint Streaming Media and founded the Small File Media Festival. She programs experimental media art for venues around the world. Marks teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. www.sfu.ca/~lmarks
  • Michael Marmor is Professor and past Chair of Ophthalmology at Stanford University. He also teaches in the Bioethics program, and the undergraduate Program in Human Biology. He is a leading expert in retinal physiology and disease, and in studies on the interface of vision and the arts. He has written several books and more than 300 papers, not only about retina but also about vision in art, history, music and sports. A recent article showed simulations of how Degas and Monet might have seen their own work as their eyesight failed. His most recent book is The Artist's Eyes (Abrams, 2009).
  • Adrienne Mayor, a historian of ancient science, investigates natural knowledge contained in myths and oral traditions. Mayor's most recent book is "Gods and Robots: Myths, Machines, and Ancient Dreams of Technology" (2018). Other books include "The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World" (2014) and a biography of Mithradates VI, "The Poison King," a National Book Award finalist (2009). Her research looks at ancient "folk science" precursors, alternatives, and parallels to modern scientific methods. Mayor's two books on pre-Darwinian fossil traditions in classical antiquity and in Native America opened a new field within the emerging discipline of Geomythology, and her book on the origins of biological weapons uncovered the ancient roots of biochemical warfare. A research scholar in Classics and the History and Philosophy of Science Program, she is currently a Berggruen Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford.
  • Christina Mazza is a San Francisco Bay Area artist working primarily with reclaimed materials, creating intricate works of art that focus on the urban byproducts of human life while encourage sustainability and environmental responsibility. She has exhibited at the Boston Center for the Arts, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, Southern Exposure, Intersection for the Arts, and numerous other venues throughout the Bay Area. Mazza recently completed a residency at Recology's AIR Program in 2010 and the Artist's Studio Program at the de Young Museum in 2009. Her work has also been accepted into The Drawing Center's Viewing Program in NYC. Selected works have been published in an anthology showcasing contemporary Asian American women artists and in Recology's 20th Anniversary publication. Mazza has a BFA in Advertising and Illustration and previously worked 15 years at leading advertising agencies in Dallas, Los Angeles and San Francisco before becoming a full-time visual artist.
  • Jay McClelland is Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, Computation and Technology at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. In fall 2006 McClelland moved to Stanford University from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a professor of psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He also holds a part-time appointment as Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU) within the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester. In 1986 McClelland published Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition" with David Rumelhart. His present work focuses on learning, memory processes, and psycholinguistics. He is a former chair of the Rumelhart Prize committee, having collaborated with Rumelhart for many years. Awards include: William W. Cumming prize from Columbia University (1970), Research Scientist Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (1981—86, 1987—97), Rumelhart Prize (2010), and C.L. de Carvalho-Heineken Prize (2014). He has been a Fellow of the National Science Foundation (1970—73). In July 2017, McClelland was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
  • Susan McConnell (Stanford/Biology) is the Susan B. Ford Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. The research in her laboratory explores the mechanisms by which neural circuits are established during mammalian brain development. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and her teaching has been recognized by the Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. McConnellÎéÎ÷s interest in the brain is an outgrowth of a lifelong fascination with animal behavior, which also led her to delve deeply into wildlife photography. Although she has worried that an obsession with "getting the picture" causes one to lose sight of the rewards of direct experience, McConnell has realized that when sheÎéÎ÷s behind the lens, she feels absolutely and fully engaged with observing and predicting animal behavior.ÎõÎé Telling stories about wildlife is best accomplished through a series of images that explore a subject and its relationships to the people who study, protect, live with, or exploit that species. McConnell is particularly interested in scientific studies of animal behavior in the field and in the depiction of animal emotions. Her photographs have been published in Smithsonian, National Geographic, Outdoor Photographer and other magazines. You can view her photos at http://www.susankmcconnell.com
  • Jamie McHugh RSME (Registered Somatic Movement Educator) is a fine art photographer and a master teacher of somatics. He has taught body-based work internationally for over twenty-five years to people of all ages. Jamie has been on faculty in the Holistic Health Department at John F Kennedy University since 1991 and at Anna Halprin's Tamalpa Institute since 1988. Jamie divides his time between San Francisco and The Sea Ranch. www.SomaticExpression.com www.NatureBeingArt.org
  • Chris McKay is a Planetary Scientist with the Space Science Division of NASA Ames. His current research focuses on the evolution of the solar system and the origin of life. He is also actively involved in planning for future Mars missions including human exploration. Chris been involved in research in Mars-like environments on Earth, traveling to the Antarctic dry valleys, Siberia, the Canadian Arctic, and the Atacama desert to study life in these Mars-like environments. His was a co-I on the Titan Huygen's probe in 2005, the Mars Phoenix lander mission in 2008, and the Mars Science Lander mission for 2011. He is the deputy program scientist for Constellation - the NASA program for future human exploration of the Moon and Mars.
  • Tom McKeag is the founder of BioDreamMachine, a nonprofit educational institution dedicated to bringing bio-inspired design education to K12 schools (www.BioDreamMachine.org). He established the nation's first public elementary school course in biomimicry in 2006, and still teaches the subject through the State of California's Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program in the Dixie school district, Marin County, California. Tom teaches bio-inspired design to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of the Arts in San Francisco where he is a Senior Lecturer. He is a member of the Biomimicry Institute's Educational Advisory Board. He writes a regular blog about biomimicry at www.greenerdesign.com.
  • Maria McVarish (Stanford) is an architect, artist, and visual researcher practicing in San Francisco. She has lectured in architecture at UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design and, since 1996, has taught interdisciplinary studies, critical theory, and design at CCA. Recent and upcoming public lectures include "Hazard Figures: Heritage, Memorial and Wasting in Appalachia" at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (April 2012); "Imaginary Spaces," at San Jose State University (November 2009); "in Visible Memory," at Syracuse University (October 2008); and "Design in the Unconscious" for the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (June 2007). Her essays, drawings, and sculpture have been published in Memory Connection journal, Diacritics, Zyzzava, How(ever), and Architecture California, the journal of the American Institute of Architects. Her architectural work has been featured in California Home and Design, Southface journal and CNN's television series Earth-Wise. She is currently a doctoral student in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford (not teaching at CCA).
  • Kimford Meador is a Professor of Neurology and Neurosciences at Stanford University, and Clinical Director of the Stanford Comprehensive Epilepsy Center. He was the Chair of Neurology at Georgetown University (2002-2004), the Melvin Greer Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at the University of Florida (2004-2008) where he served as Director of Epilepsy Program and Director of the Clinical Alzheimer Research Program, and Professor of Neurology and Pediatrics at Emory University (2008-2013) where he served as Director of Epilepsy and of Clinical Neurocience Research. He joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2013. Dr. Meador has authored over 350 peer-reviewed publications. He has served as the PI for a long running NIH multicenter study of pregnancy outcomes in women with epilepsy and their children. He has served on the editorial boards for Clinical Neurophysiology, Epilepsy and Behavior, Epilepsy Currents, Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology, Neurology, Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology, and Epilepsy.com. He has received numerous awards and honors. He is the past Chair of the Section of Behavioral Neurology of American Academy of Neurology; past President of Society for Cognitive and Behavioral Neurology; past President of the Society for Behavioral & Cognitive Neurology; past President of the Southern EEG & Epilepsy Society; and was ranked in the top 10 experts in epilepsy worldwide by Expertscape.
  • Rob Meagley is presently CEO, CTO and resident "Mad Scientist" at ONE Nanotechnologies, a company founded to invent, develop and market photonic nanodevices and device arrays for biomarker characterization and related technology. Prior to forming ONE Nanotechnologies and following post-doctoral research at UC-Berkeley and Cornell, Rob was Principle Investigator, Senior Staff Scientist, and the Molecules for Advanced Patterning Program Manager for Intel. In 2004 he was named Researcher-In Residence for a group he created at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs to discover, develop and commercialize advanced lithography materials. With over 38 papers, 41 patents, and numerous awards to his name, Rob is an expert in the design and synthesis of small molecules and complex molecular systems. In addition to managing several complex, interdisciplinary teams and research programs, he has also lectured extensively on materials science chemistry and nanotechnology, and provides consulting services to the nanotechnology, MEMS and biotechnology communities.
  • Jeremy Mende is a US designer who lives and works in San Francisco, California. Mr. Mende holds a BA in psychology from UCLA and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2000 he founded MendeDesign, a creative practice that balances commercial projects with visual research and public art. Mr. Mende is an associate professor of design at the California College of the Arts, and in 2010-11, he was the Rome Prize Fellow in Design at the American Academy in Rome. Before his career as a designer, Jeremy skippered a mail packet off the west coast of Nova Scotia.
  • Melissa Merencillo is an X-Reality (XR = AR/VR/MR) enthusiast and technophile focusing on social presence, behavioral communication and interaction design in digital reality systems. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication from California State University East Bay (2012) and a Master of Arts in Multimedia in Interaction Design also from California State University East Bay (2017). Her work on the collaborative thesis, Project: This Way!, explored the concepts of copresence in VR and was shown at the VR Mixer of the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, Maker Faire Bay Area in San Mateo, and at the symposium, If You Weren't: Playing with Realities in ARG, AR, and VR held at Stanford University in Palo Alto. She is a member of various AR/VR MeetUps and attends industry conferences on AR/VR technology throughout the Bay Area. She is currently the Instructional Support Technician II and Video Lab Coordinator of the Department of Communication at California State University East Bay supporting courses in digital video and media production.
  • Christine Metzger is CCA's first tenure-track assistant professor of Earth and environmental science. Dr. Metzger is currently a co-principal investigator for a 3-year, interdisciplinary National Science Foundation grant: Exploring Science in the Studio, which funds continued efforts to embed scientists into the studio curriculum. She is also the developer of many interdisciplinary courses that bring science to arts and design students, such as Bad Science at the Movies which is an introductory geology class as seen via the lens of Hollywood disaster movies, and Life on Earth through Time, a history of four-billion years of life history that incorporates illustration and other creative work with science. In her research, Dr. Metzger is interested in using paleosols (ancient soils) as a proxy for understanding how landscapes and ecosystems respond to environmental changes. Dr. Metzger represented California College of the Arts at the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Conference of the Parties 17, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2010. In the summers, Dr. Metzger is an instructor for Johns Hopkins University's Center for Talented Youth summer program, where she teaches a college-level Paleobiology course to academically gifted 12- to 16-year olds in a three-week residential program.
  • Helene Mialet has held positions at Cornell University, Harvard University and Oxford University where she ran the program in Science Studies; she has also held post-doctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University under the auspices of the Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship, sponsored by the European Union for extremely promising young scholars. She has published widely on subjectivity, agency, innovation and cognition. Her most recent book is entitled L'Entreprise Cr‚atrice, (Paris: HermŠs-Lavoisier, 2008), which is an ethnographic study of practices and processes of invention in an applied research laboratory in a multinational oil company (Total); this book was a finalist for the Prix ADVANCIA for the best book published in French on Entrepreneurship and Innovation in 2008. She has just completed a new book entitled Hawking Incorporated, Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject (University of Chicago Press, 2012). This work provides an ethnographic study of `abstraction' and formalism, focusing on the case of Stephen Hawking as a means of exploring larger questions having to do with singularity, identity, distributed agency, subjectivity, corporeality (and/or the mind/body problem), socio-technical networks and scientific practice. She is currently working on a new project concerned with the study of new networks of knowledge production and expertise constituted by `laypersons' (e.g., electronic lists organized around specific themes like parents of children with juvenile diabetes).
  • Fiorenza Micheli is a marine ecologist and conservation biologist conducting research and teaching at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, where she is also the David and Lucile Packard Professor of Marine Science and the Director, with Jim Leape, of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions. Micheli’s research focuses on the processes shaping marine communities and incorporating this understanding in the management and conservation of marine ecosystems. Her current research projects investigate social and ecological drivers of the resilience of small-scale fisheries to climatic impacts in Baja California, Mexico, the ecological and socioeconomic impacts of coastal hypoxia and ocean acidification in the California Current large marine ecosystem, the ecological role and spatial ecology of parrotfish and reef sharks in the coral reefs of the Pacific Line Islands, the effects of ocean acidification on seagrass, rocky reef and kelp forest communities, and the performance and management of marine protected Areas in the Mediterranean Sea. She is a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation, a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences, and senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
  • Geri Migielicz is a professor in the Graduate Program in Journalism in Stanford's Communication Department. She has served as visiting faculty at The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, and is an instructor and advisory board member for the Stan Kalish Workshop. She was Director of Photography at the San Jose Mercury News from 1993 to 2009. Under Geri's tenure, the Mercury News won major awards for photo editing and for multimedia, making the paper a destination for the leading talent in the photojournalism industry. She was executive producer of a 2007 national News and Documentary Emmy Award-winning web documentary, Uprooted, for mercurynews.com. She was on the leadership team for the coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake that won a 1990 Pulitzer Prize in general news reporting for the Mercury News. She also edited the paper's coverage of California's recall election, a 2003 Pulitzer finalist in Feature Photography. Geri was a 2004-5 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, where she studied multimedia narratives. She is a 2013 inductee to the Missouri Photojournalism Hall of Fame. She is co-founder and executive editor of Story4, (www.story4.org) a multimedia production studio. Story4 is in production of a feature documentary project, "The Cannon and The Flower", (thecannonandflowermovie.com).
  • Vivienne Ming, named one of 10 Women to Watch in Tech in 2013 by Inc. Magazine, is a theoretical neuroscientist, technologist and entrepreneur. She co-founded Socos, where machine learning and cognitive neuroscience combine to maximize students' life outcomes. Vivienne is also a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where she pursues her research in neuroprosthetics. In her free time, Vivienne has developed a predictive model of diabetes to better manage the glucose levels of her diabetic son and systems to predict manic episodes in bipolar suffers. She sits on the boards of StartOut, The Palm Center, Emozia, and the Bay Area Rainbow Daycamp, and is an advisor to Credit Suisse, Cornerstone Capital, and BayesImpact. Dr. Ming also speaks frequently on issues of LGBT inclusion and gender in technology. Vivienne lives in Berkeley, CA, with her wife (and co-founder) and their two children.
  • Omar Miranda is Assistant Professor at the University of San Francisco where he teaches and researches the literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. His book manuscript in progress, An Age of Exile: Romanticism, Celebrity, and Performance, examines the revolutionary possibilities of exile and literary form in the Romantic period. He is the editor of "Lord Byron's Manfred: A Commemorative Bicentennial Edition," a special volume of essays in Romantic Circles dedicated to Byron's play. He has published essays in European Romantic Review and Romantic Circles, book chapters in Lord Byron in Context (Cambridge UP) and The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth Century Novel, and book reviews in the BARS Bulletin and Review 19.
  • Simina Mistreanu is a China-based journalist whose work, spanning everything from China's social credit system to the crackdown campaign against minorities in Xinjiang, has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, The Guardian and Al Jazeera. Before moving to China, in 2015, she covered local politics in Portland, Oregon. (Read her article in Foreign Policy)
  • Susan Moffat is the Project Director of the Global Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary program at UC Berkeley that brings together the environmental design disciplines and the arts and humanities. Her research focuses on issues including perceptions of nature and culture in public space, parks, homelessness, water and landscape, and methods of spatial narratives. As a curator, Susan has mounted exhibitions on cartography and on the San Francisco Bay shoreline. Her oral history and mapping project, Atlas of the Albany Bulb, collects place-based stories from users of wild space at the urban edge, including unhoused people and artists, and was part of the SOMArts Cultural Center exhibition Refuge in Refuse: Homesteading Art and Culture Project. She also served as a consultant on the Detour audio tour of the Albany Bulb. She has organized symposia including Mapping and Its Discontents; Art, Politics, and the City in Mexico and China; and, in collaboration with the Arts Research Center, Reimagining the Urban and Public Art/Housing Publics: Conversations on Art and Social Justice. Susan was a guest co-editor of the Fall 2016 special edition of BOOM: California on urban humanities, which features her article, The Battle of the Bulb: Nature, Culture and Art at a San Francisco Bay Landfill.
  • Nicholas de Monchaux is is an architect, urban designer, and theorist; Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley. He is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize. The work of de Monchaux's Oakland-based design practice has been exhibited at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas, the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, San Francisco's SPUR, and SFMOMA. de Monchaux received his B.A. with distinction in Architecture, from Yale, and his Professional Degree (M.Arch.) from Princeton. Prior to his independent practice, he worked with Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro in New York. de Monchaux's work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Hellman Family fund, the Macdowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. He has received design awards and citations from Parsons The New School for Design, the International Union of Architects, Pamphlet Architecture, and the Van Alen Institute.
  • Sara Morawetz is a conceptually driven, interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the processes that underpin scientific action. Interested in the 'Scientific Method' and its philosophical implications, her work is devised to test and expose the internal processes of methodological labour, examining how concepts of observation, experimentation and standardisation operate as both scientific and cultural apparatus, that have come to convey precision, accuracy and determinacy, yet remain slippery, speculative and whimsical when ‘tested in the field.’ Through her visual and performative ‘experiments’ Morawetz unpacks the material, socio-political and temporal complexity of scientific activity, collaborating with scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (USA) to ensure rigor and authenticity are embedded in her process. The resulting work been exhibited internationally, including solo presentations at the Museé des Arts et Métiers, Australian Consulate-General New York, RAPID PULSE International Performing Arts Festival, Open Source Gallery and Dominik Mersch Gallery, and has received numerous awards including ‘the churchie’ National Emerging Art Prize (2016), the Moya Dyring Studio Scholarship (2018), the Vida Lahey Memorial Travelling Scholarship (2018), and the Terrence and Lynette Fern Cité International des Arts Fellowship (2020), as well as project funding from the Australia Council for the Arts. Morawetz was awarded her Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 2021 for her practice-led research examining the interrelationship of scientific and conceptual art practicesand has been featured in publications including Frieze Magazine, Forbes Magazine, Scientific American, Aesthetica Magazine, Artist Profile and Prime: Arts Next Generation recently released by Phaidon Pressand the forthcoming Documents of Contemporary Art: WALKING by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.
  • Hana Mori-Bottger is Assistant Professor in the Architecture and Community Design program at USF. She teaches physics, design, structural analysis and construction materials courses for architecture students, and has created the Architectural Engineering Minor program. Hana's research interests involve low-cost structural engineering techniques for earthen structures, such as the use of reinforcement to allow energy dissipation and inherent warning mechanisms during seismic activity.
  • Sophia Moskalenko received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research on terrorism and radicalization has been presented in scientific conferences, government briefings, radio broadcasts and international television newscasts. As a research fellow at the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (NC-START) she has worked on research projects commissioned by the Department of Defence, Department of Homeland Security and Department of State. With Clark McCauley, she has co-authored award-winning books: "Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us" (2011), "The Marvel of Martyrdom" and "Radicalization to Terrorism" (2020).
  • Luke Muehlhauser joined the Singularity Institute in 2011 as a researcher, and was shortly thereafter appointed Executive Director. He has published dozens of articles on technological forecasting, intelligence explosion theory, and the cognitive science of rationality. Previously, he interviewed dozens of scientists and philosophers for his podcast Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot, taught classes for the Center for Applied Rationality, and has worked both as a fashion consultant and as an information technologies consultant. He is currently developing several papers, including a survey of proposals for dealing with superhuman AI.
  • Tom Mullaney is Professor of Chinese History at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Fellow, and the recipient of Stanford’s highest award for excellence in teaching, the Gores Award. He is the author or lead editor of 8 books, including the forthcoming The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age, Where Research Begins: Choosing a Research Project that Matters to You (and the World) (University of Chicago Press, 2022, with Christopher Rea), The Chinese Typewriter: A History (winner of the Fairbank prize), Your Computer is on Fire, and Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China. His writings have appeared in Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, Quartz, the South China Morning Post, TechCrunch, the Journal of Asian Studies, Technology & Culture, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy. His work has been featured in RadioLab, The Atlantic, the BBC, and in invited lectures at Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and more. He earned his BA and MA from the Johns Hopkins University, and his PhD from Columbia University.
  • Deborah Munk is the director of the Artist in Residence Program at Recology and has spent the last eight years working with artists who make art out of garbage. She was the assistant editor of "Parallels and Intersections, Women Artists in California" published by UC Press, in 2002 and is a proud graduate of San Francisco State University with a Masters in Educational Technology focusing on art and media. Deborah also manages the Educational Learning Center at SF Recycling & Disposal where she teaches children and adults the importance of sustainability and recycling.
  • Alysson Muotri is a professor at the Departments of Pediatrics and Cellular & Molecular Medicine at UC San Diego. He is also the Director of the Stem Cell Program and Archealization Center. He earned a BSc in Biological Sciences from the State University of Campinas in 1995 and a Ph.D. in Genetics in 2001 from University of Sao Paulo, in Brazil. He moved to the Salk Institute as Pew Latin America Fellow in 2002 for a postdoctoral training in the fields of neuroscience and stem cell biology. His research focuses on brain evolution and modeling neurological diseases using human induced pluripotent stem cells and brain organoids. He has received several awards, including the prestigious NIH Director's New Innovator Award, NARSAD, Emerald Foundation Young Investigator Award, Surugadai Award, Rock Star of Innovation, NIH EUREKA Award, Telly Awards among several others.
  • Soraya Murray is an interdisciplinary scholar who focuses on contemporary visual culture, with particular interest in art, film, digital media and video games. Murray holds a Ph.D. in art history and visual studies from Cornell University, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. An Associate Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, she is also principal faculty in the Art + Design: Games + Playable Media Program and affiliated with the History of Art and Visual Culture Department. Her writings are published in Art Journal, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, CTheory, Public Art Review, Third Text, Film Quarterly, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, and Critical Inquiry. Her two anthologized essays on the military game genre, gender and race may be found in Gaming Representation: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Video Games, eds. Jennifer Malkowski and TreaAndrea M. Russworm (Indiana University Press, 2017) and in Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, eds. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (The MIT Press, 2016). Her article on the politics of identity and the poetics of form in Assassin's Creed III: Liberation is published in the media studies journal Kinephanos (2017). Murray's essay on postcolonial studies and games is published in the Open Library of the Humanities (2018). Murray's book, On Video Games: The Visual Politics of Race, Gender and Space (I.B.Tauris, 2018), considers video games from a visual culture perspective, and how they both mirror and are constitutive of larger societal fears, dreams, hopes and even complex struggles for recognition. Academic webpages: http://film.ucsc.edu/faculty/soraya_murray and https://news.ucsc.edu/2018/08/murray-video-games.html .
  • Kat Mustatea is a playwright and technologist whose language and performance works enlist absurdity, hybridity, and the uncanny to dig deeply into what it means to be human. Her TED talk, about puppets and algorithms, unpacks the meaning of machines making art. She co-curates EdgeCut, a live performance series that explores our complex relationship to the digital, and is a member of NEW INC, the art and tech incubator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Her most recent hybrid work, Voidopolis, won the Arts and Letters Unclassifiable Prize for literature and the Dante Prize for art, and has been exhibited internationally in a variety of digital and physical formats, including at Ars Electronica 2021 in the form of an AR book meant to disappear. Her mixed reality play, Lizardly, will premiere at MAXLive: The Neuroverse, co-produced by New York Live Arts, in fall of 2021. She speaks and writes frequently about cutting edge technology and art.
  • Vijaya Nagarajan is an associate professor in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies and in the Program of Environmental Studies. In addition to teaching at the University of San Francisco, she has also taught at the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University. Vijaya's academic interests weave among the fields of Hinduism, Environment, Gender, Ritual, and the Commons. She received her PhD in South Asian Language and Literatures from UC Berkeley. Vijaya has received grants, fellowships, and awards from University of San Francisco (Davies Chair, Jesuit Foundation, NEH Chair, Post-Sabbatical), Harvard University, UC Berkeley, Fulbright-Hays, Oxford University, American Institute of Indian Studies, California Tamil Academy, American Academy of Religion, Djerassi Resident Artist Program, and MESA Refuge. Vijaya has been devoted to the environmental movement for several decades in both India and the Bay Area. She is the co-founder of The Recovery of the Commons Project and the Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources, where she has co-organized events with a large range of scholars, activists and artists. Her book, "Feeding A Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual and Ecology in India, an Exploration of the kolam" was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Every day millions of Tamil women in southeast India wake up before dawn to create the kolam, a ritual design made of rice flour, on the thresholds of homes. This thousand year old ritual welcomes and honors the goddesses Lakshmi and Bhudevi. Propelled by a lifelong wonder, and fueled by deeply informed research, Vijaya Nagarajan provides a poetic and surprising entryway into the layered complexities of this ritual practice. Braiding Tamil women's voices and the author's own stories, Feeding a Thousand Souls brings into conversation different knowledge traditions--beauty, history, literature, religion, anthropology, mathematics, and ecology.
  • Amy X Neuburg's career bridges the boundaries between classical, experimental and popular musics. Her 'avant-cabaret' songs combine her interests in poetry and language, expressive use of music technology (with an emphasis on live looping), and exploration of multiple genres using the many colors of her four-octave vocal range. She has performed at venues as diverse as the Other Minds and Bang on a Can new music festivals, the Berlin International Poetry Festival and the Wellington and Christchurch Jazz Festivals (NZ). Commissions for voices and chamber ensembles (often with looping electronics) include Robin Cox Ensemble, Present Music, Santa Cruz New Music Works, Solstice Vocal Ensemble, Christchurch Arts Centre chorus, Pacific Mozart Ensemble and Del Sol String Quartet. She has also composed extensively for theater and visual media, including Mondomedia's irreverent Piki & Poko web animations and numerous onstage collaborations with modern dancers. A classically trained vocalist, Amy has been featured in contemporary operas and recordings including works by Robert Ashley, Culture Clash and Guillermo Galindo. She performs regularly with her Cello ChiXtet, a cello trio with live electronics.
  • Julie Newdoll is a painter who merges life science, mythology and culture. Her artwork has been featured on over 20 journal covers in the last few years, and is in collections world wide, including several universities. Newdoll, who studied microbiology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and medical illustration at the University of California at San Francisco, runs the "Brush with Science" Gallery in Menlo Park.
  • William Newsome is Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He is the Vincent V.C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Harman Family Provostial Professor and is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. He received his PhD in Biology from the California Institute of Technology. He served on the faculty of the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at SUNY Stony Brook before moving to Stanford in 1988. He is a leading investigator in the fields of visual and cognitive neuroscience. He co-chaired the NIH working group that planned the US national BRAIN initiative. He has made fundamental contributions to our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying visual perception and simple forms of decision-making. Among his many honors are the RAnk Prize in Opto-electronics, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, Karl Spencer Lashley Award of the American Philosophical Society, the Champalimaud Vision Award, and most recently, the Pepose Award for the Study of Vision, Brandeis University. He was elected to membership in the National Academy of Sciences in 2000 and to the American Philosophical Society in 2011. The long-term goal of the Newsome lab's research is to understand the neuronal processes that mediate visual perception and visually guided behavior.
  • Kate Nichols is an artist who synthesizes nanoparticles to mimic structurally colored animals, grows artificial skin from microorganisms, and cooks up her own paints, following 15th century recipes. In 2010, Kate was appointed a TED Fellow and was awarded a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. Kate holds a B.A. in Studio Art from Kenyon College, a M.A. in Visual Studies from UC Berkeley, and an MFA from California College of the Arts.
  • Greg Niemeyer (UC Berkeley/ Center for New Media), born in Switzerland, started working with new media when he arrived in the Bay Area in 1992 and he received his MFA from Stanford University in New Media in 1997. At the same time, he founded the Stanford University Digital Art Center, which he directed until 2001, when he was appointed at UC Berkeley as Assistant Professor for New Media. At UC Berkeley, he is involved in the development of the Center for New Media, focusing on the critical analysis of the impact of new media on human experiences. His creative work focuses on the mediation between humans as individuals and humans as a collective through technological means, and emphasizes playful responses to technology. His most recognized projects are Gravity (Cooper Union, NYC, 1997), PING (SFMOMA, 2001), Oxygen Flute (SJMA, 2002), ar (Pacific Film Archive, 2003), Ping 2.0 (Paris, La Villette Numerique, 2004), Organum Playtest (2005), Good Morning Flowers (SFIFF 2006, Townhouse Gallery, Cairo, Egypt, 2006), blackloud.org, sevenairs.org, and polartide.org
  • Rachna Nivas is a soloist, principal member of the Chitresh Das Dance Company and Director of the Chhandam School, one of the largest classical Indian dance institutions in the world. Studying under Guru, Pandit Chitresh Das, for 16 years, Rachna brings a fierce passion to her performances and has emerged as a compelling leader amongst the next generation of Kathak artists. Deemed "charismatic" and "revelatory" by the SF Chronicle, Rachna has performed at prestigious venues across the U.S. and India - Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Roy and Edna Disney Cal/Arts Theater and Getty Museum in Los Angeles, National Center for Performing Arts in Mumbai, National Center for Kathak Dance (Kathak Kendra) in New Delhi, and many others. She is also actively involved in arts education programs and lecture demonstrations at schools and universities nationwide. As Director of the Chhandam School, Rachna manages over 500 students, 15 teachers, and 7 locations in California. She has been an instrumental leader in building the school as a premiere cultural and educational academy. Rachna is also famed for her exhilarating demonstrations of Kathak Yoga, of which she pioneered playing harmonium while simultaneously singing, dancing, and improvising sophisticated rhythmical mathematics.
  • Bruno Olshausen is Professor of Neuroscience and Optometry at the University of California, Berkeley. He also serves as Director of the Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, an interdisciplinary research group focusing on mathematical and computational models of brain function. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Computation and Neural Systems from the California Institute of Technology. Prior to Berkeley he was a member of the Departments of Psychology and Neurobiology, Physiology & Behavior at UC Davis. During postdoctoral work with David Field at Cornell he developed the sparse coding model of visual cortex which provides a linking principle between natural scene statistics and the response properties of visual neurons. Olshausen's current research aims to understand the information processing strategies employed by the brain for doing tasks such as object recognition and scene analysis. This work seeks not only to advance our understanding of the brain, but also to discover new algorithms for scene analysis based on how brains work.
  • Steve Omohundro founded Possibility Research and Self-Aware Systems to develop beneficial intelligent technologies. He has degrees in Physics and Mathematics from Stanford and a Ph.D. in Physics from Berkeley. He was a computer science professor at the University of Illinois and cofounded the Center for Complex Systems Research. He published the book "Geometric Perturbation Theory in Physics", designed the A.I. programming languages StarLisp and Sather, wrote the 3D graphics system for Mathematica, invented many machine learning algorithms (including manifold learning, model merging, bumptrees, and family discovery), and built systems that learn to read lips, control robots, and induce grammars. He's done internationally recognized work on AI safety and strategies for its beneficial development. He is on the advisory board of AI startups AIBrain and Cognitalk, and is past chairman of the Silicon Valley ACM Special Interest Group in AI. He is also on the advisory board of blockchain startup Dfinity and the Institute for Blockchain Studies. See for example his Presentation on Deep Learning for Business and TED talk on A.I.
  • Dasha Ortenberg believes deeply in design's ability to stimulate critical thought, highlight the weirdness of individuals, and the reveal uncanny overlaps of (sub-)cultures. Her cross-scalar and cross-media approach to space is the result of a perpetual fascination with modes of human communication, collaboration, and cohabitation. Having emigrated from the Soviet Union as a child, she is driven by a deep gratitude to the United States for having provided the opportunity to pursue her passions and understand her heritage, and works to promote and propagate such opportunities for others. Dasha holds degrees in Art History and Linguistics (UC Berkeley), and Architecture (Harvard GSD). Her formal education is supplemented by a variegated work experience, which includes radio, dance, and archival conservation. In her conceptual projects, pedagogical pursuits, and work for art and architectural practices she strives to combine traditional and contemporary technologies to transform individual narratives and historic cross-currents into socially-impactful spatial experiences. She leverages the media of documentation, representation, and fabrication to highlight juxtapositions and create conversations that encourage mutual understanding. Her project, A Franchise of Difference, transformed documentation of interviews and sites from a 7,000-mile road trip into architectural concepts. She works as a designer at Anderson Brule Architects. As an artist with the ZERO1 American Arts Incubator in March 2018, she developed, taught and administrated the "Rhetorical City" program at L'Uzine in Casablanca, Morocco. She is also developing and directing the 2018 events cycle "Structures of Power," -- which explores the structures of traditional power and methods of empowerment -- for the Women in Architecture group of Silicon Valley.
  • Steven Oscherwitz is a digital media artist, an art and science historian and an educator who most recently taught "Comparative History of Ideas" at the University of Washington.
  • Bob Ostertag has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and three books. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, avant garder John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, transgender chanteuse Justin Bond, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men. In March 2006 Ostertag made all of his recordings available as free digital downloads. He has a new book in press about labor organizing in Nevada, and is working on another about the construction of human identities through technology. He is currently Professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.
  • Derek Ouyang graduated from Stanford University in 2013 with dual Bachelor's in Civil Engineering and Architectural Design, and is currently completing a Master's in Structural Engineering. He participated in the AEC Global Teamwork Project in 2011 and co-created the Global Urban Development Program in 2012. He was project manager of Stanford's first-ever entry to the U.S. DOE's 2013 Solar Decathlon and has been featured as an up-and-coming architect in the Los Angeles Times, in Home Energy magazine's "30 under 30", at TEDxStanford and Stanford+Connects NY and Seattle, and at fiiS 2014 in Santiago, Chile.
  • Trevor Paglen (U.C. Berkeley) has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Modern, London; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the 2009 Istanbul Biennial; the 2012 Liverpool Biennial, and numerous other solo and group exhibitions. He is the author of five books and numerous articles on subjects including experimental geography, state secrecy, military symbology, photography, and visuality. His most recent book, The Last Pictures is a meditation on the intersections of deep-time, politics, and art. Paglen has received grants and awards from the Smithsonian, Art Matters, Artadia, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the LUMA foundation, the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology, and the Aperture Foundation.
  • Chris Palmer is a Fine Artist who has specialized in traditional and modern geometric art, textile design, traditional ornament and folding. After four years teaching Digital Fabrication in schools of architecture in Chicago (IIT) and the University of Colorado at Boulder he now works with Rob Bell in a design build studio in San Francisco CA. He is a member of an international design team doing architectural ornament in middle eastern styles for the American Institute of Mathematics Research Conference Center in San Jose.
  • Megan Joan Palmer is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University. At CISAC she leads a research program focused on risk governance in biotechnology and other emerging technologies. Palmer also leads programs aimed at developing best practices and policies for the responsible development of biotechnology. For the last 5 years she served as Deputy Director of the policy-related research program of the multi-university Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (Synberc), where she led projects in safety, security, property rights, and governance. She founded and serves as Executive Director of the Synthetic Biology Leadership Excellence Accelerator Program (LEAP), an international fellowship program in responsible biotechnology leadership. She also leads programs in safety and responsible innovation for the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition. Palmer currently advises a diversity of organizations on their approach to policy issues in biotechnology, including serving on the board of the synthetic biology program of the Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genomics Institute (JGI). Palmer was previously a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and visiting scholar at CISAC at Stanford University, and a research scientist at the California Center for Quantitative Bioscience (QB3) at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • Stephen Palmer received his B.A. in Psychology at Princeton University in 1970 and his PhD in Psychology at UCSD in 1975. He has taught in Psychology at UC Berkeley ever since, where he also served as Director of the Institute of Cognitive Studies. He is best known for his research on perceptual organization and his interdisciplinary book, Vision Science: Photons to Phenomenology. He now studies visual aesthetics of color and spatial composition. He has published "Vision science: Photons to phenomenology" (MIT Press, 1999) and "Aesthetic science: Connecting mind, brain, and experience" (Oxford University Press, 2012) as well as dozens of journal articles and book chapters.
  • Annapurna Pandey is a trained sociologist, anthropologist, teaching Cultural Anthropology at the university of California, Santa Cruz since 1995 as well as at San Jose State University since 2006. Born and brought up in Odisha, India, she graduated from Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi and taught Sociology for 7+ years at the Ravenshaw University in Odisha. After her post-doctoral research in Social Anthropology at Cambridge University, she moved to Santa Cruzin 1989. She began teaching in 1995 and resumed her research on Women in Politics and Religion. She started looking into the impact of globalization on Odisha and Odia Diaspora. She also produced a documentary on the experiences of the diasporic Odias in the greater Bay Area titled "Homeland in the Heart" and she is now working on another film, "Giving Life to God: The Installation of Lord Jagannath in the Fremont Hindu Temple". She has collaborated with Prof. James Freeman of San Jose State University on the documentary "The Myth of Buddha's Birthplace" (2012).
  • Joon Sung Park is a computer science PhD student in the Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing groups at Stanford University. His work introduces the concept of, and the techniques for creating generative agents -- computational agents that simulate human behavior. His work has won best paper awards at UIST and CHI, as well as multiple best paper nominations and other paper awards at CHI, CSCW, and ASSETS, and has been reported in venues such as The Times, The Guardian, NBC, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Forbes, Wired, Science, and Nature. Joon is recognized with the Microsoft Research Ph.D. Fellowship (2022), Terry Winograd Fellowship (2021), and Siebel Scholar Award (2019).
  • Jennifer Parker is the founding Director of OpenLab, a collaborative research center at UC Santa Cruz. Parker served as Art Department Chair from 2012-17, helped spearhead the UCSC IDEA Hub for Social and Creative Entrepreneurship program from 2016-19, and is currently serving as campus lead PI for PlaceMakers: UC Place-based Art + Design a 2019 Multi-campus Research Initiative with UCSC, UCB, UCD, and UCSB. Parker also served as principal faculty for the Digital Arts & New Media (DANM) MFA program where she directed the Mechatronics collaborative research cohort from 2009-2015 developing research projects that combine art, design, science, and technology. She serves on the faculty advisory board for UCSC CITRIS and the Banatao Institute and is an active board member for SOUNDWAVE , a a Bay area non-profit promoting innovative voices in sound with captivating sound art and performance experiences. Parker maintains a multifaceted art practice at the intersection of art and science. From 2008-2012 she collaborated with artist Barney Haynes on SonicSENSE, an expandable and evolving site for art, culture, new technologies, collaboration, and participation. More recently Parker has been working with the Genomics Institute to develop an Art + Media Lab and is a founding member of The Algae Society: Bio Art and Design Collective.
  • Julie Parsonnet is the George DeForest Barnett Professor in Medicine and Professor of Health Research and Policy at Stanford University. She specializes in adult infectious diseases. She also has an active research enterprise in which she studies the way infections contribute to the development of chronic diseases including cancer, allergy and obesity.
  • Carrie Partch first studied the biochemical basis of circadian rhythms during her graduate training with Nobel Laureate Aziz Sancar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She completed postdoctoral training in biophysics and circadian rhythms with Kevin Gardner and Joe Takahashi at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, starting at UC Santa Cruz in 2011. Since then, her lab has integrated biochemistry, biophysics, and cellular studies of circadian rhythms to identify how proteins of the clock work together to keep time and control cellular health. In 2016, she was awarded the Junior Faculty Research Award by the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms, and in 2018, she was the recipient of the Margaret Oakley Dayhoff Award from the Biophysical Society for her lab's integration of cellular and biophysical studies leading to new insights into the molecular basis of circadian rhythms.
  • Josef Parvizi is Principal Investigator of the Laboratory of Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience (LBCN). He received his MD from the University of Oslo and PhD in neurosciences from the University of Iowa. He completed his medical internship at Mayo Clinic and Neurology Residency at BIDMC-Harvard before joining the UCLA for fellowship training in Clinical Epilepsy and Neurophysiology. He moved to Stanford University in July 2007 and started the Human Intracranial Cognitive Electrophysiology Program (SHICEP). His research is now supported by NIH, Stanford NeuroVentures Program, and Stanford School of Medicine. Josef's expertise is in functional mapping of the human brain using the three methods of electrocorticography, electrical brain stimulation, and functional imaging.
  • Eric Paulos is the Director of the Living Environments Lab, Co-Director of the CITRIS Invention Lab, and an Assistant Professor in Electrical Engineering Computer Science Department at UC Berkeley where he is faculty within the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM). Previously, Eric held the Cooper-Siegel Associate Professor Chair in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University where he was faculty within the Human-Computer Interaction Institute with courtesy faculty appointments in the Robotics Institute and in the Entertainment Technology Center. Prior to CMU, Eric was Senior Research Scientist at Intel Research in Berkeley, California where he founded the Urban Atmospheres research group. His areas of expertise span a deep body of research territory in urban computing, sustainability, green design, environmental awareness, social telepresence, robotics, physical computing, interaction design, persuasive technologies, and intimate media. Eric received his PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. Eric is also the founder and director of the Experimental Interaction Unit and a frequent collaborator with Mark Pauline of Survival Research Laboratories.
  • Kris Paulsen, associate professor in Ohio State University's Department of History of Art, is a specialist in contemporary art, with a focus on time-based and computational media. Her first book, Here/There: Telepresence, Touch, and Art at the Interface (MIT Press, 2017), received the 2018 Anne Friedberg Award for Innovative Scholarship from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her work traces the history of technology in the arts from photography to new media, with a particular emphasis on telepresence, virtuality, interface studies, and early video art. Her current research addresses the logics of quantification and virtuality in contemporary art and culture, with particular attention to how they intersect with the physical, fleshy body. Other publications, on topics such as experimental television, Artificial Intelligence, automation, 1990s Net Art, photographic theory, network aesthetics, and curatorial studies have appeared in numerous journals, books and exhibition catalogs. Links to these works can be found on her website, www.kpaulsen.com.
  • Mike Parker Pearson is Professor of British Later Prehistory at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London (UCL) since 2012. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. He has worked on archaeological excavations in England, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Syria, the United States, Madagascar, Easter Island and the Outer Hebrides. He has published twenty books and many scientific papers. In 2010 he was voted the UK's 'Archaeologist of the Year' and in 2011 he was awarded the Samuel H Kress Lectureship in Ancient Art by the American Institute of Archaeology. In 2004 he began the Stonehenge Riverside Project with colleagues Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Julian Thomas, Chris Tilley and Kate Welham. Over the years, this evolved into two further projects: Feeding Stonehenge, and the Stones of Stonehenge. His current field research is in west Wales, where Stonehenge's bluestones were quarried. His books include: "Bronze Age Britain" (1993), "The Archaeology of Death and Burial" (1999), "Food, Culture and Identity in the Neolithic and Early Bronze Age" (2003) and "Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Enigma" (2012).
  • Anders Bach Pedersen is a student currently enrolled in the Creative Digital Practice graduate specialization program (MSc) at the IT University in Copenhagen with an undergrad degree in music performance and composition from the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen. Prior to that Anders studied electro-acoustic composition and programming at IRCAM in Paris and contemporary jazz drumming at The Collective School of Music in New York City in 2009. In the fall of 2016 Anders will be writing his master's thesis on sound synthesis, phenomenology and algorithmic improvisation in connection with an artist residency at Mills College in Oakland, California. Besides studying Anders works as a touring musician, record producer, teacher and most notably as a composer of solo-work and as one-third of the ensemble called Ice Cream Cathedral with which he has toured Europe and the US. He currently teaches Max/MSP programming at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory and guest lectures in Digital Media Aesthetics at the IT University in Copenhagen.
  • Ellen Peel is Professor in the Department of Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. She teaches and conducts research in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction (French, English); twentieth- and twenty-first century fiction (English, U.S.); literary theory and criticism (especially narrative, feminist, psychoanalytic, reader response, rhetorical); women's literature; science fiction and utopian literature; and surveys of Western and world literature. Her publications include Politics, Persuasion, and Pragmatism: A Rhetoric of Feminist Utopian Fiction (Ohio State University Press, 2002). "Imagining the Constructed Body: From Statues to Cyborgs" appeared in the MLA volume Teaching World Literature (2009). Recent publications include "Narrative Causes: Inside and Out" (in Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions) and "The Conundrum of Feminism in Doris Lessing's Fiction" (in Feminine Issues: In the Writing of British Female Authors). She is working on a book about the constructed body in literature and film.
  • Claire Pentecost is an artist and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates the critical zone of our planet. Pentecost’s work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form. She advocates for the role of the amateur in the production and interpretation of knowledge, while a longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change. Her soil-erg project of 2012 considered the material of soil as a commodity, proposing a soil-based currency system. She is a founding member of Deep Time Chicago, a collective exploring cultural change in response to ecological crisis, and the Anthropocene Commons, an international research network. Pentecost has exhibited work at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany; 13th Istanbul Biennial; White Chapel Gallery, London; 3rd Mongolian Land Art Biennial; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Times Museum; Guangzhou; MCA Chicago; MSU Broad Museum; Museum of Contemporary Photography; DePaul Art Museum; Corcoran Museum; Milwaukee Art Museum; Transmediale 05; and many others. She is represented by Higher Pictures Generation, New York, and is Professor Emeritus at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she taught for 25 years. With Brian Holmes she directs Watershed Art&Ecology, an experimental cultural space.
  • Saul Perlmutter is a 2011 Nobel Laureate, sharing the prize in Physics for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. He is the director of BIDS, a professor of physics, where he holds the Franklin W. and Karen Weber Dabby Chair, and a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is the leader of the international Supernova Cosmology Project, and executive director of the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics. His undergraduate degree was from Harvard and his PhD from UC Berkeley. In addition to other awards and honors, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Perlmutter has also written popular articles, and has appeared in numerous PBS, Discovery Channel, and BBC documentaries. His interest in teaching scientific-style critical thinking for scientists and non-scientists alike led to Berkeley courses on Sense and Sensibility and Science and Physics & Music.
  • Marjorie Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is also Florence Scott professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California. Perloff is the author of many books and articles on 20th and 21st century Poetry and Poetics, including, "Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters" (1977), "The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage" (1981), "The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture" (1986, new edition, 1994), "Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media" (1992), "Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary" (1996), "21st Century Modernism" (2002), and "Unoriginal Genius: Writing by Other Means in the New Century" (2011), while "The Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire" (2016) enlarges on the theme of her 2004 memoir "The Vienna Paradox". "Circling the Canon: The Collected Book Reviews of Marjorie Perloff, 1969-2016" has been published in two volumes by the University of New Mexico Press in 2019, and her most recent book, "Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics",has just been published by Chicago. Perloff’s first English translation/edition of Wittgenstein’s "Private Notebooks 1914-16", has just been published by Liveright in 2022. Perloff is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society.
  • Christine Peterson is the co- founder and President of Foresight Institute, a public interest group that educates the community and policymakers on coming powerful technologies such as nanotechnology. She also serves on the Advisory Board of the International Council on Nanotechnology and the Editorial Advisory Board of NASA's Nanotech Briefs. Her work is motivated by a desire to help Earth's environment and traditional human communities benefit from advances in technology. She coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (1991) and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (1997).
  • Sasha Kolin Petrenko is an educator, intermedia artist, environmental choreographer and founding member of the New Urban Naturalists. Her site specific installations and performances have been supported, commissioned and presented nationally at institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (SF), Robert Wilson's Watermill Center (NY), Southern Exposure (SF), the Lab (SF), the Temescal Arts Center (OAK), the University of San Francisco, the Headlands Center for the Arts (CA), and the Djerassi Foundation (CA). She teaches drawing, woodworking and new media at the University of San Francisco, Diablo Valley College, and the public education program at the San Francisco Art Institute.
  • Purin Phanichphant's works are often playful, interactive, and simple, combining his fun-loving Thai roots, an obsession with knobs, buttons, and screens, and his training as an interaction designer. He was Principal Product & Interaction Designer at IDEO. His most recent works include a land-glider dubbed the Death Wheel 3000dx, an interface for human-computer sex, a wall covered with all the tap lights in the Bay Area, and a machine that churns out Thai food. Purin was born and raised in Northern Thailand, where he spent part of his life as a Buddhist monk.
  • Kavita Philip is Associate Professor at UC Irvine's Program in Women's Studies. Her research interests are in technology in the developing world; transnational histories of science and technology; gender, race, globalization and postcolonialism; environmental history; and new media theory.
  • Frank Pietronigro is an interdisciplinary artist and author, an Associate Fellow at the Studio For Creative Inquiry, College of Fine Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, and the co-founder and director of the Zero Gravity Arts Consortium. In 1998 he pioneered "drift paintings" where his body floated within a three-dimensional painting in zero gravity aboard NASA's KC135 turbojet. The Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, founded in 1999, is a space arts organization dedicated to fostering greater access for artists to zero gravity space through international partnerships with space agencies.
  • Sheila Pinkel is a Professor of Art at Pomona College where she has worked since 1986. She has exhibited and spoken nationally and internationally. Most recently she co-curated the exhibition "In Transition Russia 2008" in Ekaterinberg and Moscow, Russia, and participated in a symposium with this title.
  • Leonard Pitt is an actor, author and teacher. He originally studied mime in Paris with Etienne Decroux in the 1960s and settled in Berkeley in 1970. He has performed and taught around the world. He currently operates The Flying Actor Studio in San Francisco offering a one-year conservatory program in the art of physical theatre. He has written three books about Paris, Walks Through Lost Paris, Paris a Journey Through Time, and Paris Postcards, the Golden Age, plus A Small Moment of Great Illumination about the life of Valentine Greatrakes, a 17th century Irish healer.
  • Martin Pohl is an experimental physicist who has worked on major particle physics experiments at particle accelerators for 35 years, exploring the structure of matter, elementary forces, space and time. He also contributes to space-borne experiments measuring cosmic particles to investigate their nature as well as their sources. He is interested in the contributions of science to culture and its interaction with other cultural activities: "A major point of contact between fundamental physics and the arts ought to be that neither scientists not artists should ever expect anything but the unexpected".
  • June Power has degrees in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley and University College London. She has published numerous research papers in the area of distributed systems and has been invited to speak on this topic at several universities. She is also the co-founder of Altor Systems, a company that has developed, patented and licensed technology for 3D applications, including games.
  • Summer Praetorius is a Research Geologist in the Geology, Minerals, Energy, and Geophysics Science Center of USGS. She received a PhD in Oceanography from Oregon State University in 2014. Since joining the USGS in 2016, she has been developing high-resolution paleoceanographic records from the North Pacific to better understand past climate dynamics in this region and interactions with the global climate system. She uses foraminiferal micropaleontology and other geochemical proxies to reconstruct changes in ocean properties in the past (circulation, temperature, and salinity). Her recent work has focused largely on oceanographic changes in the North Pacific from the last Ice Age through the Holocene period. Her research interests include the dynamics of abrupt climate change, the history and climate impacts of the Missoula Floods, interactions between volcanism and climate in the past, ocean hypoxia, and coastal archaeological shell middens as paleoceanographic archives. She recently published this article on the Heliocene.
  • Phillip Prager has recently completed his PhD at the Cambridge University Digital Studio and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Minerva Foundation in Berkeley. His work relates scientific research on creativity and play to the historical and digital avant-garde.
  • Tony Pratkanis studies at Stanford University, specializing in Robotics and Mechatronics. He currently works in the Salisbury Robotics lab. He is also a member of the technical Board of Advisors for Suitable Technologies. Prior to attending to Stanford, he worked at Willow Garage. An eleven-year member of the Homebrew Robotics Club, his robots have been featured at Maker Faire and in the mass media including the CBS morning news, BBC, Servo Magazine, and IEEE Spectrum among others. In addition to robotics, he is interested in software engineering, chemistry, alternative energy and entrepreneurship.
  • Jackie Quinn is a software engineer by trade, and a synthetic biologist at heart. She currently serves as editor for the Synthetic Biology Open Language (SBOL) standard and lead for the SBOL Visual working group. She is interested in the development of biology as an engineering and design field, and loves design languages, programming languages, natural languages, and languages of all sorts. Jackie graduated with a B.S. in Engineering from Harvard University in 2012, and has spent the past two years working in Autodesk's Bio/Nano Programmable Matter research group. She has recently transitioned to Google.
  • Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at U.C. Berkeley, Director of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory (ARC), and former Director of Human Practices for the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC), is the author of "Designing Human Practices: An Experiment with Synthetic Biology " (2012); "The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary" (2011); "Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary" (2007); "Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment" (2003); "Essays on the Anthropology of Reason" (1996); "Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology" (1993); "French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment" (1989); and "The Foucault Reader" (1984). A former lecturer at the cole Normale Superieure (1997) in Paris, he was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government in 1998 and was awarded the visiting Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the cole Normale Superieure for 2001-2.
  • Ron Rael is the Director of the printFARM Laboratory (print Facility for Architecture, Research and Materials), holds a joint appointment in the Department of Architecture, in the College of Environmental Design, and the Department of Art Practice and is both a Bakar and Hellman Fellow. Rael is an applied architectural researcher, design activist, author, and thought leader in the fields of additive manufacturing and earthen architecture. In 2014 his creative practice, Rael San Fratello (with architect Virginia San Fratello), was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York-one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. In 2016 Rael San Fratello was also awarded the Digital Practice Award of Excellence by the The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). His first book, "Earth Architecture" (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008) is a history of building with earth in the modern era to exemplify new, creative uses of the oldest building material on the planet. A forthcoming book, "Borderwall as Architecture" (University of California Press 2017), advocates for a reconsideration of the barrier dividing the U.S. and Mexico through design proposals that are hyperboles of actual scenarios that occur as a consequence of the wall. Emerging Objects, a company co-founded by Rael, is an independent, creatively driven, 3D Printing MAKE-tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments and products (a short documentary of thier work can be seen here). His work has been published widely, including the New York Times, Wired, MARK, Domus, Metropolis Magazine, PRAXIS, Thresholds, Log, and recognized by several institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, The Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, La Biennale di Venezia, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and Storefront for Art and Architecture.
  • Irina Raicu is the director of the Internet Ethics Program at the Center at Santa Clara University. She is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (U.S.) and was formerly an attorney in private practice. Her work addresses a wide variety of issues, ranging from online privacy to net neutrality, from data ethics to social media's impact on friendship and family, from the digital divide to the ethics of encryption, and from the ethics of artificial intelligence to the right to be forgotten. She holds a J.D. degree from Santa Clara University's School of Law, as well as a bachelor's degree in English from U.C. Berkeley and a master's degree in English and American Literature from San Jose State University. Her writing has appeared in a variety of publications, including The Atlantic, U.S.A. Today, MarketWatch, Slate, the Huffington Post, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Recode. Raicu is a member of the Partnership on AI's Working Group on Fair, Transparent, and Accountable AI. In collaboration with the staff of the High Tech Law Institute, Raicu manages the ongoing "IT, Ethics, and Law" lecture series, which has brought to campus speakers such as journalist Julia Angwin, ethicists Luciano Floridi and Patrick Lin, and then-FTC commissioner Julie Brill. She tweets at @IEthics and is the primary contributor to the blog Internet Ethics: Views from Silicon Valley. As a teenager, Raicu came to the U.S. with her family as a refugee; her background informs her interest in the Internet as a tool whose use has profound ethical implications worldwide.
  • Anastasiia Raina is a multidisciplinary designer, researcher, and an Assistant Professor in the Graphic Design department at the Rhode Island School of Design. She graduated from the Yale School of Art with an MFA in Graphic Design and has lectured and served as a critic at design schools, including Yale University, Parsons, Pratt, Otis, UCLA, Pomona College and University of Chicago. Prior to her MFA, she worked as a commercial graphic designer and art director in Los Angeles. In her research-based practice, Anastasiia is interested in exploring the aesthetics of technologically mediated Natures through machine vision and computer-generated forms, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the incorporation of biomaterials into the artistic vernacular. She draws upon scientific inquiry and collaborations with scientists as a means for generating new methodologies and forms in design. In addition to teaching, she consults and collaborates with various international firms, including the Hyundai Motor Group, and has delivered lectures at conferences about posthumanist aesthetics and pedagogy to engage with a wide range of scholars from a variety of disciplines.
  • Kate Rakelly studies computer vision as a PhD student at UC Berkeley, supervised by Alyosha Efros and Sergey Levine. Her work focuses on building visual recognition systems that learn to collect data and improve over time. As an undergraduate, she conducted research in computer vision with Alyosha Efros, and in optimal control with Claire Tomlin.
  • Bharath Ramsundar received a BA and BS from UC Berkeley in EECS and Mathematics and was valedictorian of his graduating class in mathematics. He did his PhD in computer science at Stanford University where he studied the application of deep-learning to problems in drug-discovery. At Stanford, Bharath created the deepchem.io open-source project to grow the deep drug discovery open source community, co-created the moleculenet.aibenchmark suite to facilitate development of molecular algorithms, and more. Bharath's graduate education was supported by a Hertz Fellowship, the most selective graduate fellowship in the sciences. Bharath is the lead author of "TensorFlow for Deep Learning: From Linear Regression to Reinforcement Learning", a developer's introduction to modern machine learning, with O'Reilly Media. After leaving Stanford, Bharath co-founded Computable, where he is focused on designing the decentralized protocols that will unlock data and AI to create the next stage of the internet.
  • Janine Randerson is an Aotearoa New Zealand-based artist and writer on art, performance and technological mediation in ecological systems. Her moving image and digital artworks are exhibited in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond. Janine's recent book "Weather as Medium: Toward a Meteorological Art" (MIT Press, 2018) examines artworks that offer sensorial engagement with our future weathers, while creating openings for action in the present. She is an Associate Professor in Art and Design at AUT University.
  • Born and raised in Bombay, India, Chhoti Rao has been a resident of San Francisco since late 2007. She has attended Universities in the US and the UK here she studied History, Art History and Decorative Arts. Currently she is a Master's candidate in Museum Studies at the University of San Francisco and is driven by her passion for the visual arts, its practice, presentation and interpretation across the globe. With fifteen plus years in the art industry spent as an auction house manager and art consultant she is now shifting her focus from art sales to art appreciation in the international museum field. Implementing this transition by volunteering at the Asian Art Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum and interning at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In 2011 Ms. Rao worked closely with the Visual Arts team at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to develop and produce the exhibition, The Matter Within, showcasing contemporary art of India. She has also served on the special events committee of ArtSpan, a Bay Area non-profit organization supporting local artists and has worked extensively with the SFMOMA's auxiliary group SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art). Her current projects include compiling an important private collection database, speaking engagements on contemporary art from India, contributing to a book on art and globalization in the 21st century, organizing art and museum tours in San Francisco and working on her Master's thesis involving Exhibition Histories: Representing the Other.
  • Alan Rath, a pioneer in the field of electronic art, received a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. His contributions to the field of contemporary sculpture and new media have received significant acknowledgement worldwide. His work is in such major collections as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis, MN), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Hara Museum (Tokyo). Rath lives in San Francisco, CA.
  • Maryam Razi (Art Researcher, live from Iran) is a graphic designer and independent researcher based in Iran, with special interest in intersections of transdisciplinary Innovative projects involving art, science and technology. After her M.A. graduation with a focus study in parameters "flow" and "aesthetics" in immersive installations, she started extending her knowledge about convergence of science and technology in media art projects. Razi is passionate about building a transdisciplinary platform for Iranian media artists, scientists and all who believe in variable realities to join, collaborate and discover.
  • Gertrude Reagan was born in Washington, DC in 1936, and spent her early years in the Southern Appalachians where her father was doing geology. She moved to California in 1954. In 1956, Gyorgy Kepes' book "The New Landscape" celebrated images from science as art. It validated images like her father's geologic maps as subjects for her work. Myrrh began mining science and natural patterns for art ideas by finding analogs in crafts media for natural patterns. In 1981, she founded YLEM: Artists Using Science and Technology, which held forums and had a publication for 28 years. She now conducts a special interest group in patterns in nature and visual math.
  • Alex Reben explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. His work deals with human-machine relationships, synthetic psychology, artificial philosophy and robot ethics among other topics. Using "art as experiment" his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts. His artwork and research has been shown and published internationally and he consults with major companies guiding innovation for the social machine future. Alexander has exhibited at venues both in the U.S. and internationally including The Vienna Biennale, MAK Contemporary Art Museum, The Vitra Design Museum, Ars Electronica, Volta, The Whitney Biennial, CERN, TFI Interactive, IDFA, ArtBots, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, Doc/Fest, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting and WIRED among others. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT and other universities. Reben is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab where he studied human-robot symbiosis and art. He is a 2016-2017 WIRED innovation fellow and a visiting scholar in the UC Berkeley psychology department.
  • Robert Rich has released over 30 albums in the last three decades, mostly instrumental electronic music. He became somewhat notorious for performing all-night Sleep Concerts in the '80s. He studied for a year at Stanford's CCRMA while getting a degree in Psychology, and now tours occasionally, creates sound design for films and electronic instruments, and has begun teaching courses on audio mastering and studio engineering. More at http://robertrich.com.
  • Laura Richard (UC Berkeley) works in Modern and Contemporary Art with a Designated Emphasis in Film. This past Spring she taught a course on Installation Art and last summer her article, "Anthony McCall: The Long Shadow of Ambient Light," appeared in the Oxford Art Journal. Since 2009 Laura has been the co-coordinator of the Townsend Working Group in Contemporary Art at UC Berkeley, whose mission is to foster interdisciplinary and inter-institutional conversations. She is currently writing her dissertation on the early film and room works of Maria Nordman, a portion of which she presented at the UCSD Visual Arts Graduate Student Conference in March.
  • Jan Rindfleisch is an artist, educator, curator/museum director and author. From 1978 to 1985, she taught art and art history at De Anza College, and in 1979 began a 32-year journey as executive director/curator of Euphrat Museum of Art. For decades, she has kept art in the forefront of the South Bay community through her visionary interdisciplinary exhibitions and programs at that museum. Rindfleisch has written essays and over a dozen books in conjunction with the California History Center, Euphrat Museum of Art, San Jos‚ Museum of Art, Arts Council Silicon Valley, Southern Exposure (San Francisco), Bronx Museum of the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Artship Foundation (Oakland), and many other public, private, and governmental institutions. These include Coming Across: Art by Recent Immigrants; The Power of Cloth: Political Quilts 1845-1986; Content: Contemporary Issues; and Staying Visible, The Importance of Archives. Rindfleisch helped found the Cupertino Arts Commission, participated in the Getty Museum Management Institute, and served on the Santa Clara County Arts Council, the California Arts Council Visual Arts Panel, the Arts Council Silicon Valley Local Arts Grants Review Panel, and San Jos‚ City Hall Exhibits Committee. Her most recent book, Roots and Offshoots: Silicon Valley's Arts Community, explores the ignored history of the passionate individuals, creative partnerships, and maverick arts institutions that influenced South Bay Area arts and culture.
  • Richard Rinehart is a digital media artist and Digital Art Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. He is Associate Director for Public Programs of the Berkeley Center for New Media. Rinehart's papers, projects, and more can be found on his website
  • Marilia Librandi Rocha is Assistant Professor of Luso-Brazilian and Latin American Literature ans Cultures at Stanford university. She is the author of Maranhao-Manhattan. Ensaios de Literatura Brasileira (Rio de Janeiro, 7Letras, 2009). Her current authored manuscript is titled "Writing by Ear: Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel, and it is now under review at the University of Toronto Press as part of their important Romance Studies series. She is co-Executive Editor (with Vincent Barletta) of the literary Journal of Lusophone Studies of the American Portuguese Studies Association. Her texts have appeared in Australia, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Portugal, besides Brazil and the United States. She has been an Invited speaker at Princeton University, Columbia University, The University of Chicago, The University of Utah, Brigham Youth University, The University of Queensland in Australia, Indiana University, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Casa de Rui Barbosa, among others. Website: www.librandirocha.com
  • Kiri Rong graduated from Beijing Institute of Technology as Computer major and began her career as a Cisco network engineer. Soon after, She studied Fashion Design at Beijing's Central Academy of Arts and began her own design business which soon blossomed into her own designer goods factory. While the factory was a great success, Kiri sensed that her true calling lay in the booming Chinese art scene. Kiri soon became the department manager for Modern and Contemporary Art at the Beijing Googut Auction House. In 2009 Kiri moved to the Bay Area and soon opened an art gallery while practicing Digital Art.
  • Leah Rosengaus is Director of Digital Health at Stanford Health Care. In her role, she oversees the design, implementation, scaling and evaluation of digital health products and services within the health system. Most recently, she led the team that enabled 2,000 clinicians to provide >2M virtual visits in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Rosengaus specializes in driving strategy through to execution of new clinical service innovations. Prior to joining Stanford Health Care, she directed the telehealth program at UW Medicine where she led the team that launched virtual care offerings including eConsults, TeleStroke, TeleOB, TelePsychiatry and a new on-demand virtual clinic. She was also a Director for five years at COPE Health Solutions, a national healthcare management consultancy focused on population health strategy, Medicaid transformation and healthcare workforce development. In addition to product development, Rosengaus is passionate about surfacing the frontline needs of patients and providers to policymakers. She is active in digital health policy advocacy at the state and federal level, working to inform rulemaking grounded in real-world care experience.
  • Phil Ross is an artist, curator, and educator who places natural systems within frames of social and historic contexts. Phil's living artworks are grown into being over the course of several years, integrating traditional manufacturing techniques with practices and technologies from disparate fields. His recent work includes a trilogy of documentary videos on microorganisms, and the growing of a building composed of living fungus. Phil currated an exhibition on biotechnology for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2007, and is the founder and director of CRITTER, a science and art salon located in San Francisco's Mission District.
  • Rachel Rossin, who lives and works in New York, is a multimedia artist and self-taught programmer working primarily in virtual reality and painting with a focus on how technology impacts consciousness. In her work she draws together traditional art-making techniques, such as painting, with new technologies such as virtual reality and hologram projections to examine the slippage between the real and the digital, between perceptual and embodied space. In 2015 Rossin was the inaugural Virtual Reality Fellow at the New Museum's incubator New Inc. In 2021 she exhibited oil paintings embedded with holograms at the Magenta Plains gallery in New York and logged her sequenced genome on the blockchain as a smart contract minted on the NFT platform OpenSea. She is currently working on a commission for KW Museum of Art in Berlin and the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC.
  • Kathryn Roszak, Artistic Director of Danse Lumiere, brings new audiences to classical art forms by blending and innovating within the disciplines of dance, literature, music, science and theater. Training at San Francisco Ballet, School of American Ballet, and American Conservatory Theatre, Roszak performed with San Francisco Ballet, San Francisco Opera Ballet, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre. She choreographed for American Conservatory Theatre, San Francisco Opera Center, Kent Nagano's Berkeley Symphony. Recent works include stage adaptations of Pulitzer Prize winning poet Gary Snyder's "Mountains and Rivers Without End," Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Fifth Book of Peace," and "The Star Dances," collaborating with U.C. Berkeley astronomers for the International Year of Astronomy. The San Francisco Bay Guardian named Danse Lumiere one of the top ten performances of 2011 for Roszak's "Pensive Spring; A Portrait of Emily Dickinson" presented by Cal Performances' Fall Free for All. Roszak taught for the Lines Ballet/Dominican University and she teaches "Dance and Film" at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, at U.C. Berkeley, where she also serves as the Dance Specialist for Cal Performances. Danse Lumiere creates dance theater linking the arts, environment, and humanity. Founded in 1995 as Anima Mundi, the company specializes in adapting literature for the stage, fusing dance, theater, and music. The company performed at La MaMa Theater, New York, The Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., Copenhagen Cultural Festival, University of San Francisco and at the Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, among others. The company has received grants including from Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Laurance S. Rockefeller, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Djerassi Resident Artists' Program, Goethe Institute, Royal Norwegian Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Fleishhhacker Foundation, and Zellerbach Family Fund.
  • Lynn Rothschild is an evolutionary biologist/ astrobiologist at NASA Ames, where she has been instrumental in establishing NASA's program in synthetic biology. She is a Professor (Adjunct) at Brown, the University of California Santa Cruz, and Stanford, where she has taught Astrobiology and Space Exploration. She has broad training in biology, with degrees from Yale, Indiana University, and a Ph.D. from Brown University in Molecular and Cell Biology, and a love for protistan evolution. Since arriving at NASA Ames in 1987, her research has focused on how life, particularly microbes, has evolved in the context of the physical environment, both here and potentially elsewhere, and how we might tap into "Nature's toolbox" to advance the field of synthetic biology. Field sites range from Australia to Africa to the Andes, from the ocean to 100,000 feet on a balloon. In the last few years Rothschild has brought her expertise in extremeophiles and evolutionary biology to the field of synthetic biology, addressing on how synthetic biology can enhance NASA's missions. Since 2011 she has been the faculty advisor of the Stanford-Brown award-winning iGEM team, which has pioneered the use of synthetic biology to accomplish NASA's missions, particularly focusing on the human settlement of Mars and astrobiology. Her lab is working on expanding the use of synthetic biology for NASA with projects as diverse as recreating the first proteins de novo to biomining to using synthetic biology to precipitate calcite and produce glues in order to make bricks on Mars or the Moon.
  • Stuart Russell received his B.A. with first-class honours in physics from Oxford University in 1982 and his Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford in 1986. He then joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, where he is Professor (and formerly Chair) of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and holder of the Smith-Zadeh Chair in Engineering. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Neurological Surgery at UC San Francisco. He is a recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award of the National Science Foundation, the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, the Mitchell Prize of the American Statistical Association and the International Society for Bayesian Analysis, and the ACM Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award. In 1998, he gave the Forsythe Memorial Lectures at Stanford University and from 2012 to 2014 he held the Chaire Blaise Pascal in Paris. He is a Fellow of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published over 150 papers on a wide range of topics in artificial intelligence including machine learning, probabilistic reasoning, knowledge representation, planning, real-time decision making, multitarget tracking, computer vision, computational physiology, and global seismic monitoring. His books include "The Use of Knowledge in Analogy and Induction", "Do the Right Thing: Studies in Limited Rationality" (with Eric Wefald), and "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" (with Peter Norvig).
  • Rebecca Rutstein, a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, sculpture, interactive installation and public art, creates work at the intersection of art, science and technology. Rutstein is passionate about creating visual experiences that shed light on hidden environments, forging a dialogue about stewardship in the face of climate change. Rutstein has been an artist-in-residence at locations around the world, including six expeditions at sea and two dives to the ocean floor in the Alvin submersible. Her collaborations with scientists through residencies and workshops have been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Academies of Science / Keck Futures Initiative, Ocean Exploration Trust and Schmidt Ocean Institute. Rutstein has received the prestigious Pew Fellowship in the Arts, an Independence Foundation Fellowship, is an MIT Ocean Discovery Fellow, and was recently named the Delta Visiting Chair for Global Understanding - awarded to leading global scholars and creative thinkers who do groundbreaking work at the University of Georgia. Rutstein's work has been featured on ABC, CBS, NPR, and in the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, Vice, Philadelphia & Vogue magazines. With over 25 solo exhibitions, Rutstein has exhibited widely in museums and institutions, and her work can be found in several public collections including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum and Yale University.
  • Bektur Ryskeldiev is a Kyrgyzstani-born multidisciplinary researcher and creative technologist, focused on spatial and social computing, human-computer interaction, immersive media, computational creativity, and digital art. He is currently a senior research scientist at Mercari R4D and a long time educator, organizer, and content producer at SIGGRAPH. He was previously in the Digital Nature Group at the University of Tsukuba, investigating how advances in handheld and wearable technologies are changing the ways we interact and perceive each other online. His works have been showcased at such conferences as SIGGRAPH Asia, CHI, CSCW, IEEE VR, and Augmented Human. He is also a founder, facilitator, and contributor at different tech, art, and science communities around the world, such as one of the first AI+XR tech hackathons in Tokyo, and MUTEK JP AI Music Lab.
  • Allen Saakyan is a polymath, empath, and science communicator propelling unconventional concepts like world peace & sustainable colonization of planets and stars. He hosts and produces Eureka! science comedy shows, Worlds Fair future festivals, and The Simulation - his newest series asking global leaders humanity's most thought-provoking questions. Allen mentors entrepreneurs around the world and is a sought after speaker, emcee, and life coach.
  • Philip Sabes (UCSF/ Neuroscience) is a neuroscientist and neural engineer and a Professor of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Sabes' laboratory works to understand how the brain controls movement, and in particular the role of sensory information and learning. His lab also applies their scientific findings toward the development of Brain Machine Interfaces to help people with severe sensory and motor loss, such as spinal cord injury. Dr. Sabes currently holds the Jack D. and DeLoris Lange Endowed Chair in Cell Physiology at UCSF.
  • Warren Sack is a media theorist, software designer, and artist whose work explores theories and designs for online public space and public discussion. He is Professor in the Film + Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz where he teaches digital arts and digital studies. He has been a visiting professor in France at Sciences Po, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme, and Telecom ParisTech. His artwork has been exhibited by SFMoMA (San Francisco), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the ZKM (Karlsruhe, Germany). His scholarship and research has been supported by the Paris Institute for Advanced Study, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Sunlight Foundation, and the National Science Foundation. Warren received his PhD from the MIT Media Lab. His book "The Software Arts" (MIT Press, 2019) presents an alternative history of software that traces its roots to the step-by-step descriptions of how things were made in the workshops of 18th-century artists and artisans. He illustrates how software was born of a coupling of the liberal arts and the mechanical arts and argues that the arts are at the heart of computing.
  • Mehran Sahami is a Professor (Teaching) and Associate Chair for Education in the Computer Science department at Stanford University, where he is also the Robert and Ruth Halperin University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was a Senior Research Scientist at Google. His research interests include computer science education and machine learning. Recently, he has focused on ethical issues in computing, including co-teaching a course on "Computers, Ethics, and Public Policy" with colleagues from the Political Science department at Stanford.
  • David Salesin (Adobe) leads the Adobe Creative Technologies Lab, which he founded when he joined the company in 2005. He is also an Affiliate Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he has been on the faculty since 1992. He received an Sc.B. from Brown University in 1983, and a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1991. From 1983-87, he worked at Lucasfilm and Pixar, where he contributed computer animation for the Academy Award-winning short film, "Tin Toy," and the feature-length film, Young Sherlock Holmes. He spent the 1991-92 year as a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Program of Computer Graphics at Cornell University. In 1996, he co-founded two companies, where he served as Chief Scientist: Inklination and Numinous Technologies. When the latter was acquired by Microsoft in 1999, he worked as a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research until 2005, while remaining on the UW faculty. He was named a Guest Professor of Zhejiang University and an ACM Fellow in 2002.
  • Virginia San Fratello is an educator, designer and creative technologist. She is the Chair of the Department of Design at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley and an International Interior Design Association (IIDA) Educator of the Year recipient. She is a design activist, author, and thought leader within the fields of additive manufacturing, architecture, interior and product design. She has served in the role of Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arkansas and The University of Queensland. In 2014 her creative practice, Rael San Fratello (with Ronald Rael), was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York—one of the most coveted awards in North American architecture. In 2016 Rael San Fratello was also awarded the Digital Practice Award of Excellence by the The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). In 2020 Rael San Fratello received an Art + Technology Award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). In 2020 the Pink Borderwall Teeter Totters installed on the border between the USA and Mexico, designed by Rael and San Fratello, was awarded the Beasley Design of the Year Award. San Fratello is the co-author of Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing (Princeton Architectural Press 2018), a book that reexamines the building process from the bottom up and offers illuminating case studies for 3D printing with materials like chardonnay grape skins, salt and sawdust. She is also a partner in Emerging Objects, a creatively driven, 3D Printing MAKE-tank specializing in innovations in 3D printing architecture, building components, environments and products (a short documentary of their work can be seen here).
  • Tanu Sankalia, Assistant Professor in the Department of Art + Architecture at the University of San Francisco, is currently at work on a book project that examines slots or interstitial spaces in San Francisco-the subject of an exhibition, The Urban Unseen, he curated last February. He teaches classes in architecture, urban design and city planning, and has worked as an architect and urban designer in Mumbai and San Francisco.
  • Betty Sargeant is a media artist based in Australia who creates multi-sensory installations with a focus on disappearing the interface. She is co-creative director and artist with the art-technology duo PluginHUMAN. Betty has exhibited internationally (Asia, Europe, North America, Australia). She has won Good Design Awards (2020 and 2018) and a Premier's Design Award (2017) for her progressive artworks. She was the Melbourne Knowledge Fellow (2016), was artist-in-residence at the Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University (2017-19); and was creator-in-residence at the Asia Culture Centre (South Korea, 2016-17). Betty's PhD was ranked top three at the CHASS Prize (2015). Betty has created media art installations for institutions such as the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taiwan, 2018), Questacon (the National Science and Technology Museum, Australia, 2018) and the Asia Culture Centre (South Korea, 2016 & 2017).
  • Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
  • Karl Schaffer is a mathematician and choreographer. Schaffer began dancing in Birmingham, Alabama, and has studied, performed and/or taught modern, tap, Flamenco, Bharatya Natyam, folk dance, and Tai Chi Chuan. Schaffer's dance work plays with ideas and movement in original, surprising, and entertaining ways, often exploring imaginative connections between dance and mathematics. The Dr. Schaffer and Mr. Stern Dance Ensemble, co-directed with Erik Stern for 30 years has performed internationally, including recently at the National Science Museum in Seoul, Korea; National Museum of Mathematics, NYC; Kennedy Center, DC. He recently served as guest artist for the Mellon Creative Residencies at Haverford, Swarthmore, and Bryn Mawr, and an Artist in Residence at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. Schaffer and Stern are on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Partners in Education Teaching Artist Roster, and frequently give workshops for major arts venues on integrating math and dance in the classroom and studio. Schaffer's recent concerts are The Daughters of Hypatia celebrating women mathematicians, Mosaic dealing with the conflict in Palestine, Israel, and the Mideast, and the upcoming Choreocopia, integrating food, song, and dance. He teaches dance freelance and math at De Anza College, and received his MA and PhD in graph theory from UC Santa Cruz.
  • AnneMarie Schleiner is engaged in gaming and media culture in a variety of roles as a critic, theorist, activist, artist, and designer. She has exhibited in international galleries, museums and festivals. Documentation of her performative culture work is available on the Video Data Bank. She holds a doctorate in Cultural Analysis from the University of Amsterdam. She has taught at universities in the United States, Mexico, and Singapore, and teaches web scripting at the University of California, Davis. She recently published her book "Transnational Play - Piracy, Urban Art, and Mobile Games".
  • Dawna Schuld is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History in the Department of Visualization, Texas A&M University. Her research concentrates on points of intersection between art, technology, and biology, with an emphasis on how the perceptual phenomena of human experience are implemented in art and art systems. In her writings, she has focused especially on the ways that light and space manifested as sculpture in 1960s and 1970s American art. She is the author of "Minimal Conditions: Light, Space, and Subjectivity" (The University of California Press, 2018), and co-editor, with Cristina Albu (University of Missouri, Kansas City), of Perception and Agency in Shared Spaces of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2018). Dr. Schuld is the 2019-20 Dana and David Dornsife Research Fellow at the Huntington Library Pasadena, California and was previously a Senior Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
  • Marjorie Schwarzer co-directs the Museum Studies Graduate program at University of San Francisco. An award-winning museum scholar and educator, her book, Riches, Rivals and Radicals: 100 Years of Museums in America is in its second printing and she has authored over 50 articles on a range of contemporary museum issues. Check out our blog: http://usfmuse.wordpress.com
  • Julia Scott is director of the Brain and Memory Care Lab at Santa Clara University. The research program partners with external stakeholders--companies, clinicians, community organizations--to co-design healthcare innovation projects for numerous disciplines, from public health to engineering. The primary technologies engaged are in non-invasive brain sensing and stimulation in application to cognitive decline or impairment and neurobehavioral conditions. Successful integration of EEG derived signals into virtual reality (VR) experiences has seeded ongoing development of VR biofeedback applications that enhance the sense of presence and train self-regulatory skills. Julia Scott, PhD received her training in neuroscience at University of California campuses (Davis, San Diego, and San Francisco). She has published widely on normal and abnormal neurodevelopment as well as brain aging in the characterization of longitudinal change models and neuroimaging markers. She has taught a range of courses in Biology and Bioengineering, including physiology, neural engineering and medical imaging.
  • Victoria Scott strives to understand the transformation of matter and energy as it flows from one state into another. Working with electronic media, sculpture and social relations, she creates site-specific installations, digital prints, objects and audio works. Her recent projects include constructing 3D paper representations of objects that exist both in simulated environments and real life. She is also developing a series of batteries that are charged by human emotional energy. Scott Kildall is a cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, prints, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork in the form of interventions into various concepts of space. Zer01 Artists in Residence.
  • Derek Sears is a teacher and researcher who has spent his career studying meteorites and their relationship to asteroids. He is best known for his application of thermoluminescence to the study of meteorites, but has also worked on water on Mars and the composition and spectral properties of asteroids. For 14 years he was part of the preliminary examination team for Antarctic meteorites and between 1992 and 2002 he was editor of Meteoritics and Planetary Science. He has published three books on meteorites. He is a research scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
  • SEEC Photography is a collaboration of artist and photographer Enar de Dios Rodriguez und two physicists, Philipp Haslinger (UC Berkeley) and Thomas Juffmann (Stanford University). Having met during their studies in Vienna, the trio is now based in and around San Francisco.
  • Tina Seelig is Professor of the Practice in the Department of Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) at Stanford University, and a Faculty Director for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP), the entrepreneurship center at Stanford University's School of Engineering. She teaches courses on creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship in the dept of MS&E and the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school) at Stanford. In 2014, Dr. Seelig was honored with the SVForum Visionary Award, and in 2009 she received the Gordon Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, recognizing her as a national leader in engineering education. Dr. Seelig earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University Medical School in 1985 where she studied Neuroscience. She has worked as a management consultant, as a multimedia producer, and was the founder of a multimedia company called BookBrowser. She has also written 17 books and games, including Insight Out (2015), inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity (2012), and What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (2009), all published by HarperCollins.
  • Adrien Segal is a sculptural data artist and designer based in Oakland, CA. Her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries and museums, and is published in several books and academic journals, including Boom: A Journal of California and Data Flow 2. She has been an Artist in Residence at Facebook, the Bunnell Street Art Center in Alaska, the Oregon College of Arts and Crafts in Portland, Oregon, and at Autodesk's Pier 9 Workshop in San Francisco. Adrien is the Fall 2015 Wornick Distinguished Visiting Professor at California College of the Arts, where she holds a BFA in Furniture Design. In addition to teaching, she pursues her creative practice out of her studio on the former Naval Base in Alameda, CA.
  • Henry Segerman is a mathematician, working mostly in three-dimensional geometry and topology, and a mathematical artist, working mostly in 3D printing. He is an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics at Oklahoma State University.
  • Audrey Shafer (Stanford Univ) is Professor of Anesthesia, Stanford University School of Medicine/VA; staff anesthesiologist, Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System; and Director, Arts, Humanities and Medicine Program, Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics http://bioethics.stanford.edu/arts/. Born in Philadelphia, she studied at Harvard, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania for biochemistry, medicine and anesthesia training, respectively. She is associate editor, Medical Humanities - BMJ and poetry editor, Journal of Medical Humanities. She co-directs the scholarly concentration in Biomedical Ethics and Medical Humanities, teaches creative writing for medical students, and strives to create an environment at the medical school which encourages creative exploration, collaboration and scholarly work in medical humanities. She is a founding member of Stanford Pegasus Physician Writers. Her poetry appears in numerous journals and anthologies and she is the author of The Mailbox (Random House, 2006), a story about posttraumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans. "From [the] knockout opening, first-time novelist Audrey Shafer builds a story finely balanced between mystery. and meditation -- on loneliness, love and what a boy really needs to make a life." The Washington Post
  • Stan Shaff started out in the 1950s as a trumpet player, composer and teacher. His friendship and collaboration with painter and sculptor Seymour Locks expanded his grounding in the arts. He explored the nature of sound in relation to movement with Ann Halprin's Dancers Workshop; curious about sound bereft of traditional tools and structure, he turned to tape composition, working and performing with composers involved with the Tape Music Center. By the late 1950s, Shaff's work with audio tape led to the need to externally realize sound in the way he conceived of it: as an energy in space. In 1959 Shaff met fellow musician and teacher Douglas McEachern, whose background in electronics enabled him to develop original equipment systems for live, spatial performances. From the first public presentation of these ideas in 1960 through succeeding decades of work with the co-creation and development of the sound theatre AUDIUM - constructed specifically for choreographing sound in space - Shaff has sought to explore and expand the language of space in music composition and performance.
  • Shan Shan Sheng has artworks installed in four of the world's tallest buildings, as well as other major works of architecture. Born in Shanghai, Sheng came to United States in 1982 to pursue her academic and artistic interests by attending Mount Holyoke College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and continued to Harvard University as an artist-in-residence for two years. Now she lives and works in San Francisco. In 1989, she was an official artist for the Asian Art Festival in Chicago. She has spent the last 18 years working in the public art field. She has now completed over 25 large-scale projects in the states of California, Arizona, Massachusetts, Florida, New Mexico, Utah, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma and the cities of Chicago,Miami, Denver, Nashville, Cleveland and Charlotte as well as the international cities of Shanghai, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, London and Venice. Her public art project "Ocean Wave" at port of Miami was awarded the best public art project by Americans for the Arts in 2007. In 2009, Sheng's artwork "Bamboo Forest" at a high speed train station in Taiwan was awarded the best public art project. Sheng has held over thirty one-woman shows in Europe, Asia and America. Most recently, her "Open Wall" project was included in the 53rd Venice Biennale. In 2010 this project was exhibited at the Shanghai World Expo. Her works appear in selected public collections around the world including Harvard University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, China National Art Museum, Beijing, Shanghai International Convention Center, Amoco Building in Chicago, Art Museum of South Texas, Berengo Collection, Venice, Italy and Shanghai Art Museum.
  • Krishna Shenoy is the Hong Seh and Vivian W. M. Lim Professor of Engineering. He is with the Departments of Electrical Engineering and by courtesy, Bioengineering and Neurobiology at Stanford University. He is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Prof. Shenoy holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from UC Irvine (1987-1990), a PhD in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (1990-1995), was a postdoctoral fellow in Neurobiology at Caltech (1995-2001), and has been on faculty at Stanford since then (Assistant Prof. 2001-2008, Associate Prof. 2008-2012, Full Prof. 2012-2017, Endowed Chair 2017 to present). Prof. Shenoy directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetic Systems Lab (basic neuroscience and engineering) and co-directs the Stanford Neural Prosthetics Translational Laboratory (clinical trials), which aim to help restore lost motor function to people with paralysis. Honors and awards include a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical Sciences, a Sloan Fellow, a McKnight Technological Innovations in Neurosciences Award, an NIH Director's Pioneer Award, the 2010 Stanford University Postdoc Mentoring Award, and he was elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) College of Fellows. Prof. Shenoy serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of The University of Washington's Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering (a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center), CTRL-Labs Inc., MIND-X Inc., Inscopix Inc. and Heal Inc. He is also a consultant for Neuralink Corp
  • Katherine Sherwood's acclaimed mixed-media paintings gracefully investigate the point at which the essential aspects of art, medicine, and disability intersect. Her works juxtapose abstracted medical images, such as cerebral angiograms of the artist's brain, with fluid renderings of ancient patterns; the paintings thus explore and reveal, with a most unusual palette, the strange nature of our time and current visual culture. Sherwood's work was exhibited in the 2000 Whitney Museum Biennial and at Yerba Buena Art Center in 2003 and 2009. Among many throughout the USA, Katherine also had a solo exhibition in 2007 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC. She co-curated "Blind at the Museum" at the Berkeley Art Museum, and organized an accompanying conference at UC Berkeley. Sherwood was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship 2005-2006 and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant 2006-2007. Katherine is a professor at UC Berkeley in the Art Department and the Disability Studies Program.
  • Neil Shubin is the Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, Associate Dean of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Professor on the Committee of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Chicago and the Provost of the Field Museum of Natural History. He is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist. Raised outside Philadelphia, Shubin earned a A.B. from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1982 and a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University in 1987. He also studied at the University of California, Berkeley. Shubin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2011. He is the author of "Some Assembly Required" (2021, an accessible new view of the evolution of human and animal life on Earth), "Your Inner Fish" (chosen by the National Academy of Sciences as the best book of the year in 2009, which showed how our bodies are the legacy of ancient fish, reptiles and primates), and "The Universe Within - Discovering the Common History of Rocks, Planets, and People".
  • Mikey Siegel is a robotics engineer turned consciousness hacker. He envisions a present and future where science and technology support psychological, emotional and spiritual flourishing. Where our devices not only connect us to information, but also connect us to ourselves and each other, acting as a catalyst for individual and collective awakening. He is currently teaching at Stanford University, founder of Consciousness Hacking, BioFluent Technologies,, and the Transformative Technology Conference. He received an MS in robotics from the MIT Media Lab.
  • Danielle Siembieda-Gribben is an Arts Entrepreneur working in the intersection of New Media Art, Sustainability and Community. She practices between genres of Social Practice, Institutional Critique, Intervention and New Media. Most of her work includes an emphasis on the environment and technology. Her most recent project, "The Art Inspector" was incepted in 2009 as a method to reduce the carbon footprint of art. This project has been funded Silicon Valley Energy Watch to conduct energy assessments on artist's studios and take them through an eco-art makeover. She has been an artist in residence at the TechShop SJ where she create a body of work around cyborg politics and the anthropocene. Some of her other roles include being a board member of the Women's Environmental Art Directory; art consultant to the SF Department of the Environment, member San Jose Public Art Advisory Committee; and Fellow Alum at SF Emerging Arts Professionals. Siembieda has a MFA in Digital Media Art at SJSU at the CADRE Laboratory for New Media with a focus on green technologies, sustainable materials. More at www.siembieda.com and www.artinspector.org
  • Vanessa Sigurdson (Autodesk) is the Artist in Residence (AIR) Program Manager at Autodesk's Pier 9 Workshop. With over a decade of experience in design and digital fabrication, Vanessa has worked with artists and fabrication companies worldwide to combine modern technologies with traditional art making practices. Vanessa joined Autodesk in 2013, and has facilitated over 100 artist in exploring new methods of creating their work. Since then, her clan of wacky and diverse AiRs have been re-inventing the word `craft' and changing how we look at art today.
  • Eva Silverstein is Professor of Physics at Stanford University since 2006. Past Appointments include: Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (1999 - 2000); Fellowship, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1999 - 1999); Postdoctoral Fellow, Rutgers University (1996 - 1997); Permanent Member and Visiting Professor of Physics, Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara (2009 - 2010); Assistant Professor, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University (1997 - 2001); Associate Professor, Stanford University, SLAC and Physics Department (2001 - 2006). She has also served on the Advisory Council of Princeton University Department of Physics (2009); the Advisory Board of Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (2004 - 2007); the Advisory Board of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Gravity and Cosmology; the Advisory Board of Foundational Questions in Physics and Cosmology. She received a B.A. from Harvard University and her PhD. from Princeton University.
  • Glori Simmons, Director of the USF Thacher Gallery, is a poet and fiction writer, the author of the story collections "Carry You" and "Suffering Fools", and of the book of poems "Graft". A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she has received numerous awards for her poetry and fiction and has taught throughout the Bay Area.
  • Sharon Siskin's artwork has been featured in numerous publications and received numerous awards. She was the Artist in Residence at San Francisco Recycling & Disposal, Inc. in the summer of 2004 and has taught at University of San Francisco, the Graduate Department of Arts and Consciousness at John F. Kennedy University, California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, California State University East Bay, University of New Mexico and at several California Community Colleges. She is a long-time board member of WEAD (Women Environmental Artists Directory.)
  • Renetta Sitoy was born in New York, NY and graduated in 2007 with an MFA in Design + Technology from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she was the recipient of the San Francisco Art Institute MFA Fellowship from 2005 to 2007. Using media that include video and animation to examine the human condition, her work has explored topics such as the alteration of time and space, perception, memory, dreams, and the effects of technology on human behavior. Her work has been shown in Atlanta, Baltimore, New York City, Los Angeles, Athens, Greece, Varna, Bulgaria, Budapest, Hungary, and throughout the Bay Area. She is currently working on a documentary about the French born, Oakland based electronic music artist Laetitia Sonami. She lives and works in the Bay Area.
  • Paul Skokowski is a philosopher and cognitive scientist who teaches in Symbolic Systems and Philosophy at Stanford, and runs a research initiative with workshops on consciousness in conjunction with the Stanford Humanities Center. He has been a Visiting Professor in Philosophy at UC Berkeley, McDonnell-Pew Visiting Fellow at Oxford University, Professor of Surfing at Yahoo!, and Director of the Institute for Scientific Computing Research for the UC Livermore Lab. Paul has published in philosophy, physics, cognitive science and computing. Paul received a PhD in philosophy from Stanford and a BA and MA in physics and philosophy from Oxford. His current research interests include consciousness and philosophy of quantum mechanics. Paul is an avid runner and can be found most weekends on trails in the coastal range from the Peninsula up into Marin County.
  • Joel Slayton is a pioneering artist, researcher, and curator. He is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Art and Art History at San Jose State University, and has been the founding director of the CADRE laboratory for New Media (Computers in Art, Design, Research, and Education), Executive Director of Zero1 that organized four international biennials in San Jose and exhibited the work of dozens of emerging art/tech artists, a member of the Board of Directors of LEONARDO/ISAST (International Society for Art, Science and Technology), Senior Fellow of the American Leadership Forum in Silicon Valley, and Editor in Chief of the Leonardo MIT Press Book Series. He has been Visiting Artist in Russia, Ireland, and New Zealand, besides the Art Institute of Chicago, UC Santa Cruz's Art-Science Institute, Mills College, the San Francisco Exploratorium, and Xerox PARC among others. He has exhibited his art installations at dozens of venues nation-wide, as well as in Canada, Germany, Netherlands, South Africa, Mexico. He was executive director of CADRE's Switch Journal (1998-2014), one of the earliest online journals focusing on art and technology, editor in chief of the Leonardo Book series, has published dozens of essays and has curated several exhibitions including the two most recent LAST Festivals.
  • Daniel Small is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and researcher. His work has been exhibited internationally and his 2011 project The Circumference is Everywhere was included at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa Japan. His project Third Person Eclipse was shown in the Iraqi Embassy in Pankow Berlin as part of the ongoing project Des Chapitres Du Conflit, a collection of interventions that address and inhabit the former Iraq Embassy to East Germany. In his project Partially Recovered, he resurrected an erased image from a hard drive as a large scale photorealist Jacquard tapestry that will be exhibited in the Gruuthuse Museum that houses the largest collection of tapestries from the 14th and 15th century in Brugge, Belgium where it was produced. Excavation II is a triangulation of past, present and future that proposes a full excavation of the remains of Cecil Demille's 1923 film set of The Ten Commandments that was the largest film set ever built and mimics ancient Egyptian artifacts.
  • Benjamin Smarr studies the temporal structures that biological systems make as they move through time. He is a NIH-funded postdoctoral fellow with a Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Washington, Seattle. He joined the UC Berkeley Kriegsfeld Lab in 2013, where he works to understand how physiological dynamics like sleep, circadian rhythms, and ovulatory cycles are shaped by the brain, and how disturbances to those cycles give rise to disease. He uses comparative physiology and neuroendocrinology approaches coupled with data analytics and sensor design to build predictive models for use in personalized medicine and education optimization efforts. Dr. Smarr is also an advocate for scientific outreach, and routinely gives public lectures and visits K-12 classrooms to help promote the idea that by understanding the biology that guides us, we can live more empowered lives. Dr. Smarr's collaboration with Cross-disciplinary artist Stephen Auger address the fundamental relationships between aesthetic perception, sensory well-being and the dynamic movement of light over time, which are central to Auger's artistic vision.
  • Bill Smart is an associate professor of computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, where he works on problems in robotics, machine learning, and brain-machine interfaces. He is currently on sabbatical at Willow Garage, Inc., a very unusual robotics company in Menlo Park. He is currently looking at how to make humans and robots interact more naturally and effectively.
  • Monica L. Smith (UCLA) is Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability at the University of California, Los Angeles. She holds the Navin and Pratima Doshi Chair in Indian Studies and is the director of the South Asian Archaeology Laboratory at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. Her archaeological field experience includes work in England, Italy, Egypt, Madagascar, Bangladesh, Tunisia, and the American Southwest. With her colleague R.K. Mohanty she has co-directed a long-running archaeological research project in eastern India at the sites of Sisupalgarh, Talapada and Ostapur and their environs, supported by funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, and the American Institute of Indian Studies. She is the author of The Prehistory of Ordinary People (2010) and Cities: The First 6,000 Years (2019), the co-author (with R.K. Mohanty) of Excavations at Sisupalgarh (2008), and the editor of The Social Construction of Ancient Cities (2003) and Abundance: The Archaeology of Plenitude (2017).
  • Alvy Ray Smith is a cofounder of Pixar and a pioneer of computer graphics. He was present at Xerox PARC for the invention of the personal computer, then at the New York Institute of Technology where the vision of the first digital movie was conceived, then Lucasfilm, where he was its first director of computer graphics. His second startup company Altamira was sold to Microsoft, where he was the first Graphics Fellow. He has received two technical Academy Awards for his contribution to digital movie-making technology. He created and directed the Genesis Demo in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", the first use of full computer graphics in a successful major motion picture. He hired Pixar's star animator, John Lasseter, and directed him at Lucasfilm in "The Adventures of Andre & Wally B". He initiated the Academy-Award-winning CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) project between Pixar and Disney, the hardware and software system that Disney used for years for full production of all its 2D animated feature films. He initiated and negotiated the Academy-Award-winning CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) project between Pixar and Disney, the hardware and software system that Disney used for years for full production of all its "traditional" 2D animated feature films. He has published dozens of articles on cellular automata, computer graphics, scholarly genealogy, and computer history, and created numerous artworks. He has a PhD from Stanford in computer science. His book "A Biography of the Pixel" was published by MIT Press in 2021.
  • Jenn Smith is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Mills College. Her research integrates perspectives from evolutionary ecology, animal behavior, and physiology in an effort to understand how natural selection and current conditions shape decision-making in mammals. She combines naturalistic observations on free-living mammals with field experiments, genetic and endocrine analyses, and social network statistics to test evolutionary theory. Her work focusing on understanding the evolution of cooperation, leadership and social structures to reveal commonalities among mammalian societies. Her research includes studies of leadership roles in spotted hyenas in Kenya (covered by BBC News), the origins of cooperation in human societies , cover by NPR, and, most recently, a local field project focuses on, The Behavioral Ecology California Ground Squirrels at Briones Park.
  • Christina Smolke is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Department of Bioengineering. Christina's research program focuses on developing modular genetic platforms for programming information processing and control functions in living systems. She has pioneered the design and application of RNA molecules that process and transmit user-specified input signals to targeted protein outputs, thereby linking molecular computation to gene expression. These technologies are leading to transformative advances in how we interact with and program biology, providing access to otherwise inaccessible information on cellular state, and allowing sophisticated exogenous and embedded control over cellular functions. Her laboratory is applying these technologies to addressing key challenges in cellular therapeutics, targeted molecular therapies, and green biosynthesis strategies. Her research has been recognized with a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, World Technology Network Award in Biotechnology, and TR35 Award.
  • Michael Snyder is the Stanford Ascherman Professor and Chair of Genetics and the Director of the Center of Genomics and Personalized Medicine. Dr. Snyder received his Ph.D. training at the California Institute of Technology and carried out postdoctoral training at Stanford University. He is a leader in the field of functional genomics and proteomics, and one of the major participants of the ENCODE project. His laboratory study was the first to perform a large-scale functional genomics project in any organism, and has developed many technologies in genomics and proteomics. These including the development of proteome chips, high resolution tiling arrays for the entire human genome, methods for global mapping of transcription factor binding sites (ChIP-chip now replaced by ChIP-seq), paired end sequencing for mapping of structural variation in eukaryotes, de novo genome sequencing of genomes using high throughput technologies and RNA-Seq. These technologies have been used for characterizing genomes, proteomes and regulatory networks. Seminal findings from the Snyder laboratory include the discovery that much more of the human genome is transcribed and contains regulatory information than was previously appreciated, and a high diversity of transcription factor binding occurs both between and within species. He has also combined different state-of-the-art "omics" technologies to perform the first longitudinal detailed integrative personal omics profile (iPOP) of person and used this to assess disease risk and monitor disease states for personalized medicine. He is a cofounder of several biotechnology companies, including Protometrix (now part of Life Technologies), Affomix (now part of Illumina), Excelix, and Personalis, and he presently serves on the board of a number of companies.
  • Christa Sommerer is an internationally renowned media artist working in the field of interactive computer installation. She is currently a professor at the University of Art and Design in Linz Austria where she heads the Department for Interface Culture at the Institute for Media. Previously she held a position as Artistic Director and Researcher at the ATR Media Integration and Communications Research Lab in Kyoto, Japan, where she led a research team to design interactive environments that combine novel human-machine interaction experiences, artificial life and evolutionary image design. In 1992 Sommerer teamed up with French media artist Laurent Mignonneau, and they created numerous interactive computer installations, which have been called "epoch making" (Toshiharu Itoh, NTT-ICC museum) and have subsequently been presented in countless media exhibitions and media collections around the world. Sommerer and Mignonneau have won mayor international media awards, including the "Golden Nica" Ars Electronica Award for Interactive Art.
  • Neeraj Sonalkar is Research Associate at Stanford's Center for Design Research. The question that motivates his research is: how do engineering design team co-create new product possibilities? His research is focused on investigating how team behavior influences the generation and propagation of ideas into products. The Human Innovation Engineering group at the Center for Design Research conducts empirical and field research oriented towards acceleration of radical innovation by teams, organizations and regional ecosystems. We study and model how humans innovate both at the interpersonal interaction level and at the broader level of an organization or a regional innovation ecosystem such as the Silicon Valley. This research furthers our understanding of innovation as the outcome of an integrated system spanning individual mindset, interpersonal interaction dynamics, and the underlying physical, institutional, financial and knowledge infrastructure.

  • Laetitia Sonami is a French-born sound artist and performer. Her sound performances, live-film collaborations and sound installations explore ideas of presence and participation. Her signature instrument, the lady's glove, allows her to control sounds, mechanical devices, and lights in real-time. Sonami also creates sound installation work incorporating household objects embedded with mechanical and electronic components. Although some recordings of her works exist, Sonami generally eschews releasing recorded work. Sonami has given performances and shown installation work in concert venues, museums, and art galleries internationally, including appearances at Ars Electronica (Linz, Austria), the Other Minds Festival (San Francisco), the Interlink Festival (Japan), Lincoln Center Out of Doors (New York), and Internationales Musikerinnen-Festival (Berlin). In 2013, a film about Sonami, ``the ear goes to the sound: The Work of Laetitia Sonami'', was made by artist Renetta Sitoy. Sonami teaches sound art at the San Francisco Art Institute.
  • Beibei Song has been an associate arbitrator for international business disputes, a corporate banker, a high-tech marketer, a cross-border business development consultant, a media producer, a show host, and an executive educator. She has run a web publication focusing on health and environmental innovation, spearheaded media campaigns for a premier international sailing race, and managed clinical trial contracts. She now surrounds herself with polymaths who similarly defy classification, curating and representing their work through her art and media agency, Essinova (www.artsofsciences.com). Her fascination with science and technology both led to, and grew as a result of, corporate and entrepreneurial experiences in related industries; and the artist in her has been seeking outlets since teenage years in China, ever more assertive as life went on.
  • Sharon Spain serves as curator for Recology San Francisco's Artist in Residence Program. The Program's mission is to educate the public about recycling and resource conservation by enabling artists to make art "at the dump," providing tours to students and adults, and programming off-site exhibitions. Before coming to Recology, Spain was the associate director of the Asian American Art Project at Stanford University, the managing editor of Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (Stanford University Press, 2008), and a contributor to the de Young Museum catalog, Asian/American/Modern Art (2008). She has worked for the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery and San Francisco State University Fine Arts Gallery.
  • Tami Spector is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of San Francisco and serves on the Board of Leonardo. She has a strong interest in the intersections of chemistry and art and aesthetics and has published a number of papers related to these topics. She is currently serving as a guest editor for an on-going special section of Leonardo on nanoscience/technology and art and welcomes comments and/or submission on this topic from the audience.
  • Kal Spelletich is the founder of Seemen, an interactive machine art performance collective, has collaborated with Survival Research Labs and countless others from rock bands to scientists, politicians, NASA, Hollywood television and filmmakers. For 28 years he has been experimenting with interfacing humans and technology to put people in touch with intense real life experiences and to empower them. Kal's work is always interactive, requiring a participant to enter or operate the piece, often against their instincts of self-preservation. He works on the waterfront of San Francisco scouring junkyards and dumpsters for industrial items whose technology can be reapplied. He curates art exhibits and is involved in political activism.
  • Heather Spence is a marine biologist and sound artist who combines science and art to harmonize human-environment interactions. Her expertise and problem solving include bringing renewable power options to ocean observing initiatives, reducing noise pollution in dolphin habitats, deciphering nocturnal behavior of marine animals, researching dolphin sleep and dreams, developing new methods of studying living decapod crustacea, innovating documentation of the MesoAmerican Reef, predicting aquatic invasive species dispersal, assisting shellfish aquaculture, and examining coselection of communicatory traits. She has designed and taught courses on animal behavior, behavioral neuroendocrinology, sensation and perception, personality, and motivation, and consulted on video games. Her Passive Acoustic Monitoring research program on the MesoAmerican Reef is featured in the award-winning microdocumentary World of Sound (https://vimeo.com/thestillsagency/worldofsound), National Geographic's television program "When Sharks Attack", and is explored in her composition for viola da gamba trio, Vale la Pena? (Is it worth it?) derived from a technical study commissioned by the Mexican government (https://vdgsa.org/pgs/music_a.html#NEWMUSIC). She composes music inspired by, and inspiring, conservation and performs internationally as a cellist and gambist. (www.HeatherSpence.net). Heather was the 2017 NAKFI fellow at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program and a 2017-2019 AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the US Department of Energy in the Water Power Technologies Office. She currently advises on science and acoustics at the US Department of Energy and is co-leader of the transdisciplinary Ocean Memory Project (www.oceanmemoryproject.com)
  • Klaus Spiess directs the Art&Science program at the Center of Public Health, Medical University in Vienna as a associate professor. He has published extensively in academic journals (Performance Research, Lancet ao) and exhibited his work at Beall Center Arts&Technology, Irvine; Prix Ars Electronica, Haus der Kulturen, Berlin ao.
  • Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her artworks exploring biomedical imaginaries have been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation and the Triennale Brugge. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design, Pioneer Works, and New York Hall of Science and is represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, NYU’s Langone Art Collection, and the Berkeley Art Museum. Her writing and interviews have appeared in Art Practical and SciArt Magazine. Her recent exhibitions featuring molecular animations and material artifacts of laboratory animals include her large-scale immersive installation in the Brooklyn Army Terminal at BioBAT Art Space. She is currently developing a new series of collaborative artworks with theoretical biophysicist Adam Lamson for a project supported by the Simons Foundation. Her research as a member of the New Museum’s NEW INC Creative Science incubator included collaborations with scientists to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biotechnological landscape. She is now a NEW INC Artist-in-Residence at EY where she is collaborating with the Cognitive Human Enterprise at EY on projects and research exploring the implications of virtual technologies. Splan often creates public engagement with her projects to make concepts and techniques behind her work accessible to audiences with programming including everything from all ages bacterial transformation workshops to remote textiles collaborations. Splan has held academic appointments at Stanford University, teaching interdepartmental Art courses to Engineering, Computer Science, Biology, Math, as well as Art majors. Splan was a Digital Arts Fellow supported by the National Endowment for the Arts at AS220 Industries where she taught creative coding and physical computing workshops. She has been a visiting artist and critic at numerous institutions.
  • Julianne Stafford was the co-founder of a private consulting firm for investing in natural resources and have a long and varied musical backgrounds in classical and popular music. Stafford also perform with the Left Bank trio and Fiume di Musica.
  • Clare Stanton is in charge of Communications & Outreach at Harvard's Library Innovation Lab, a forward-looking group of thinkers and doers working at the intersection of libraries, technology, and law. Clare's true occupation is as a milliner, creating multiple hats for herself everywhere she goes. She also is the outreach and communications lead for Perma.cc. Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet's boundlessness, what's found on the web can also be modified, moved, or entirely disappeared. This often-irreversible decay of web content is commonly known as linkrot. It comes with a similar problem of content drift, or the often-unannounced changes--retractions, additions, replacement--to the content at a particular URL. Stanton and collaborators at Harvard Law School undertook a project to gain insight into the extent and characteristics of journalistic linkrot and content drift. We examined hyperlinks in New York Times articles starting with the launch of the Times website in 1996 up through mid-2019, developed on the basis of a dataset provided to us by the Times. We focus on the Times not because it is an influential publication whose archives are often used to help form a historical record. Rather, the substantial linkrot and content drift we find here across the New York Times corpus accurately reflects the inherent difficulties of long-term linking to pieces of a volatile web. Results show a near linear increase of linkrot over time, with interesting patterns emerging within certain sections of the paper or across top level domains. Over half of articles containing at least one URL also contained a dead link. Additionally, of the ostensibly "healthy" links existing in articles, a hand review revealed additional erosion to citations via content drift. Read the report here.
  • Lars Steinmetz studied molecular biophysics and biochemistry at Yale University and conducted his Ph.D. research on genome-wide approaches to study gene function and natural phenotypic diversity at Stanford University. After a brief period of postdoctoral research at the Stanford Genome Technology Center, where he worked on functional genomic technology development, he moved to Europe in 2003. At the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, he started his own group, focused on applying functional genomic approaches and high-throughput methods to study complex traits, transcription and the mitochondrial organelle at a systems level. In parallel, he maintained a focused group at the Stanford Genome Technology Center working on technology development. From 2009 to 2016, Lars acted as Joint Head of the department of Genome Biology at EMBL.In October 2013 Lars became Professor of Genetics at Stanford University and Co-Director of the Stanford Genome Technology Center. His lab develops and applies cutting-edge technologies to investigate the function and mechanism of transcription, the genetic basis of complex phenotypes and the genetic and molecular systems underpinning disease. Their ultimate goal is to enable the development of personalized, preventative medicine. In parallel to his research activities at Stanford, Lars continues to lead his lab at EMBL. His Stanford and EMBL labs collaborate very closely. In addition to his academic endeavours, Lars is a consultant and board member of several companies, advising in the areas of genetics and personalized medicine.
  • Char Stiles is a digital artist, educator and programmer. Using computational systems and algorithms she is producing pieces that span disciplines such as video, dance, interactive installation, performance and online works. She has given talks and lead workshops at Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, MIT and NYU. She was recently granted an NEA-funded artist residency at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University to develop an open-source toolkit for artists.
  • Cindy Stokes is a photographer and systems biology consultant living and working in the Bay Area. She focuses closely on the curious details of the world, having fun with structural and spatial complexity and ambiguity in her abstracts and still-lifes.
  • David Stork is Rambus Fellow and directs research in the Computational Sensing and Imaging Group at Rambus Labs in Sunnyvale CA. A graduate in Physics from MIT and the University of Maryland, he's held faculty positions in Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science, Statistics, Electrical Engineering, Psychology, Neuroscience and Art and Art History variously at Wellesley and Swarthmore Colleges and Clark, Boston and Stanford Universities. He has lectured on computer image analysis of art over 250 venues in 14 countries, including major museums such as the Louvre, National Gallery London, National Gallery Washington, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, van Gogh Museum, and Venice Biennale, and has published widely on the subject including as co-editor of the first three volumes on computer image analysis in the study of art. He delivered the 2011 C. P. Snow Memorial Lecture celebrating scholarly work spanning the arts and sciences. He is author of the second edition of Pattern classification, co-author of Seeing the Light: Optics in nature, photography, color, vision and holography. He holds 42 US patents and is a senior member of both the Optical Society of America and IEEE as well as a Fellow of the International Association for Pattern Recognition (IAPR), of the International Academy, Research and Industry Association (IARIA), and of SPIE.
  • Carol Strohecker is Dean of the College of Design at the University of Minnesota. Her creative practice, research on learning, studies of complex systems, and "designing so others can design" have contributed to contexts of growth and change, including technology R&D, academic administration, organizational start-up, and community economic development. A co-founder of the SEAD network for Sciences, Engineering, Arts, and Design, spawned through grants from the US National Science Foundation, she inaugurated the roles of Vice Provost at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and Director at the Center for Design Innovation, a multi-campus research center of the University of North Carolina. Previously she was Principal Investigator of the Everyday Learning research group at Media Lab Europe, the European partner of the MIT Media Lab. Prior to MLE, she worked at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories and in the Human Interface Group of Sun Microsystems. She earned the PhD of Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1991 and the Master of Science in Visual Studies from MIT in 1986. She has served MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences as a Lecturer and as a Presidential Nominee on the MIT Corporation Visiting Committee. She has served on research and advisory panels for the National Science Foundation and the European Commission.
  • Michael Sturtz teaches at Stanford's d.school after over twenty years of experience as a teacher, builder, manifestor, and facilitator in a variety of creative fields. teaches at Stanford's d.school, where he directed the ReDesigning Theater Project, and is now the Founder and Executive Director of the Stanford Creative Ignition Lab. This new lab is exploring the potential for visual, experiential, and embodied thinking to advance the future of learning, design, and making. The program aims to pioneer new ways to more purposefully bring the tools of invention and production seamlessly into our creative processes. In 1999 Michael set out to reinvent the idea of arts education, founding an art school that encourages a truly non-competitive learning environment. The Crucible started with only a conceptual design and a grant for $1,750, growing rapidly under Michael's leadership to become the nation's largest nonprofit industrial arts education facility. Michael designed facilities and programs that house 70 faculty and over 8,000 students annually. His Fire Arts Festivals, Fire Operas, and Fire Ballets defined a new genre of entertainment in the Bay Area and attracted extremely diverse audiences from around the country. When not trying to reinvent the world, Michael enjoys restoring his 1875 Victorian home, building in his studio, and conducting experimental cooking adventures. You can see his work at michaelsturtz.com.
  • Kokichi Sugihara is a Meiji University distinguished professor emeritus. His research area is mathematical engineering. In his research on computer vision, he found a method for constructing 3D objects from “impossible figures”, and extended his research interest to human vision and optical illusion. He is acting also as an illusion artist by creating various impossible objects. He won the first prize four times in the Best Illusion of the Year Contest.
  • Dawn Sumner is a geobiologist interested in how early life evolved on Earth and whether or not Mars may have once hosted microbial life. She explores life in many different ways, ranging from describing the ancient remains of bacteria from remote areas on Earth to characterizing modern bacterial communities living in ice-covered Antarctica lakes to helping run the Curiosity rover on Mars to developing virtual representations of data for improved scientific interpretations. Dawn has several active collaborations with artists that integrate scientific data with novel implementations of visualization technology. In these collaborations, the merged artistic and scientific visions provide unique insights that benefit both the aesthetic and technical understanding of the natural world. Dawn is based in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Davis, where she has been a professor since 1997.
  • Pireeni Sundaralingam is a cognitive scientist, poet, and playwright. Having conducted both her undergraduate and graduate training at the University of Oxford, she has gone on to explore the cognitive bases of perception and the role of analogy in problem-solving and reconfiguring what we perceive in the world around us at MIT's Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences. Sundaralingam is editor of Indivisible, the first national anthology of South Asian American poets, winner of the 2011 N. California Book Award & 2011 PEN Oakland National Book Award; her own poetry has been published in journals such as Ploughshares and The Progressive, anthologies by W.W.Norton, Prentice Hall, and Macmillan, translated into 5 languages, and been featured on national radio in the United States, England, and Sweden. Dedicated to examining the confluence of science and art, Sundaralingam has held national fellowships both in cognitive science and in poetry, and most recently, a fellowship in interdisciplinary thinking at Berlin's Institut Fr Raum Experimente (Institute for Spatial Experiments). She has spoken on the intersections between poetry and cognition at MOMA (New York), the Exploratorium (San Francisco), and the Life in Space symposium at Studio Olafur Eliasson (Berlin), and recently guest-edited a special issue of World Literature Today on the "Crosstalk between Science & Literature".
  • Leonard Susskind, Stanford Professor of Theoretical Physics, pioneered the idea that elementary particles might be represented by a relativistic string, the so-called "string theory." His research interests have stretched from quantum field theory to quantum cosmology. He is the author of "The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design" (2006) and "The Black Hole War-My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics" (2008).
  • Melanie Swan is the principal of MS Futures Group, a futurist, hedge fund manager, and founder of citizen science organization DIYgenomics. Her educational background includes an MBA in Finance and Accounting from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and a BA in French and Economics from Georgetown University. Melanie enjoys kick-boxing, independent film, and international travel.
  • Leila Takayama is is a research scientist at Willow Garage, studying human-robot interaction. She holds a PhD and MA in Communication from Stanford University (2008) as well as BAs in Psychology and Cognitive Science from UC Berkeley (2003). The work she is presenting is from her doctoral dissertation on Throwing Voices: Investigating the Psychological Effects of the Spatial Location of Projected Voices, which won the Nathan Maccoby dissertation award. http://www.leilatakayama.org
  • Nomi Talisman is an Israeli-born artist who earned her MFA and photography, video and electronic arts from Mills College. She has exhibited her work in four continents. She was chosen to be the first artist to be working on a new series of online works commissioned by the Magnes Museum in Berkeley (2008-09).
  • Hirohisa Tanaka is Professor of Particle Physics and Astrophysics at Stanford University. Honors & Awards include: Co-recipient, Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2015); Invitation Fellow, Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2009); Fellow, American Physical Society (2015). He is or has been a member of the International Advisory Committee, International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics (2016 - Present), of the Experimental Advisory Committee, SNOLAB (2009 - 2012), of the Panel on Long Baseline Neutrino Experiments and Neutrino Factories, International Committee for Future Accelerators (2013 - 2017), of the Five Year Plan Steering Committee, TRIUMF (2012 - 2013), of the Physics Advisory Committee, Fermilab (2014 - Present), of the Long Range Planning Task Force, Institute of Particle Physics (2015 - 2015), of the Planning and Policy Advisory Committee. Chair, Accelerator Subcommittee, TRIUMF (2017 - Present).
  • Mary Tang is the Managing Director of the Stanford Nanofabrication Facility, in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. The SNF provides nano- and micro-fabrication tools and know-how to over 400 researchers annually, supporting research and prototyping applications across engineering, physical and biological sciences, and medicine. SNF is open to all; in continuous operation for ~30 years, it has supported the work of thousands of students and has "graduated" hundreds of companies as well. SNF is a founding member of a network of University facilities across the country supported since 1994 by the National Science Foundation, with the mission of providing open, shared access to advanced fabrication and characterization technologies. Mary received an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford and then worked as a process engineer at Intel. She went on to earn a Ph.D. in Bioengineering from the UC Berkeley and San Francisco and began her career at SNF as a liaison for Bio/Engineering research. She has been in her current position since 2013.
  • James Thompson is a graduate from the Design Program of Stanford University. James Thompson holds an AS in engineering from Shepherd University and a BS in aerospace engineering from the University of Virginia.
  • An award-winning author, filmmaker and new media consultant, Andrew Todhunter did undergraduate work in the humanities at the American University of Paris, received his BA in Ancient History from UC Berkeley and later studied film production at NYU's Graduate Department of Film and Television. He is the author of three books, including the PEN USA Literary award-winning A Meal Observed, and dozens of articles for national publications including National Geographic, The Atlantic and The Wall Street Journal, among others. He has worked on numerous film projects, including productions for Lucasfilm and National Geographic Television. Todhunter teaches writing at Stanford University through the Department of Biology and the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, and co-directs The Senior Reflection, a creative capstone course series for scientists in the arts.
  • Manuela Travaglianti is a Lecturer in the Peace and Conflict Studies and the Global Studies program at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the causes and consequences of political violence in Sub-Saharan Africa. She studies the the effectiveness of electoral violence prevention programs through experimental and qualitative methods. She teaches classes on post-conflict peace building and global studies in Africa, and advise undergraduate senior capstones in peace and conflict studies. She has collaborated with the United States Institute of Peace. Prior to joining UC Berkeley she was a graduate fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation.

  • Jonathan Trent is the lead scientist on Project OMEGA (Offshore Membrane Enclosures for Growing Algae)-a system to produce microalgae for biofuels, food, and fertilizer, while treating wastewater, sequestering carbon, and promoting environmentally sustainable aquaculture. Jonathan has conducted research in microbiology and molecular biology at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Germany, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the University of Paris (Orsay) in France, and at the Boyer Center for Molecular Medicine at Yale Medical School in the USA. He moved to Argonne National Laboratory to study environmental bioremediation, before going to NASA Ames Research Center, where he is currently working. At NASA he has contributed in the fields of Astrobiology and Bio-Nanotechnology and, in 2007, he founded GREEN (Global Research into Energy and the Environment at NASA), which ultimately led to Project OMEGA. In addition to his position at NASA, Jonathan is an Adjunct Professor in the Engineering Department at UC Santa Cruz and a Fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.
  • Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer who has worked in "in-between" spaces throughout her career: mixing drawing, performance, and installation; writing about her own creative process and the work of others; and engaging crossover points between art and science. She has been artist-in-residence at the Complexity Sciences Center at the University of California, Davis (UCD), since 2011. Her ongoing collaboration with UCD geobiologist Dawn Sumner, the interactive 3-D art installation "Dream Vortex," has been presented internationally, at ISEA2015, Vancouver and Creativity & Cognition, Glasgow School of Art, 2015, and nationally at more than a dozen public lectures at American universities ranging from Stanford University in Palo Alto to Brown University in Providence. A related dance performance "Outside the Vortex," a collaboration with choreographer Donna Sternberg, was presented at Diavolo in Los Angeles June, 2016 and will travel to Northern California in early 2017. Tromble and Sumner met Sternberg when they were chosen as participants in the first art and science residency at the Djerassi Resident Artist Program. Tromble is also the co-editor, with Charissa Terranova, of "The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art & Architecture," forthcoming from Routledge in August 2016, and contributor to "Technoetic Arts Journal: Complexism," a new special issue available from Intellect Books.
  • Milana Trounce (Stanford) completed her emergency medicine residency and fellowship in Disaster Medicine and Bioterrorism Response at Harvard Medical School. She worked with the Center for Integration of Medicine and Technology (CIMT), a consortium of Harvard teaching hospitals and MIT, where she led BioSecurity related projects in conjunction with the US State Department. After Harvard she joined UCSF as an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and was Medical Director for Disaster Response. For the past 11 years, she has been at Stanford Medical School, where she is a Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine. She directs the BioSecurity program at Stanford, focused on protecting society from pandemics and other threats posed by infectious organisms, with a specific emphasis on approaches to interrupting transmission of infectious organisms in various settings. The background for the approach is outlined in her briefings at the Hoover Institute. Stanford BioSecurity facilitates the creation of interdisciplinary solutions by bringing together experts in biology, medicine, public health, disaster management, policy, engineering, technology, and business. At Stanford, over the past ten years she has established and directed a class on BioSecurity and Pandemic Resilience , which examines ways of building global societal resilience to pandemics and other biothreats. She has also taught an online Harvard course on medical response to biological terrorism, educating thousands of physicians globally. She has served as a spokeswoman for the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) and is a founding Chair of BioSecurity at ACEP.
  • Danielle Tullman-Ercek is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California Berkeley. Danielle received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, and her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin. She carried out her postdoctoral research at UCSF and the Joint Bioenergy Institute prior to joining Cal in 2009. Her research focuses on building protein-based devices for applications in bioenergy, biomaterials, and drug delivery. She is particularly interested in engineering the cellular machinery that transport materials across membranes. She is a member of the Berkeley Synthetic Biology Institute and the Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, and was recently awarded an NSF CAREER award for her work on the construction of bacterial organelles using protein membranes.
  • Fred Turner is a cultural historian and the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor in Communication at Stanford University. Since the late 1990s, he has been studying the ways in which changes in computing and American culture have shaped one another. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and most recently, its prequel, The Democratic Surround: Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties.
  • Christopher Tyler is the Director of the Smith-Kettlewell Brain Imaging Center at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute with scientific interests in the brain mechanisms of visual perception and the diagnosis of retinal and binocular eye diseases. He also holds a Professorship at City University of London. He has a longstanding interest in the interface between art the science of vision, including portraiture, the general principles of composition, and the historical development of space representation. He was the inventor of 3D ('Magic Eye') autostereograms that you may have dazzled your eyes with back in the 1990s and has lectured around the world on both science and art topics. He has created a website on Leonardo.
  • Niki Ulehla is a San Francisco based artist, puppeteer and goldsmith. Originally from Tennessee, she lived in Texas, Alabama, Germany, Georgia, Massachusetts and the Marshall Islands before coming to California in 1997. She studied painting at Stanford, puppet-making in Prague and goldsmithing in San Francisco. She worked as a goldsmith in the studios of Petra Class and Sandra Enterline for five years and has had her own studio since 2005. She has been making and performing with marionettes for over a decade in the SF bay area and Czech Republic. She began performing in San Francisco with the puppet-music ensemble, Cows for Tuttle and later began developing shows in collaboration with musicians and composers. Currently she is further developing a version of Dante's Inferno that she began as an artist in residence at Recology (the dump) in San Francisco. In addition she has been exploring the possibilities of Small Shows, performing experiments in small scale and microscopic puppetry using projection.
  • Anja Ulfeldt is an artist, educator, and curator with a hybrid practice that floats between interactive installation, performance, and unconventional art facilitation with a focus on the current and future state of human infrastructure as it relates to the body. Through haptic interaction, her work considers technology- both simple and advanced- as it relates to ideas around stability, mobility and personal agency. Stemming from an underlying fascination with invention, Ulfeldt's work looks at the ephemeral nature of resources and infrastructure that feed, house and nurture our bodies directly. This includes simple technology such as plumbing, refrigeration and climate control as well as less tangible resources such as time, creative space, and community. Anja is currently a full time lecturer at Stanford University in the areas of Sculpture and Emerging Technology. She has exhibited in the Bay Area at SLAC National Laboratory, Pro Arts Gallery, Kala Art Institute, SOMArts, Root Division, the San Mateo Maker Faire, and in venues in New York, London, Salzburg and Berlin. Ulfeldt's work has been collected by the Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco, Esplora National Interactive Science Centre in Malta, and Recology San Francisco. She has been an artist-in-residence at Recology San Francisco, the Exploratorium Museum, Lost & Foundry Oakland and currently at Stochastic Labs.
  • Fyodor Urnov joined the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences in Seattle in August 2016, having previously worked as Vice President, Discovery and Translational Research, at Sangamo BioSciences. During his 16 year career at Sangamo, Fyodor co-invented human genome editing with engineered nucleases, and led a successful effort to reduce to practice its application in basic research and translational settings, including in the clinic. Fyodor led Sangamo's partnership efforts with Dow Agrosciences (crop trait engineering), Sigma-Aldrich (research tools), and Biogen (gene editing for beta-thalassemia and sickle cell disease). He did his undergraduate training at Moscow State University, his PhD at Brown University, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH. As an associate director at Altius, he shares broad responsibility for defining and leading the scientific effort at the Institute.
  • Willard Van De Bogart received his Masters of Fine arts from the California Institute of Art where he studied under Morton Subotnick co-developer of the Buchla Synthesizer. Van De Bogart developed a performance ensemble, Ether Ship, using the Electronic Music Labs AKS synthesizer from the UK leading to exhibiting at the American Cultural Center on 3 Rue de Dragon in Paris, France for a piece commissioned by Don Forester for the 200th anniversary of the United States. Van De Bogart worked alongside Nicolas Sch”ffer, father of cybernetic art, where intricate displays of sound and light were explored. As a media consultant with NASA he was led to participating in the SETI program. Collaboration with Scot Forshaw, a quantum algorithm designer from the UK, led to exhibiting in Beijing and Shanghai, China for Roy Ascott's Consciousness Reframed conferences. Further ideas on nano-sound led Van De Bogart to exploring the sounds produced by the newly designed protein synthesizer, Eigenprot, developed by Zhao Qin and Markus Buehler at MIT where his ideas on xenolinguistics were further expanded. Van De Bogart is a member of the Generative Systems Art and Technology Group from Chicago founded by Sonia Landy Sheridan in 1969 and is included in their recent book "Weaving Global Minds" edited by Sheridan. Van De Bogart's videos can be found on YouTube under Ether Ship as well as sound tracks on SoundCloud. Published papers on his philosophy can be found in the Technoetic Arts Journal published by Intellect UK and edited by Roy Ascott.
  • Liena Vayzman s hybrid practice incorporates photo-based and curatorial projects. Vayzman co-curated "Chance Operations" and "Night Light: An Evening of Luminous Environments". She organized "Captured Accidents: Valencia Street Live," an interactive media project by digital artist Tim Thompson at Artists Television Access (ATA) and "HOME: The Aesthetics and Politics of Home in Contemporary Art" at Root Division. Vayzman started the bands Jerk Alert and I Like Action! and is currently at work on "The Lemon Tree Project, a yearlong photographic and narrative collaboration with a fruit tree in Oakland CA, and a book project on food and agriculture in contemporary art. In 2008-09, she taught in the Photography Program at San Jose State University.
  • Victoria Vesna (UCLA) is a media artist, professor at the department of Design & Media Arts at the UCLA School of the Arts, director of the UCLA Art & Science center and the UC Digital Arts Research Network. Her work explores how communication technologies affect collective behavior and how perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation. Victoria has exhibited her work in solo exhibitions worldwide, and is the recipient of many grants, commissions and awards. Her most recent installations (Blue Morph, Mood Swings and Water Bowls) aim to raise consciousness around the issues of our relationship to natural systems. She published an edited volume, "Database Aesthetics: Art in the age of Information Overflow" (2007), and is co-authoring "Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts" (2010).
  • After an extensive career in strategy and business consulting for the technology industry, for the past several years Gian Pablo Villamil has been working with notable artists to bring to life complex technology-based artworks.
  • Luis Villarreal is Professor Emeritus in Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at UC Irvine and the founding director of the Center for Virus Research. Luis Villarreal, the author of two books: Viruses and the Evolution of Life and Origin of Group Identity, has studied viruses for about 50 years. Villarreal's PhD advisor was John Holland at UC San Diego, and Villarreal did postdoctoral research in virology with Nobel laureate Paul Berg at Stanford University.
  • Indre Viskontas straddles the line between music and neuroscience, holding a Master of Music degree in Voice Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience from UCLA. An affiliate of the Memory and Aging Center at UCSF, she continues to publish research related to memory and creativity. An active Bay Area performer, she is the co-founder and Director of Opera on Tap: San Francisco, an opera company whose mission is to change the perception of opera as elitist and stuffy by producing high quality performances in unusual venues. She is also the co-founder and leader of Vocallective, a collective of singers and instrumentalists dedicated to the art of vocal chamber music. Passionate about bringing science to the public, she co-hosted a 6-episode docuseries on the Oprah Winfrey Network called Miracle Detectives, in which she represented the scientific side of a believer-scientist team investigating real claims of miracles. She continues to educate and provoke the lay public via her blog (www.indreviskontas.com/blog/blog.html), as a host of the podcast Point of Inquiry (http://www.pointofinquiry.org/) and via public speaking appearances.
  • Wayne Vitale is a composer, performer, author, teacher, recording engineer, and instrument conservator in the field of Balinese music. He is the director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya (www.gsj.org), an ensemble of sixty musicians and dancers that has achieved an unparalleled international reputation for its cross-cultural creative work. As a composer, he has created numerous works for gamelan that have directly impacted the evolution of Balinese kebyar music. His recording label, Vital Records (www.vitalrecords.ws), releases critically acclaimed CDs of Balinese music. He has also devoted himself to the metallic art of gamelan tuning, grinding and filing his way throughout the US and Europe to restore Balinese instruments.
  • Mark Wagner is a digital and traditional artist, and educator. Wagner moved from art school at Pratt Institute in Brookln NY to the high desert plains of New Mexico in the mid 80's. He's been involved in Native American Indian ceremony for over 30 years. He has been involved in the film industry as a concept artist and consultant, in addition to his work as graphic designer, illustrator, author, musician, and fine artist. He is currently working with the Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Natural History where the Paleo Indian department is featuring his artwork throughout their new web site. Wagner worked at Pixar Studios on the new Disney feature film John Carter, and has worked on other films; Terminator 3, DreamKeeper, and The Book of Stars. Wagner is also an internationally know street painter and chalk drawing artist. He founded the 501(c)3 nonprofit Drawing on Earth that inspires art and creativity in youth and communities around the world. Their first project set a Guinness World Record for the largest chalk drawing. Their current project is an Global Illustrated Story.
  • Nina Waisman (Media Artist) has exhibited in museums, galleries and public spaces internationally; venues include the California Biennial at OCMA, the Museum of Image and Sound in Sao Paulo, Brazil, the CECUT in Tijuana, the House of World Cultures in Berlin, LAXART in Los Angeles, the Zero1 Biennial, ISEA, the San Diego Museum of Art, the Beall Center for Art & Technology; she has a large-scale long-term interactive installation up at The New Children's Museum in San Diego through 2016. She has taught at institutions such as Cal Arts, SFAI, UCSD, Casa Vecina, and recently created and ran a 2-week think tank on non-cerebrocentric intelligence, with scientist-participants from SETI Insitute, NASA, MBARI, and dancers, artists and educators: http://blog.montalvoarts.org/blog/intelligence-starts-on-a-small-scale More info at http://www.ninawaisman.net As a former dancer turned installation artist, Nina Waisman is fascinated by the critical roles that movement and sensation play in forming thought. Scientists call such "embodied thinking" the pre-conscious scaffolding for all human logic. Waisman's interactive sound installations and videos pose questions about such embodied thinking, while focusing on related issues such as surveillance, nanotechnology, machine-human feedback loops, "invisible" laborers, body language and training. She recently completed a year-long research-residency in the SETI Institute's AIR program, from which she will make work exploring non-human intelligences, ranging from the microbial to plant, animal and extra-terrestrial, with an eye to finding relationships between small scale movements (those of single cells and their components) and the so-called "higher" logics built upon those movements.
  • James Wall received an undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Tulane University in 1999. He graduated from medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in 2003. He completed a General Surgery residency at the University of California San Francisco in 2010 and then spent a year learning advanced laparoscopic and endoscopic techniques at the IRCAD institute in Strasbourg, France. James finalized his formal medical training with the Pediatric Surgery Fellowship at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. In addition to his medical training, James is an alumnus of the Stanford Biodesign program and holds a Masters degree in Bioengineering from Stanford University. He founded InSite Medical Technologies in 2007 to develop new approaches to regional anesthesia that resulted in a novel device for epidural access. His current research interest is in the design, development and analysis of medical technology as well as the emerging field of surgical endoscopy. He currently leads the surgical endoscopy program Lucile Packard and is the Assistant Director of the Biodesign Innovation Fellowship Program.
  • Peter Walter is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at UCSF and an HHMI Investigator. He graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 1976, and received his Masters of Science in Organic Chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1977. In 1981 he obtained his PhD in Biochemistry at The Rockefeller University. In 1983, Peter joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco, and served as Department Chair from 2001 until 2008. He is the current President-Elect 2016 of the American Society of Cell Biology. Peter's awards include the Eli Lilly Award, the Passano Award, the Wiley Prize, the Stein & Moore Award, the Gairdner Award, the E.B. Wilson Medal, the Otto Warburg Medal, the Jung Prize, the 2012 Ehrlich and Darmstaedter Prize, the 2014 Shaw Prize, the 2014 Lasker Award and the 2015 Vilcek Prize.
  • Ge Wang is an Associate Professor at Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). He researches artful design of tools, toys, games and social experiences. Ge is the architect of the ChucK music programming language, director of the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, co-founder of Smule and designer of the Ocarina and Magic Piano apps for mobile phones. He is a 2016 Guggenheim Fellow and the author of "Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime", a photo comic book about the ethics and aesthetics of shaping technology. Based on the book, Ge is currently teaching a new critical thinking course at Stanford, "Design that Understands Us." .
  • Andreas Weigend, formerly the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, teaches at Stanford and shares his insights at top conferences, such as the World Innovation Forum 2010 in New York. Known as a lively and engaging speaker, his main goal is to challenge the minds of the audience, helping them understand how the Social Data Revolution changes the behavior of people, companies, and society. He also gives speeches and workshops to the world's most innovative firms that combine cutting-edge ideas with his expertise on behavioral economics and vision for consumer-enabling technologies. Andreas received his undergraduate education in Germany and Cambridge (UK), and his Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University. He taught Computer Science and Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Information Systems at the Stern School of Business at NYU and published more than 100 scientific papers. His career as a data scientist combined with his deep industry experience across information-intensive organizations allows him to successfully bridge the gap between academia and industry. See more at: http://weigend.com/blog/bio/#sthash.lIN0pcKZ.dpuf
  • Irving Weissman is a Professor of Pathology and Developmental Biology at Stanford University, where he is the Director of the Stanford Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine along with Michael Longaker. His awards include election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1989, being named California Scientist of the Year in 2002, the Robert Koch Prize in 2008 the Rosenstiel Award in 2009 and the Max Delbrueck Medal in 2013. He developed methods to identify stem cells, and has extensively researched stem cells and progenitor cells.His research focus is "the phylogeny and developmental biology of the cells that make up the blood-forming and immune system." Weissman is widely recognized as the "father of hematopoiesis" since he was the first to purify blood forming stem cells in both mice and humans. His work has contributed to the understanding of how a single hematopoietic stem cell can give rise to specialized blood cells. Weissman is also a leading expert in the field of cancer stem cell biology, where his work sheds light on the understanding of the pathogenesis of multiple human malignancies. He is also known for transgenic research in which human brain cells are grown in the brains of mice. Weissman was awarded the 2019 Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research for discoveries in stem cell and cancer biology.
  • Birgitta Whaley was born in England and moved to the US following an undergraduate degree in Oxford University. She received her Ph. D. from the University of Chicago in 1984 and was appointed to the faculty at the University of Berkeley, California in 1986, where she is now Professor of Chemistry, Director of the Berkeley Quantum Information and Computation Center, and senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Fellow of the American Physical Society and former chair of the APS Division of Chemical Physics, her honors include Kennedy and Sloan Foundation fellowships, an Alexander von Humboldt research award, a Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science Professorship at Berkeley, and senior Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2012-2013). Advisory activities include committees for the National Academy of Sciences, the scientific advisory board for the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics. Her research is broadly focused on quantum information and quantum computation, control and simulation of complex quantum systems, and quantum effects in biological systems.
  • Jennifer Widom is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, and the Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Academic Affairs in Stanford's School of Engineering. She served as chair of the Computer Science Department from 2009-2014. Jennifer received her Bachelor's degree from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 1982 and her Computer Science Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1987. She was a Research Staff Member at the IBM Almaden Research Center before joining the Stanford faculty in 1993. Her research interests span many aspects of nontraditional data management. She is an ACM Fellow and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; she received the ACM-W Athena Lecturer Award in 2015, the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award in 2007, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2000. She has served on a variety of program committees, advisory boards, and editorial boards.
  • Gail Wight, Associate Professor of Art at Stanford University, uses visual art to explore topics in biology and the history of science and technology. Her work engages the cultural impact of scientific practice, and plays with our constant redefinition of self through our epistemologies. Recent projects have explored deep time, and her works of art often involve other living organisms, inviting them to become co-authors in the finished work of art. She has exhibited her work at galleries, museums, and festivals throughout the US and internationally.
  • Steve Wilson is a San Francisco author, artist and art professor who explores the cultural implications of emerging technologies and scientific research. His interactive installations & performances have been shown internationally in galleries and art shows. He won a Rockefeller New Media Fellowship and the Prize of Distinction in Ars Electronica's international competitions for interactive art and several honorary mentions. He is also author of many books and articles including Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology. (MIT Press, 2002)
  • Amelia Winger-Bearskin is an artist who innovates with artificial intelligence in ways that make a positive impact on our community and the environment. She is a Banks Family Preeminence Endowed Chair and Associate Professor of Artificial Intelligence and the Arts, at the Digital Worlds Institute at the University of Florida. She is the inventor of Honor Native Sky, a project for the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture: Honor Native Land Initiative. She founded Wampum.Codes which is both an award-winning podcast and an ethical framework for software development based on indigenous values of co-creation. Wampum.codes was awarded a Mozilla Fellowship embedded at the MIT Co-Creation Studio from 2019-2020 and was featured at the 2021 imagineNative festival. She continued her research in 2021 at Stanford University as their artist and technologist in residence made possible by the Stanford Visiting Artist Fund in Honor of Roberta Bowman Denning (VAF) . In 2019 she was an invited presenter to His Holiness, The 14th Dalai Lama, at his World Headquarters in Dharamsala for the Summit on Fostering Universal Ethics and Compassion. In 2018 she was awarded a MacArthur/Sundance Institute fellowship for her 360 video immersive installation in collaboration with the artist Wendy Red Star (supported by the Google JUMP Creator program). The non-profit she founded IDEA New Rochelle, in partnership with the New Rochelle Mayor's Office, won the 2018 $1 Million Dollar Bloomberg Mayor's Challenge for their VR/AR Citizen toolkit to help the community co-design their city. In 2018 she was awarded the 100k Alternative Realities Prize for her Virtual Reality Project from Engadget and Verizon Media. Amelia is Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) of the Seneca-Cayuga Nation of Oklahoma, Deer Clan.
  • Ian Winters is a video & media artist working at the intersections of physical performance, installations / architectural form, and time-based media. In addition to individual work he often collaborates with composers, directors, and choreographers to create staged and site-specific media environments through performance, visual and acoustic media. He teaches and lectures widely on intersection of live media, installation, and performance and is a 2018-2019 visiting research fellow at the University of Sussex Digital Humanities Lab. Recent residencies enclude a master artist residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts and residencies at at Djerassi, Sussex University, Duke, Amherst and Earthdance. Recent collaborations include projects with Myra Melford, Netia Jones, Mary Armentrout Dance Theater, Chitresh Das, Pamela Z, Robert Moses Kin, Francis Ford Coppola, Shotgun Players, Shadowlight Puppet Theater, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, LightBulb Ensemble, DSDT, ODC Dance/ Brenda Way, Lenora Lee Dance, Evelyn Ficarra, blindsight and others. His work (either solo or as a video/media designer) has been seen at many venues worldwide including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Ft. Mason Center for the Arts, Zellerbach Hall, the Barbican, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Disney Hall, Zero-1 Gallery, ODC, Z-Space, The Asian Art Museum, Center for New Music-SF, The Kitchen, EMPAC, London City University, The Phoenix- Brighton, Attenborough Centre for the Arts, Conservatory Electro-acoustic Center, Journees de l'Electroacoustique in Paris, London Cutting Edge Festival, OPEN Cinema Festival (RU), CNMAT, Highways, Shotgun Players, The Magic, Luckman Center for Arts (LA).
  • Lea Witkowsky is a Policy Analyst at the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), a non-profit research partnership between UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco, dedicated to improving and applying genome engineering to solve major world problems. Lea has a B.A. in Chemistry from Willamette University and received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 2016, where she studied mechanisms of gene regulation and CRISPR-based gene editing in human cells. She joined the IGI in September 2017 to work on science policy and help shape the IGI's engagement activities. Lea runs a monthly ethics discussion group that brings together life scientists, social scientists, lawyers, and ethicists. She aims to inspire and facilitate scientifically informed ethical discussions about genome editing through communications with regulators and policymakers and by convening international events that feature diverse perspectives.
  • Dave Wolber (USF/ Computer Science) runs USF's Democratize Computing Lab and focuses on empowering artists, designers, kids, women, men, humanity majors, business students-- makers of all types-- to add coding to their creative arsenals. He is a leader in teaching beginners to learn coding by programming phones and tablets using the visual language App Inventor. His appinventor.org site has helped over 1.5 million new app creators, and his course-in-a-box materials have served as a template for numerous App Inventor courses at the K-12 and university levels. Wolber developed many of the tutorials for Google's original App Inventor site, and he is the lead author of "App Inventor 2: Create your own Android Apps", along with App Inventor creators Hal Abelson, Ellen Spertus and Liz Looney. He is also a co-author of mobile-csp.org, an on-line course and professional development materials for the new Computational Thinking Advanced Placement (AP) course for US High Schools.
  • Erling Wold is a composer, primarily of large and dramatic works. His opera UKSUS is on the life and times of Daniil Kharms. A recording of Certitude and Joy was released on MinMax/Starkland/Naxos. In 2011, his orchestral overture on Certitude and Joy was premiered, and the San Francisco International Arts Festival remounted his adaptation of William Burroughs' Queer. Two of his large works, the Missa Beati Notkeri Balbuli Sancti Galli Monachi for a Cathedral in Switzerland, and his solo opera Mordake, were released on CD. He is cofounder and executive director of the San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra. His dance opera Blinde Liebe was performed in Europe and the US with Palindrome Dance of Nurenberg, Germany. His chamber works have been presented in Philadelphia by Relache, in the Bay Area by New Music Works and the Conservatory New Music Ensemble. He was a resident artist at ODC Theater, which presented his opera Sub Pontio Pilato (also performed in Austria), a chamber opera based on William Burroughs' early autobiographical novel Queer, as well as A Little Girl Dreams of Taking the Veil, based on the Max Ernst collage novel (European premiere in a German version by the Klagenfurter Ensemble in 2001). He has written a number of pieces for a dancer-controlled interactive video and music system for Palindrome dance. He has also worked with Nesting Dolls in Los Angeles and San Francisco on several theater and dance projects, including 13 Versions of Surrender and I brought my hips to the table. He has co-composed the scores for several Deborah Slater Dance Theater projects with fixed-media sound artist Thom Blum.
  • Andrea Stevenson Won (Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab) received the MS degree in biomedical visualization from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2005. She is currently working toward the PhD degree at the Department of Communication, Stanford University. Her research interests include mediated self-representation and capturing, assessing and manipulating body movements to affect outcomes.
  • Theresa Wong is a composer, cellist and vocalist active at the intersection where music meets with the creative spirit of experimentation, improvisation and the synergy of multiple disciplines. Her works include The Unlearning, 21 songs inspired by Goya's Disasters of War etchings (Tzadik 2011), O Sleep, an opera inspired by the conundrum of sleep and dream life and Venice Is A Fish (Sensitive Skin Music 2014), an album of solo songs. Bridging areas of music, dance, theater and visual art, Wong is interested in performance as a vehicle for transformation for both the artist and receiver alike. She has presented her work internationally at venues including Fondation Cartier in Paris, Cafe Oto in London, Area Sismica in Forl, Italy, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and Roulette in New York City. She is currently based in Berkeley, California. For more information please visit www.theresawong.org
  • Kathrine Worel is a visual artist and curator, she earned her MFA from the San Francisco art institute in New Genres. Her work has been exhibited throughout the Untied States, China, Italy and Spain as well as being held in numerous private collections. She is a SECA Award nominee and has been awarded residencies from Kala Art Institute and The Garage and will soon be relocating to Tokyo, Japan to explore living in the future.
  • Danielle Wright is the Executive Director of the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council (NASRC) a nonprofit organization dedicated to reducing the environmental impact of commercial refrigeration. For the past decade, she has worked in energy efficiency and sustainability of the built environment with a special focus on refrigeration. Her goal is to create solutions that produce positive business outcomes and environmental benefits.
  • Tony Wyss-Coray is a professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University, the Co-Director of the NIH-sponsored Stanford Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, and the Associate Director of the Center for Tissue Regeneration, Repair and Restoration at the Palo Alto VA. His lab investigates the role of immune responses in brain aging and neurodegeneration with a focus on cognitive decline and Alzheimer's disease. He combines the study of mouse models with human clinical samples using cytomic, proteomic, and bioinformatics tools. He is the recipient of an NIH Director's Transformative Research Award, a Zenith award from the Alzheimer's Association, and a distinguished scholar award from the John Douglas French Alzheimer Foundation. He has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos and at TED Global in London, and he is the co-founder of two companies and inventor on multiple patents. He has received several honors and awards.
  • Lisa Wymore is an Associate Professor at the University of California Berkeley in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, and is Co-Artistic Director of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts with Sheldon Smith. A dancer, choreographer and educator in Chicago and formerly at the Northwestern University, she has received several awards for her work. Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts creates multimedia dance theater works and experimental performances. Their work has been presented and hosted by numerous national and international festivals including. She started a multi-disciplinary project called The Resonance Project in 2005, which has evolved into the Z-Lab UC Berkeley, a site for interactive real-time collaboration that involves choreographers, computer engineers, and visual/sound artists. She is a Certified Laban/Bartenieff Movement Analyst from the Integrated Movement Studies program. She is a Co-Founder of the Townsend Center Dance Studies Working Group, and she helps organize the Indigenous Peoples' Day Celebration in the Bancroft Studio.
  • Rieko Yajima is a biochemist with interests that lie at the intersection of science and society-which include design and policy. She has organized national symposia on these topics. She has given talks on the nexus between scientific research and design thinking at Stanford University's d.school and the Design Principles and Practices Conference. For the past eight years, she has worked for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Washington, DC, where she advises the scientific community on ways to strengthen research and innovation and in the use of informed decision-making for funding research. In 2015, Yajima was elected to the Global Young Academy, a rallying point for outstanding young scientists from around the world to come together to address topics of global importance. She holds a doctorate degree in integrative biosciences from Penn State University and served as a science policy fellow at the National Academy of Sciences.
  • Lily Xiying Yang is a member of an Asian American artist collective Lily Honglei, whose practice interweaves East Asian cultural heritages with new imaging technologies including animation, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Yang strives to make voices for underserved communities and marginal groups in societies through artistic creativity and innovations. Lily Xiying Yang's art projects have been exhibited at numerous contemporary art and new media art venues including Museum of Art and Design in New York, Queens Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, The Painting Center of New York, Eyebeam Art Technology Center New York, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning in New York, Asian American Art Alliance in New York, SIGGRAPH Art Gallery and SIGGRAPH Asia, to name a few. Her work has received recognitions from many leading art institutions such as Creative Capital Art Foundation, Jerome Foundation, New York Foundation of Arts Fellowship, New York State Council on the Arts, Museum of Art & Design New York, Queens Art Council, among others.
  • Weidong Yang has a Ph. D. in Physics and a M.S in Computer Science. He has also been practicing the art of photography and dancing. With experience in both science and art, he founded Kinetech Arts in 2013, a dance company that explores the boundary of applying science and technology in theatre performance. He founded Kineviz in 2014, developing solution in human data interface and 3D visualization.
  • Imin Yeh (San Francisco, CA) is fresh off of an Irvine Fellow at the Lucas Artist Programs of Montalvo Art Center. She is a recipient of the 2009 Barclay Simpson MFA Award, the San Francisco Foundation's Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship (2008) and the Yozo Hamaguchi Endowed Scholarship in 2007. BA, University of Wisconsin, Madison; MFA, California College of the Arts.
  • Nicole Yunger Halpern is a theoretical physicist at the Joint Center for Quantum Information and Computer Science at the University of Maryland, as well as the author of the book "Quantum Steampunk: The Physics of Yesterday's Tomorrow". Nicole earned her PhD at Caltech, winning the international Ilya Prigogine Prize for an energy-science thesis. As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, she won the International Quantum Technology Emerging Researcher Award. Nicole has written over 100 articles for the blog Quantum Frontiers and suspects that a copy of her is a novelist in some parallel universe. You can follow her on Twitter @nicoleyh11.
  • Pamela Z, composer, performer, and media artist, makes solo works combining a wide range of vocal techniques with electronic processing, samples, gesture-activated MIDI controllers, and video. She has toured extensively throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Her multimedia work "Baggage Allowance" (that premiered in 2011) involves vocal performance with electronic processing, found text, recorded interviews, multi-channel sound, interactive video, and sculptural objects.
  • target=_blankReza Zadeh is CEO at Matroid and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. His work focuses on Machine Learning, Distributed Computing, and Discrete Applied Mathematics. Reza received his PhD in Computational Mathematics from Stanford under the supervision of Gunnar Carlsson. His awards include a KDD Best Paper Award and the Gene Golub Outstanding Thesis Award. He has served on the Technical Advisory Boards of Microsoft and Databricks. As part of his research, Reza built the Machine Learning Algorithms behind Twitter's who-to-follow system, the first product to use Machine Learning at Twitter. Reza is the initial creator of the Linear Algebra Package in Apache Spark. Through Apache Spark, Reza's work has been incorporated into industrial and academic cluster computing environments. In addition to research, Reza designed and teaches two PhD-level classes at Stanford: Distributed Algorithms and Optimization (CME 323), and Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms (CME 305).
  • Yi Zeng is a Professor and Deputy Director at Research Center for Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence, and Director of the China-UK Research Centre for AI Ethics and Governance, both at the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences. He is a board member for the National Governance Committee of Next Generation Artificial Intelligence, Ministry of Science and Technology China. He is the Director for the Research Center on AI Ethics and Sustainable Development, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. He is an expert in the UNESCO Adhoc Expert Group on AI Ethics. He is the lead drafter of Beijing Artificial Intelligence Principles, Harmonious AI Principles, and one of the major drafters for the National Governance Principles of New Generation Artificial Intelligence, China. He founded the Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Development Goals (AI4SDGs) Cooperation Network. His major research interests focus on Brain-inspired Artificial Intelligence models, Artificial General Intelligence, AI Safety, Ethics, and Governance.
  • Alice Yuan Zhang (b. Dalian, China) is a media artist, researcher, and educator based between Berlin and Los Angeles. Her transdisciplinary practice operates on cyclical and intergenerational time. Along the peripheries of colonialist imagination, she works to bring technology down to earth by devising collective experiments in ancestral remembering, interspecies pedagogy, and networked solidarity. Alice is a founding steward of virtual care lab, 2022 DWeb fellow, recent research resident at 0x Salon, Creative Wildfire artist, resident artist at CultureHub, and community member of NAVEL and Trust. She has taught Media Studies for Performance at Sarah Lawrence College, facilitated a study group on Digital Matterealities, and hosted lectures, workshops, and other learning engagements across academic institutions including CalArts, Harvard, Duke, NYU ITP, and University of Toronto, arts institutions such as Goethe-Institute, Iowa PS1, and MAK Center, and independent cultural initiatives like SFPC, Tiny Tech Zines, SOFTER, and M20.
  • Stella Zhang was born in Beijing, China. She learned painting from her father the acclaimed brush painter Ping Zhang who was a professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts. She attended the Central Academy of Fine Arts for high school. She then matriculated to the Central Academy of Fine Arts for college where she received her BFA in Chinese Brush Paining in 1989. She moved to Japan in 1990 where she studied Japanese Painting at Tama Fine Art University and later at Tokyo Art University where she earned her MFA in Japanese Painting in 1996. She has lived in the United States since 2003. In the past 20 years, her work has been exhibited in Chinese, Japanese and American galleries and museums. Her work has been included in fine arts collections in many countries. She has published four books.
  • Thomas Zimmerman is an inventor and educator, exploring the frontiers of human-computer interaction at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His 30+ patents cover position tracking, user input, wireless communication, music training, biometrics and encryption. His Data Glove invention established the field of Virtual Reality, selling over one million units. His electric field PAN invention, developed with Professor Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Media Lab, sends data through the human body. He also founded and directs the Extreme Science Program at the Latino College Preparatory Academy (LCPA) in East San Jose.
  • Catherine Zoi has spent 30 years in the energy and environmental sectors at the nexus between technology and policy. She is currently Consulting Professor at Stanford and directs the recently---established Energy Transformation Collaborative (ETC). Cathy served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary and acting Under Secretary at the Department of Energy, overseeing more than $30 billion in energy investments. In the private sector, Cathy has been an energy investor (Silver Lake and Bayard Capital), a board member (Ice Energy, SES, Pacific Solar), and a management consultant (ICF and Next Energy) with bases in the US and Australia. She was the founding CEO of both the Alliance for Climate Protection established by former Vice President Al Gore and the NSW Sustainable Energy Development Authority, a $50m fund to commercialize technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the early 1990s, Cathy pioneered the Energy Star program at the US EPA and was Chief of Staff for the Office on Environmental Policy in the Clinton White House. Cathy has a BS in Geology from Duke and an MS in Engineering from Dartmouth.
  • Katia Zolotovsky, Assistant Professor at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) is an architect, biologist and bio-designer drawing from new technologies, synthetic biology, and materials science to further sustainable innovation with materials. She designs things on multiple scales: buildings and interiors as an architect, but also biomaterials and 3D-printed materials, and even designed bacteria engineered on the nanoscale. Her research focuses on the intersection of science and design, particularly computational design and biology. She hopes to introduce first-year students to material sciences that capture generative bio-processes within a framework of ecological concerns and sustainability. She earned her PhD in Design and Computation from the Department of Architecture at MIT. She has an impressive record of National Science Foundation funding and experience in various domains of professional practice.

Leonardo Art Science Evenings | Piero Scaruffi | LAST Festival