Participants: 2017

Denver-based duo Monica and Tyler Aiello are award-winning artists and pioneering STEAM specialists recognized for their work uniting art, science, and engineering. For more than a decade, they have collaborated with NASA and the scientific community to create fine art and public practice initiatives that galvanize transdisciplinary collaboration and community engagement.… read more »

Elizabeth Alter is an evolutionary geneticist, professor of biology at City University of New York (Graduate Center and York College), and Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Her research focuses on understanding how aquatic biodiversity is generated and maintained, particularly in extreme environments such as river rapids and toxic urban waters, using the tools of genomics.… read more »

Amelia Amon is a solar designer with an aesthetic approach to integrating sustainable energy into the built environment. Her design company develops products and installations, including a solar awnings with architects, solar signage for wayfinding, dark-sky compliant solar LED lights for SolarOne Solutions, solar sculptural trackers for the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), interpretive exhibits for science museums & environmental centers such as Liberty Science Center, the Sustainable Development Fund of PA, and the NY SunWorks Science Barge, system components for the NY State Energy Research & Development Authority, (NYSERDA), a fountain for the Smithsonian National Design Museum, solar freezer carts for Ben & Jerry’s, & alternative energy resources for rural women in India with the Institute for Policy Studies.… read more »

Suzanne Anker is a visual artist and theorist working at the intersection of art and the biological sciences. She works in a variety of mediums ranging from digital sculpture and installation to large-scale photography to plants grown by LED lights. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally in museums and galleries including the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany, Walker Art Center, the Smithsonian Institute, the Phillips Collection, P.S.1… read more »

“I am Professor of Physiology, Anesthesiology, and PM&R at Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois. Over the past two decades my lab has been devoted to unravelling the brain mechanisms underlying chronic back pain (CBP), which has culminated in over 50 papers and a current clinical trial designed to arrest the development of CBP.… read more »

Jill Bargonetti is a Full Professor at The City University of New York (CUNY) at Hunter College and The Graduate Center in the PhD Programs of Biology and Biochemistry. In 2015 she joined the Cornell Medical Center Hunter College Belfer Research team as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology.… read more »

Dr. Ashley Bear is a Program Officer with the Board on Higher Education and Workforce at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In this capacity, Dr. Bear manages a portfolio of projects dealing with critical issues in higher education.… read more »

Adrian Bejan is the J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor at Duke University. His research is in applied physics, thermodynamics and the Constructal Law as the law of physics that governs organization and evolution in nature. He is the author of 30 books and over 600 peer-reviewed journal articles.… read more »

Dr. Belfer is world-recognized expert in human pain genetics and assessement of clinical pain and pain-related traits. She started her career as a neurologist, and then got extensive training in neurobiology and human genetics. Since 2001, her primary interest has been the relationship between gene polymorphisms and complex phenotypes such as pain, psychiatric disorders, and addictions.… read more »

Paul Artin Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Director of its Global Institute for Advanced Study.  He earned a PhD in Philosophy from Princeton University and a B.Sc. in Physics from Trent University.

Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012, his research interests are primarily in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.… read more »

Tega Brain is an artist and environmental engineer making eccentric engineering. Her work intersects art, ecology and engineering, addressing the scope and politics of emerging technologies. It takes the form of site specific public works, dysfunctional devices, experimental infrastructures and information systems.… read more »

Paul Browde is a psychiatrist and teaching faculty in the Department of Narrative Medicine at Columbia University. The ethical stance of Narrative therapy shapes his clinical work. He works with both individuals and couples exploring the relational space and the reciprocal relationship between listening and telling.… read more »

Patricia Carlin received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, focusing on Shakespeare studies, and poetry and poetics. Her most recent poetry collection, Second Nature, appeared in May 2017. Previous books include Quantum Jitters and Original Green, poetry collections, and Shakespeare’s Mortal Men, a study of Shakespeare’s plays in their cultural context.… read more »

Professor Edgar Choueiri is Director of Princeton University’s Program in Engineering Physics, and Director of Princeton’s Electric Propulsion and Plasma Dynamics Laboratory (EPPDyL). He is tenured Full Professor in the Applied Physics Group at the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, and associated faculty at the Astrophysical Sciences Department/Program in Plasma Physics at Princeton University.… read more »

Professor Robin Collins is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. He earned his PhD in philosophy at the University of Notre Dame (1993) and has graduate-level training in theoretical physics from the University of Texas at Austin. He has written over forty-five substantial articles and book chapters in philosophy with some of the leading academic presses, spanning the areas of philosophy of physics, philosophy of science, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of mind.… read more »

Lisa DeBenedittis is an Assistant Professor of Design Research at Parsons School of Design, and most recently has served as Vice Provost of The New School, and Associate Dean at Parsons.
She completed her Ph.D. (NYU) in 2005, writing on the aesthetics of subjectivity, and completed her analytic training at the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association, now in practice in New York City and Long Island.… read more »

Elizabeth Demaray is a fine artist whose research area is the interface between the built and the natural environment. Working in sculpture, digital media and eco-art, she designs listening stations for birds that play human music, cultures lichen on the sides of skyscrapers in New York City, and manufactures alternative forms of housing for hermit crabs out of man-made materials.… read more »

Simon Aban Deng is a human rights activist living in the United States. A native of the Shilluk Kingdom in southern Sudan, he spent several years as a child slave until escaping and thereafter applying for asylum in the U.S. and taking U.S.… read more »

Anis Dizdarevic MD is an assistant clinical professor of anesthesiology and pain medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. He specializes in acute and chronic pain, causes, evolution and management. His particular interest is in pain prevention, minimally invasive pain management and mind-body remodeling and rehabilitation mechanisms.… read more »

Ev Fedorenko is a cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in the study of the human language system. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Linguistics from Harvard University in 2002. She then proceeded to pursue graduate studies in cognitive science and neuroscience at MIT.… read more »

Alan Fein is a Professor of Cell Biology in the School of Medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center.

After receiving his Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Dr. Fein went to the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole where he eventually became the Director of the Laboratory of Sensory Physiology.… read more »

Stuart Firestein is the former Chair of Columbia University’s Department of Biological Sciences, where he studies the vertebrate olfactory system. Aside from its molecular detection capabilities, the olfactory system serves as a model for investigating general principles and mechanisms of signaling and perception in the brain.… read more »

Paul H. Fry is the William Lampson Professor of English and has taught at Yale since 1971. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph. D. from Harvard. His primary areas of specialization are British romanticism, the history of literary criticism, contemporary literary theory, and literature in relation to the visual arts.… read more »

Alexis Gambis is a filmmaker and a biologist whose interdisciplinary work aims at transforming the way science is communicated to the public through film and visual arts. His first feature film The Fly Room has toured festivals and academic institutions worldwide ending with a theatrical release in New York, Paris, and Berlin in the fall of 2017.… read more »

Daniel L. Goroff is Vice President and Program Director at the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, a grant-making philanthropy that supports breakthroughs in science, technology, and economics. He is also Professor Emeritus of Mathematics and Economics at Claremont’s Harvey Mudd College, where he served as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty.… read more »

Anthony Grafton studied history, classics and history of science at the University of Chicago and University College London. He teaches European history at Princeton University, where he has worked since 1975. He has been a visiting professor at the Collège de France, the Louvre, the University of Munich, the Warburg Haus in Hamburg and Columbia University, and has held visiting fellowships at Merton and Pembroke Colleges, Oxford, and Christ’s and Trinity Colleges, Cambridge.… read more »

William Grassie is an interdisciplinary scholar, academic entrepreneur, social activist, and author. Grassie received a B.A. in political science from Middlebury College and then worked for ten years on nuclear disarmament, citizen diplomacy, community organizing, and sustainability issues in Washington, D.C,… read more »

David Grinspoon is an astrobiologist and prize-winning author. He is a Senior Scientist at the Planetary Science Institute. His research focuses on climate evolution on Earth-like planets and potential conditions for life elsewhere in the universe. He is involved with several interplanetary spacecraft missions for NASA, the European Space Agency and the Japanese Space Agency.… read more »

Daniel Grushkin is co-founder and Executive Director of Genspace. He is also the founder of the Biodesign Challenge. Daniel is a Fellow at Data & Society. From 2013-2014, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars where he researched synthetic biology.… read more »

Uri Hasson grew up in Jerusalem. As an undergrad he studied philosophy and cognitive sciences at the Hebrew University. He completed his Ph.D. in Neurobiology at the Weizmann Institute in Israel and was a postdoctoral fellow at NYU before moving to Princeton.… read more »

Daniel Hill is an abstract painter and sound artist whose work has been included in numerous exhibitions exploring the relationship between painting, sound, and science. Recent exhibitions include: Brattleboro Museum of Art (2016/17), NurtureArt (2016/17), Holland Tunnel Gallery- Greece (2016), Pace University (2015), Margret Thatcher Projects (2014), and McKenzie Fine Art (2012, 2013).… read more »

Erik Hoel received his PhD in neuroscience from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. His family owns Jabberwocky Books, an independent bookstore anchored for more than 40 years in Newburyport MA. He is the co-founder of YHouse, a non-profit here in New York City that hosts events which bring together artists and scientists.… read more »

Amy Holman is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet and a literary consultant. Her collection, Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window was described by one reviewer as “part freak show, part searing insight”. She is also the author of four poetry chapbooks, including the prizewinning Wait For Me, I’m Gone, from Dream Horse Press.… read more »

Noah Hutton is a film director and founder of the website The Beautiful Brain. He has presented on art and neuroscience at the Venice Biennale, Impakt Festival, Society for Neuroscience, Wellcome Collection, Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere. In 2015 he was named a Salzburg Global Fellow in Neuroscience & Art, and created Brain City, a multi-platform installation in Times Square commissioned by the Times Square Arts Alliance.… read more »

​Karen Ingram is a creative director, designer, and artist who uses her skill set to promote scientific awareness. As a Synthetic Biology LEAP fellow, she is recognized as an emerging leader in synthetic biology. Karen co-authored “Biobuilder: Synthetic Biology in the Lab” (O’Reilly, 2015), a synbio curriculum in which she crafted visual elements.… read more »

PAOLO JAVIER’s collaboration with Listening Center (David Mason) appeared as a limited edition book/cassette, Ur’lyeh/Aklopolis, published by Texte und Töne in early 2017. A featured artist in MoMA PS1’s 2015 Greater NY Show, he is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, including Court of the Dragon (Nightboat Books 2015), which Publisher’s Weekly calls “a linguistic time machine”.… read more »

​In 2014 VIDA Art and Artificial Life International Awards Pioneer Prize was awarded to Natalie Jeremijenko “for her consistently brilliant portfolio of work over the past two decades.” (a prize only awarded once before to Laurie Anderson). Awarded the 2013 Most Innovative People, named of the most influential women in technology 2011, one of the inaugural top young innovators by MIT Technology Review and 40 most influential designers Jeremijenko directs the Environmental Health Clinic, and is an Associate Professor in the Visual Art Department, NYU and affiliated with the Computer Science Dept and Environmental Studies program.… read more »

Daniel Kahneman is Professor Emeritus of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton., He is best known for his joint research with Amos Tversky on human judgment and decision making. Tversky did in 1996. Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013.… read more »

Eric R. Kandel, M.D., is University Professor at Columbia; Kavli Professor and Director, Kavli Institute for Brain Science; Co-Director, Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute; and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. A graduate of Harvard College and N.Y.U.… read more »

Born in 1964 in Ahmedabad, India to French and American parents, Daniel Kohn was raised in France. He has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1996. His artistic work can be seen as an ongoing attempt to integrate this diverse background into an evolving point of view.… read more »

Marina Korsakova-Kreyn is a professional pianist and scholar in music perception and cognition. She received her Diploma in Piano Performance from Nizhniy Novgorod State Conservatory, Russia, and she received her Ph.D. in Cognition and Neuroscience from The University of Texas at Dallas.… read more »

Ellen K. Levy, a New York-based artist and writer is Past President of the College Art Association (2004-2006) and received her PhD from the University of Plymouth (UK) (2012) on the art and neuroscience of attention. With Patricia Olynyk she co-directs the NY-based LASER (Leonardo Art and Science Evening Rendezvous).… read more »

Ben Lillie is a high-energy particle physicist who left the ivory tower for the wilds of New York’s theater district. He has a B.A. in physics from Reed College, a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Stanford University, and a Certificate in improv comedy from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater.… read more »

Farzad Mahootian is a Clinical Associate Professor of Global Liberal Studies at New York University since 2010. He has an interdisciplinary background (PhD Philosophy, Fordham; MS Chemistry, Georgetown). His research focuses on interactions between philosophy, science and society within the mythological imagination of technoscience and with guidance from process philosophy, biomimicry, artificial intelligence, and premodern sciences.… read more »

Roger Malina is an ArtScience Researcher, Space Scientist and Astronomer and Editor.
​He co directs the ArtSciLab at UTD Dallas which works on projects that cannot be accomplished unless artists and scientists work together, and on projects in Experimental Publishing. The latest project is the ARTECA art science technology aggregator with MIT Press and MIT.… read more »

Carol A. Mandel is Dean of the NYU Division of Libraries, which includes NYU’s libraries in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai; along with Campus Media Services, University Archives, and the NYU Press. She has been a leading figure in research librarianship during its turn of the 20th-century transformation in a digital environment.… read more »

Stephen Massimilla is a poet, scholar, professor, and painter. He holds an M.F.A. in Writing and Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, with a focus on poetry, from Columbia University. His new multi-genre volume, Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo, 2016), won the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the National Indie Excellence Award, and others.… read more »

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He received his B. A. in Physics and Philosophy from Yale and his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. His work centers on the interpretation of physical theory: how the mathematical structures used in physics may be understood as presenting a physical account of the world.… read more »

Shane Mayak is a biologist and founder of Ligo Project, a non-profit focused on connecting science to art, culture, and community. She studies the immune system, biological microenvironments, and how cells communicate with each other and their surroundings. Her main interest is in learning how immune cells and the biological processes and structures that control them can go awry in diseases such as cancer.… read more »

Jame McCray is an Environmental Social Scientist at the Delaware Sea Grant. She is also a modern dancer, currently working on a component of “Same Stories, Different Countries,” a student project creating dances based on the science behind renewable energy in the U.S.… read more »

Mark Mitton is a magician who is fascinated by using magic to better understand how we see the world. He performs magic and produces unique entertainment around the world, and explores the limits and potential of perception. Mark’s specialty is physical misdirection, or what some call “embodied cognition”.… read more »

Mark A. Norell was born July 26, 1957, in St. Paul, Minnesota and spent most of his formative years (from 1964) in southern California. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1980 from Long Beach State University and a Masters of Science from San Diego State University in 1983.… read more »

Andrea Norton is classically-trained singer and choral conductor with a degree in Church Music from Westminster Choir College. Across her career, Andrea has worked with musicians of all ages in studio and church settings, and served as the artistic director and conductor of a community-based Renaissance a cappella choir.… read more »

atricia Olynyk’s work explores art, science, and technology-related themes that often examine the dialectics of natural and artificial, and cognition and affect. Appropriating scientific imaging technologies, her installations, photographs, and videos address how interpretation fluctuates between fact and speculation. Working across disciplines to develop “third culture” collaborations, she has programmed art, science and technology curricula, symposia and fellowships at several research institutions, including the University of Michigan, where she was the first non-scientist appointed to their Life Sciences Institute.… read more »

Cynthia’s background is in Fine Arts, with a major in Printmaking and a minor in Art History. As a professional artist, her career embraced printmaking, textiles, mixed-media, photography, and interactive sculpture with artwork exhibited at The American Craft and Cooper-Hewitt museums in New York City, and commissions from Citicorp, The Discovery Museum in Bridgeport, CT; The Staten Island Children’s Museum, and the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority.… read more »

Nirav S. Patel is a Research Scholar at the Honors College, where he researches and teaches programs focuses on interdisciplinary approaches to human-environment interactions within social-ecological systems. As a member at the Rutgers energy Institute and Rutgers Climate Institute, Patel focuses specifically on coupled natural and human systems.… read more »

Nancy Princenthal is a Brooklyn-based writer whose book Agnes Martin: Her Life and Art (Thames and Hudson, 2015) received the 2016 PEN America award for biography. A former Senior Editor of Art in America, she has also contributed to Artforum, the Village Voice, and the New York Times.… read more »

Alana Quinn organizes exhibitions and public programs exploring intersections of art, science, and culture at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. She has co-organized the popular monthly D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) salon since its inception in 2011.… read more »

Mark is the Director of Guerilla Science, an award-winning international arts, science and culture organization that creates live events in unusual places, and a an assistant professor of Math & Science at the Pratt Institute of Art and Design. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Cambridge in 2010 and has been creating live experiences for the past decade.… read more »

Andrew Rossetti is a clinical music psychotherapist, researcher, and coordinator of the multi-site music therapy program in radiology oncology at Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center. He is currently a visiting professor at the University of Barcelona, and has developed several music therapy programs in hospitals both in the United States and in Spain.… read more »

John Schaefer is the host and producer of WNYC’s long-running new music show New Sounds (“The #1 radio show for the Global Village” – Billboard), founded in 1982, and its innovative Soundcheck podcast, which has featured live performances and interviews with a variety of guests since 2002.… read more »

Caleb Scharf’s research career spans cosmology, exoplanetary science, and astrobiology. He currently leads efforts at Columbia University in New York to understand the nature of exoplanets and living environments in the universe. He is also a Global Science Coordinator for the Earth-Life Science Institute’s Origins Network at the Tokyo Institute for Technology and a co-founder of YHouse, Inc.… read more »

Dr. Seal is a tenure-track assistant professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Otolaryngology and the Pittsburgh Center for Pain Research. Her work has focused on the neurobiology of neurotransmitter transporters and their role in nervous system function including hearing, vision, motor output and pain.… read more »

Harvey Seifter, one of the world’s leading authorities on organizational creativity, is founder and director of The Art of Science Learning (AOSL), a National Science Foundation-funded initiative that uses the arts to spark creativity and innovation in science, technology, engineering and education.… read more »

Daphna Shohamy is an Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Mind, Brain Behavior Institute and Department of Psychology and a member of the Kavli Institute for Brain Science. Dr. Shohamy’s research combines brain imaging in healthy humans with studies of patients with brain disorders to understand how our expectations and experiences change the way memories are formed and the consequences for health and disease.… read more »

Steven Sloman is a Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University where he has worked since 1992. He did his PhD in Psychology at Stanford University from 1986-1990 and then did post-doctoral research for two years at the University of Michigan.… read more »

Ken Soehner is the Arthur K. Watson Chief Librarian, Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan of Art. With a collection of more than one million volumes, the libraries at The Metropolitan Museum comprise one of the largest and most encyclopedic collections of research material relating to the history of art.… read more »

Ilya Tëmkin is an interdisciplinary scientist who studies how evolution works in nature and in human culture in the general framework of the hierarchy theory. An expert on bivalve mollusks, he analyzes the relative roles that ecology, history, and individual development play in diversification and the evolution of organic form.… read more »

Dr. Concetta Tomaino is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function and was Senior Vice President for Music Therapy at CenterLight Health System (formerly Beth Abraham Family of Health Services), where she worked from 1980 to 2016.… read more »

Athena Viscusi is currently the Psychosocial Care Specialist at MSF/Doctors without Borders USA, providing support to field workers before, after, and during deployment abroad. As a Mental Health Officer with MSF, she directed mental health and psychosocial programs for MSF in Haiti, South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, and Palestine.… read more »

Morris J. Vogel has been president of New York’s Lower East Side Tenement Museum since 2008. He trained as an American social and urban historian at Brandeis University (B.A. 1967) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1974), before joining the faculty of Temple University in Philadelphia in 1973, where he was promoted to professor in 1985.… read more »

Tyler Volk is professor of biology and environmental studies at New York University. In his just-released book, Quarks to Culture: How We Came to Be (Columbia University Press, May, 2017) Volk explores a rhythm within what he calls the “grand sequence,” which has progressed as a series of levels of sizes and innovations from elementary quanta to globalized human civilization.… read more »

Elizabeth Waters (Ph.D.) is a democracy and knowledge consultant. Her training in learning and memory neuroscience naturally led her to become an educator. Elizabeth works with students, teachers, and communities to explore the boundaries of our current knowledge and the practices that support this exploration.… read more »