Professor John Conway is an experimental particle physicist at UC Davis. He works on the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment at the new Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and on the Collider Detector at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois. He has searched for new particles for the past twenty-two years, including for the elusive Higgs boson. Though he has not found any new particles yet, he expects to do so very soon. Conway is a contributor to the science blog Cosmic Variance. He and his wife Robin Erbacher, also a particle physicist on the faculty at UC Davis, have a 22-month old son, Ian, who shows all the classic signs of early physicist syndrome.
Brian Dunning is the host and producer of the podcast Skeptoid: Critical Analysis of Pop Phenomena (skeptoid.com), applying critical thinking to paranormal and pseudoscientific subjects promoted by the mass media. Skeptoid has a weekly audience of 108,300 listeners. Brian is also the author of two books based on the podcast, Skeptoid and Skeptoid II. A Silicon Valley computer scientist by trade, Brian now uses new media to promote critical thinking. He has appeared on numerous radio shows and television documentaries.
Professor Ian Faloona first studied chemistry at UC Santa Cruz. He was unable to become a vegetarian until after leaving the rigid conformity of that community. He then spent 4 years in Colorado working as an environmental consultant, measuring smoke stack emissions and running computer models. After running out of things to learn, he obtained a Ph.D. in meteorology from Penn State, studying atmospheric photochemistry from planes and towers. As a postdoctoral researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, CO he made more measurements from aircraft, studying marine clouds and turbulent mixing. Now an assistant professor at UC Davis, his research group investigates how marine and terrestrial ecosystems influence the Earth's atmosphere and climate.
While at University of Georgia, Chris Jay Hoofnagle co-founded The Sagan Society, a student-faculty group devoted to skepticism, and in recent years, focused upon "Denialism," at Scienceblogs: http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/. For his day job, Hoofnagle is director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology's information privacy programs and senior fellow to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. He is an expert in information privacy law.
Brian Malow is Earth’s Premier Science Comedian (self-proclaimed). He is a freelance science video correspondent for Time Magazine’s website. He’s been featured on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and in Nature, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. He is also on the advisory board for the USA Science & Engineering Festival. Based in San Francisco, Brian performs for science organizations, corporations, science festivals, universities, and special events.
Dr. David Morrison is the Director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and Senior Scientist for Astrobiology at the NASA Ames Research Center. He holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard and is internationally known for his research on small bodies in the solar system, including advocacy for developing plans to defend the Earth from impacts by comets and asteroids. A Fellow of CSI, he has written extensively on such fringe science topics as Velikovsky, cosmic catastrophes, UFOs, the creation science movement, and most recently the climate crisis caused by global warming. For the past two years he has been the primary scientist critic of the widespread fear that the world will end in 2012, and of the doomsday sleaze artists who use the Internet, blogs, and cable TV to frighten people for profit.
Wallace Sampson, MD (Wally to his friends) is a graduate of UC Berkeley, with an MD from the University of California, San Francisco. A recovering (retired, not retiring) hematologist-oncologist, he became interested in medical pseudoscience in 1972 with the Laetrile phenomenon. His former biochemistry professors introduced him into scientific analysis of false claims, and all went uphill from there. At the request of a Stanford faculty committee in 1979 he formed the first medical school course in “holistic medicine,” now a course in analysis of false claims accenting “alternative medicine.” He left private practice in 1991 to head the Division of Oncology at Santa Clara Valley Med. Center, San Jose, retired in 1997, formed The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine with Paul Kurtz and CSICOP (now CFI). He also served as Chairman of the Cancer Advisory Council of the State of California. He and wife Rita, a retired RN-turned computer specialist, have 5 sons and 9 grandchildren, reside in Los Altos and Aptos, Calif.
Dr. Kiki (Kirsten Sanford, PhD) is no birdbrain, but she would take it as a compliment if you called her one. With a PhD in Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Physiology, she has peered into bird’s brains to discover how they tick. She hosts several popular science programs on the web, including This Week in Science, Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour, Food Science, and Potential Energy, and worked with Revision3 on their all-female tech show, PopSiren. She also contributed regularly to Brink on the Science Channel. You can find her blog, The Bird’s Brain, at www.drkiki.tv.
Dr. Eugenie C. Scott is Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education, Inc., a not for profit membership organization of scientists, teachers, and others that works to improve the teaching of evolution, and of science as a way of knowing. It opposes the teaching of “scientific” creationism and other religiously-based views in science classes. A former college professor, Dr. Scott is an internationally-known expert on the creationism and evolution controversy, and is called upon by the press and other media to explain science and evolution to the general public. The author of Evolution vs Creationism: An Introduction and co-editor with Glenn Branch of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for our Schools, and has been awarded six honorary degrees. She has also received numerous other awards, including the "Defense of Science" award from CFI, the "Public Education in Science Award" from CSICOP, and the James Randi award from the Skeptic Society.
Dr. Seth Shostak is the Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute, in Mountain View, California. He has an undergraduate degree in physics from Princeton University, and a doctorate in astronomy from the California Institute of Technology. For much of his career, Seth conducted radio astronomy research on galaxies, and has published approximately sixty papers in professional journals. He has written several hundred popular magazine and Web articles on various topics in astronomy, technology, film and television. He lectures on astronomy and other subjects at Stanford and other venues in the Bay Area, and for the last six years, has been a Distinguished Speaker for the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He is also Chair of the International Academy of Astronautics' SETI Permanent Study Group. Every week he hosts the SETI Institute’s science radio show, "Are We Alone?" Seth has edited and contributed to a half dozen books. His most recent tome is "Confessions of an Alien Hunter: A Scientist’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence" (National Geographic).
Dr. Karen Stollznow is a Host of the Center for Inquiry’s Point of Inquiry podcast, and of the Skeptics Society's Monster Talk podcast. A prolific skeptical writer and investigator of pseudoscience and the paranormal, she is the "Naked Skeptic" web columnist for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the "Bad Language" columnist for Skeptic magazine. Dr. Stollznow is Contributing Editor for Skeptical Inquirer, is the Managing Editor of CSI's Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice, and a frequent contributor to many sites and publications, including the Skepbitch and Skepchick blogs. She is a linguist and Researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Director of the San Francisco Bay Area Skeptics.
