Speakers

Speakers

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  • Doug Soltis

    Distinguished professor, Department of Biology, University of Florida

    Douglas Soltis came to the University of Florida from Washington State in 2000. He is a former president of the Botanical Society of America, winner of their Centennial Award and author with Pam Soltis of Phylogeny and Evolution of Angiosperms. His interests include genome doubling (polyploidy), floral evolution, building the tree of life and angiosperm diversification. He has reconstructed relationships among major lineages of flowering plants and, with others, proposed a new classification for angiosperms. These new classifications represent the most dramatic changes in angiosperm relationships in over 100 years. Soltis’ framework formed the basis for two projects using genomic tools to address a fundamental problem: the origin of the flower. Soltis is part of a recently funded effort to build a first-draft tree of life for all of the 1.8 million species on Earth. The first draft of this tree will be available in the fall of 2013.

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  • Pam Soltis

    Distinguished professor; curator of molecular systematics and evolutionary genetics, University of Florida; Florida Museum of Natural History

    Pam Soltis has played a major role in reconstructing the plant branch of the tree of life and relaying this information to the scientific community and the public. Her research interests are in plant biodiversity, emphasizing angiosperm phylogeny, polyploidy, the evolution of the flower, conservation genetics of rare plant species and phylogeography. She joined the University of Florida faculty in 2001 after teaching at Washington State, where with Doug Soltis she investigated genome doubling. Soltis has served as president of the Society of Systematic Biologists and the Botanical Society of America and as an associate editor for ten journals, including Evolution and Systematic Biology. She participates in public outreach through the Gainesville public schools and the Florida Museum of Natural History, where she is featured in an ongoing exhibit, “Botanical Chords,” with artist Terry Ashley.

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  • H. Eugene Stanley

    William Fairfield Warren distinguished professor; professor of physics, chemistry, biomedical engineering, and physiology; director, Center for Polymer Studies, Boston University

    Gene Stanley’s pathbreaking career in physics and complexity studies began when he performed biological physics research with Max Delbruck and was awarded the Ph.D. in physics by Harvard. Today he works in collaboration with students and colleagues on major puzzles in interdisciplinary science. His main focus is understanding the anomalous behavior of liquid water in bulk, nanoconfined and biological environments. He has worked on a range of other topics in complex systems, such as quantifying correlations among the constituents of the Alzheimer brain and quantifying fluctuations in noncoding and coding DNA sequences as well as interbeat intervals of the healthy and diseased heart. Honored by universities and scientific societies around the world, Stanley is a member of the Academies of Sciences in the U.S. and Brazil. He was elected chair of the 2008 NAS/Keck Futures Initiative on Complexity and is an active member of the NAS committee Forefronts of Science at the Interface of Physical and Life Sciences, charged with finding ways for fostering useful collaborations between physicists and life scientists. He also serves on three NAS committees concerned with threat networks and threatened networks.

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  • Evelyn Strauss

    Founding co-editor of the Science of Aging Knowledge Environment (SAGE KE), founding executive director of Scientists Without Borders, and founding executive editor of the Multiple Sclerosis Discovery Forum

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  • Karyn Traphagen

    Executive director and co-founder, ScienceOnline

    Karyn Traphagen is executive director and co-founder of ScienceOnline. She is acutely focused on supporting our global community in creative and responsive ways. She dreams possibilities for conversations and collaborations, digs into the details, and listens to your ideas — among the many reasons Karyn received the 2011 BlogTogether Community Service Award.

    Karyn has a graphic design studio, volunteers at a local science museum, and tells stories about her mother’s postcards. She previously taught physics at the high school, undergraduate and graduate levels. As a teacher, she sought to connect the science of the curriculum with the everyday life of her students and to instill lifelong skills for learning. Karyn completed graduate work at the University of Virginia and also studied at the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa). She has trained physics teachers through the University of Virginia’s Physics department and traveled to South Sudan to conduct professional development training for local teachers.

    She has more than 10 years of experience developing and teaching online courses, and she’s summited the 46 major Adirondack peaks. Karyn lives in Durham, North Carolina, in a house filled with Lego, books, a 3-D printer and lots of other toys. She writes about creativity on her blog, Stay Curious.

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  • Erik Vance

    Freelance science writer, Mexico City

    Erik Vance is a science writer native to the Bay Area replanted in Mexico City as a non-native invasive. Like many in his field, he couldn’t really hack it as a scientist and now works as a professional groupie. That said, “science groupie” is just the best job he can imagine, especially in Mexico. His work often focuses on interesting characters in science and has appeared in Harper's, Scientific American, Discover, and Nature. He often claims the m-dash is superior to the comma but secretly he just wishes the semicolon would come back.

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  • Mitch Waldrop

    Nature

    M. Mitchell Waldrop was the editorial page editor at Nature magazine from 2008 to 2010, and is currently a features editor at Nature. He earned a Ph.D. in elementary particle physics at the University of Wisconsin in 1975, and a Master’s in journalism at Wisconsin in 1977. From 1977 to 1980 he was a writer and West Coast bureau chief for Chemical and Engineering News. From 1980 to 1991 he was a senior writer at Science magazine, where he covered physics, space, astronomy, computer science, artificial intelligence, molecular biology, psychology, and neuroscience. He was a freelance writer from 1991 to 2003 and from 2007 to 2008; in between he worked in media affairs for the National Science Foundation from 2003 to 2006. He is the author of Man-Made Minds (Walker, 1987), a book about artificial intelligence; Complexity (Simon & Schuster, 1992), a book about the Santa Fe Institute and the new sciences of complexity; and The Dream Machine (Viking, 2001), a book about the history of computing. In his spare time he is an avid cyclist. He lives in Washington, D.C. with his wife, Amy E. Friedlander.

    What Nature wants in a pitch:
    We're looking for stories about science and scientists that are intriguing, that tell us something
    new, and that are a compelling read.

    Contact:
    m.waldrop@us.nature.com

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  • George M. Whitesides

    Woodford L. and Ann A. Flowers university professor, Harvard University

    George M. Whitesides is the world’s most cited living chemist and one of the most imaginative and prolific scientists and inventors of the past century. A pioneer in microfabrication and self-assembly at the nanoscale and the founder of several companies, he served on the faculty of MIT from 1963 to 1982 before moving his laboratory to Harvard, where he chaired the chemistry department 1986-89. He now holds one of 21 University Professorships at Harvard. Whitesides is a member of the National Academies of Science and Engineering, a major figure in science policy and a winner of the Kyoto Prize, King Faisal International Prize in Chemistry, U.S. National Medal of Science and many other honors. A lively explainer of scientific ideas, he is co-author with Felice Frankel of On the Surface of Things: Images of the Extraordinary in Science (2008) and No Small Matter: Science on the Nanoscale (2009). His extensive Harvard research group is currently investigating questions ranging from soft robotics to medical diagnosis to the origins of life; its goal is “to fundamentally change the paradigms of science.”

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  • George T. Whitesides

    Chief executive officer and president, Virgin Galactic

    George T. Whitesides was chosen in 2010 to lead Virgin Galactic, the spaceflight company founded by Sir Richard Branson. After winning the X Prize with SpaceShipOne, a rocket plane that is lifted initially by a carrier vehicle, Branson unveiled SpaceShipTwo in 2009. Whitesides is responsible for guiding all aspects of the company to commercial operation in the U.S. and a proposed spaceport in Abu Dhabi. This includes The Spaceship Company, a joint venture to manufacture additional space vehicles. More than 540 individuals have plunked down deposits for seats on planned spaceflights. Before joining Virgin Galactic, Whitesides served as chief of staff for NASA and earlier as executive director of the National Space Society. Whitesides holds a master’s degree in geographic information systems and remote sensing from the University of Cambridge. He is a licensed private pilot and certified parabolic flight coach and cofounder of Yuri’s Night, an annual global celebration of space.

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  • Florence Williams

    freelance writer and author of The New York Times Notable Book, BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History

    Florence Williams’ book, BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History (W.W. Norton 2012) received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology and the 2013 Audie for audio books. It was also named a notable book of 2012 by the New York Times.

    She is a contributing editor at Outside Magazine and a freelance writer for New York Times, Slate, Mother Jones, O-Oprah, W., Bicycling and numerous other publications. She has received many awards, including six magazine awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and she was a 2013 finalist for the National Magazine Awards. Williams was named “Author of the week” by The Week in May, 2012. The Wall Street Journal calls her writing “droll and crisp,” which makes her feel like a pastry. She serves on the board of her favorite non-profit, High Country News, and lives with her family in Washington, D.C.

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  • Emily Willingham

    Writer and scientist

    Emily Willingham is a writer and scientist who founded the NASW grant-supported Double X Science online magazine. Her research focus is mammalian sex development. When she's not studying gonads or editing good science writing, she's probably engrossed in yet another Victorian novel.

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  • Corinna Wu

    Associate editor, Chemical & Engineering News

    Corinna Wu works from her home in Oakland, Calif., as an online editor for Chemical & Engineering News. Prior to joining C&EN, she spent six years as an independent writer, editor, and producer specializing in coverage of the physical sciences, engineering, and education. Her work has been published in Nature, Science, Technology Review, Prism, and Science News. She has also created radio and podcast stories for Science Update, Nature Publishing Group, Marketplace, and Scientific American. She spent the 2005-06 academic year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT studying neuroscience and engineering design.

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  • Clive D.L. Wynne

    Professor of psychology, Arizona State University

    Clive Wynne’s research interests have focused on dogs and their wild relatives, but over the last 30 years he has studied the behavior of animals ranging from pigeons to dunnarts (a mouse-sized marsupial) and from bats to Galápagos tortoises. He is currently completing a book on the evolution of dogs, a project that has taken him to Africa and other sites of early domestication to elucidate the interplay of genetics and behavior. Professor of psychology at the University of Florida from 2002 to 2013 and director of U.F.’s Canine Cognition & Behavior Lab, Wynne recently joined the Arizona State faculty. He is also director of research at Wolf Park, a wildlife education and research facility in Battle Ground, Ind. Always fascinated by the things animals do, in recent years he has developed an additional interest in how people relate to animals. When not working, he talks to his dog — even though research from his own lab suggests she is quite indifferent to what he says to her.

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  • Julianne Wyrick

    Student, UGA Program for Health and Medical Reporting

    Julianne Wyrick is a freelance science and health writer currently completing the health and medical journalism graduate program at the University of Georgia. While in the HMJ program, Julianne has interned as a science writer at Fermilab, covered a conference on macular degeneration research and written about hospital-related topics for Georgia Health News and Athens Patch. Julianne has also blogged about food for Scientific American’s Guest Blog. Prior to beginning the HMJ program, Julianne worked as a science-writing intern for Alltech, a global animal health and nutrition company. She has a B.A. in biochemistry from Asbury University, where she served as senior news writer for The Asbury Collegian. While completing her biochemistry degree, she also worked as an assistant lab technician, researching nitrate toxicity in forage for the University of Kentucky’s department of plant and soil sciences.

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