Pat Shipman is a paleoanthropologist specializing in human evolution and a well-known writer of books and articles for the general public about evolution and human biology. Her 1994 book The Evolution of Racism: Human Differences and the Use and Abuse of Science traced the complex interaction of genetics, anthropology, and racism from Darwin's day to the 20th century. Now retired from the anthropology department at Penn State, Shipman in 2015 published her 10th book, The Invaders, in which she argued provocatively that the Neanderthals were eradicated by modern humans hunting cooperatively with dogs — 20,000 years before wolves were thought to have been domesticated. Shipman is a Fellow of the AAAS and in 2006 was awarded the Leighton Wilkie Prize by the Stone Age Institute at Indiana University for her lifetime contributions to paleoanthropology. A long-time contributor to American Scientist magazine, she has also won several literary prizes and in 2000 was selected as the A. Dixon and Betty F. Johnson Lecturer in the Communication of Science at Penn State.

Ramin Skibba is a freelance science writer and journalist based in San Diego and president of the San Diego Science Writers Association. He tries to balance freelance writing with being the parent of two small, rebellious children.

Twitter: @raminskibba
Email: raminskibba@gmail.com

Erica Smithwick, professor of geography at Penn State, is a landscape and ecosystem ecologist. Her laboratory group is actively involved in understanding how a wide range of disturbances, especially fire, affect ecosystem function at landscape scales.

Smithwick’s work is increasingly focused on problems that require inter- and trans-disciplinary teamwork to address complex environmental challenges. One of these projects, Visualizing Forest Futures, funded by the NSF, seeks to address how indigenous and western knowledge systems can be best used to address forest sustainability under climate variability, in partnership with the Menominee tribal nation in northern Wisconsin. Smithwick serves as the PI of the project.

Planetary scientist Steven W. Squyres has played a pioneering role in numerous explorations of objects in our solar system and was the principal investigator for the science payload on the Mars Exploration Rover Project. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1981, and after five years at NASA's Ames Research Center became a faculty member at Cornell in 1986. In September 2019, he stepped down from his position as James A. Weeks Professor of physical sciences to join the spaceflight company Blue Origin. His planetary exploration missions include Voyager, Magellan, NEAR, Cassini, Mars Express, MRO, Mars Odyssey, and the Mars Science Laboratory. Squyres led the most recent National Research Council Planetary Decadal Survey and served as Chairman of the NASA Advisory Council. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

S. Shyam Sundar is the founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory, a leading facility of its kind in the country. He teaches courses in the psychology of communication technology, media theory, and research methodology. He earned his doctoral and master's degrees in communication. His industry experience includes more than eight years as a journalist. He holds joint faculty appointments in the departments of film-video and media studies, advertising, architecture, and communication arts and sciences at Penn State. Sundar's research investigates social and psychological effects of technological elements unique to online communication, ranging from websites to newer social and personal media. In particular, his studies experimentally investigate the effects of interactivity, navigability, multi-modality, and agency (source attribution) in digital media interfaces upon online users' thoughts, emotions, and actions. His research is supported by the National Science Foundation, Korea Science and Engineering Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services, among others. A frequently cited source on technology, Sundar has testified before Congress as an expert witness and delivered talks at several universities in the United States, Germany, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Korea, China, Singapore, and India. He has served on the editorial boards of 18 journals. From 2013 to 2017, Sundar was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. He is a Fellow of the International Communication Association and recipient of the Deutschmann award for research excellence from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).

Twitter: @shyamer
Web: http://bellisario.psu.edu/people/individual/s.-shyam-sundar

Kelly Tyrrell is a senior science writer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has a B.S. in zoology, an M.S. in cellular and molecular biology, and was a 2011 Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellow at the Chicago Tribune. She was a staff reporter at the News Journal in Wilmington, Del. (Gannett) before joining the University Communications team at UW-Madison in 2014. There, she covers everything from atmospheric science to veterinary medicine, manages social media, plays a variety of roles in major science communication projects, and participates in a number of outreach and science engagement efforts. Her work has also appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Hospitalist, and The Rheumatologist. Kelly is also the engagement editor for The Open Notebook.

Twitter: @kellyperil
Email: kapril7@gmail.com

Maggie Villiger is the senior science + technology editor for The Conversation US, an online news site with articles written by academics, edited by journalists and aimed at the general public. "Conversation" stories are disseminated to other media outlets for republication using a Creative Commons license.

Maggie studied neuroscience as an undergraduate because it was the most interdisciplinary science major. Confident she didn't want to be a bench scientist or a physician, she luckily realized that a career in science communication was possible. She earned a master's degree in science journalism from Boston University and has since worked in public radio, public television, museum exhibit creation, educational video production and more. Whatever the venue, Maggie strives to translate science concepts so they're accurate and accessible for a general audience.

Twitter: @MaggieConvo
Email: maggie.villiger@theconversation.com