Scientific Sense ®

A theory of the interstellar medium: Three components regulated by supernova explosions in an inhomogeneous substrate, Theory of Star Formation, and Radioactive feedback processes and implications for the initial mass function. Prof. Christopher McKee is emeritus professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on how stars form out of the diffuse interstellar medium of galaxies.

Social networks, Influencers, On the origins of a good society, Artificial Intelligence in hybrid systems, and managing pandemics. Prof. Nicholas Christakis is professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. He directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale. His current research is focused on the social, mathematical, and biological rules governing how social networks form (“connection”), and (2) the social and biological implications of how they operate to influence thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (“contagion”).

The Great American Gun War: Notes from Four Decades in the Trenches, Understanding Gun Violence: Public Health v/s Public Policy, and Thinking about gun violence. Prof. Philip Cook is Professor of Public Policy, Economics and Sociology at Duke University. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He is also co-director of the NBER Work Group on the Economics of Crime, and co-editor of a NBER volume on crime prevention.

Do Youth Employment Programs Work? Evidence from the New Deal, The association between educational attainment and longevity using individual-level data from the 1940 census, The Incentive Effects of Cash Transfers to the Poor, and A Unified Model of Cohort Mortality for Economic Analysis Prof. Adriana Lleras-Muney is a Professor of Economics at UCLA. Her research examines the relationships between socio-economic status and health, with a particular focus on education and income. Her most recent work investigates the long term impact of government policies on children by analyzing the effects of programs like the Mother’s Pension program and the Civilian Conservation Corps, implemented during the first half of the 20th century.

Outline of an Account of Experience, Conscious Experience: A Logical Inquiry, Experience and Its Rational Significance, and Principles and the Generalization Function of Truth Prof. Anil Gupta is Professor of Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and a Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also editor of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

Reducing Crime and Violence: Experimental Evidence from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in Liberia, The Long-Term Impacts of Grants on Poverty: Nine-Year Evidence from Uganda’s Youth Opportunities Program, and Gang rule: Understanding and Countering Criminal Governance Prof. Chris Blattman is an economist and political scientist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

Modulation of early sensory processing in human auditory cortex,  Inhibitory Control in Children with ADHD, The neural bases of momentary lapses in attention, Timing and Sequence of Brain Activity in Top-Down Control of Visual-Spatial Attention,  and A key role for stimulus-specific updating of the sensory cortices in the learning of stimulus–reward associations. Prof. Marty Woldorff is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University. His research focuses on advancing our understanding of the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying human attentional processes and their effects on other cognitive functions.

Networks of military alliances, wars, and international trade, The Friendship Paradox and Systematic Biases in Perceptions and Social Norms,  Using Gossips to Spread Information: Theory and Evidence from Two Randomized Controlled Trials, and The Role of Referrals in Immobility, Inequality, and Inefficiency in Labor Markets Prof. Matthew Jackson is Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an external faculty member of the Santa Fe Institute, and is president of the Game Theory Society. Prof. Jackson's research interests include game theory and the study of social and economic networks, on which he has published many articles and the books `The Human Network' and `Social and Economic Networks'.

Pathophysiology and correction of amblyopia, The synaptic substrates of visual recognition memory, and pathophysiology and correction of fragile X syndrome and other causes of autism Prof. Mark Bear is a Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His laboratory is interested in how the brain is modified by experience. He uses a variety of methods to examine the synaptic modifications that form the neurobiological basis of learning and memory.

Motivation, Perception, and Chance Converge to Make a Binary Decision, Recurrent Circuitry Sustains Drosophila Courtship Drive While Priming Itself for Satiety,, Measures the Passage of Time to Coordinate Behavior and Motivational State, and Sleep Loss Can Cause Death through Accumulation of Reactive Oxygen Species in the Gut Prof. Dragana Rogulja is an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. Her interests include sleep, circadian rhythms, and motivation.

Problem of Polarization, and Semantic Descent: More Trouble for Civility Prof. Robert Talisse is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Graduate Studies at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in contemporary political philosophy, with particular interest in democratic theory and political epistemology. His current research is focused on democracy, polarization, public ignorance, and egalitarianism.

In vivo quantification of excitation and kilohertz frequency block of the rat vagus nerve, stimulation of the sensory pudendal nerve increases bladder capacity in the rat, and evoked potentials reveal neural circuits engaged by human deep brain stimulation Prof. Warren Grill is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. His research interests are in neural engineering and neuromodulation and include design and testing of electrodes and stimulation techniques, the electrical properties of tissues and cells, and computational neuroscience.

The evolution, effects and relationships of microbes with other biological systems such as Amoeba, Termites/Pests and humans. Dr. Fredrik  Inglis is an assistant professor at the University of Missouri – St. Louis. He studies the evolution of microbial interactions. Dr. Sussane DiSalvo is an assistant professor at the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville. Her research interests center on host-microbe interactions that span the symbiotic spectrum. Dr. Brittany Peterson is an assistant professor at the Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville.  She is interested in understanding the physiological mechanisms governing, modulating, and perpetuating symbiotic interactions and how these mechanisms lead to adaptive traits in the host organisms.

Welfare across Countries and Time, The misallocation of talent and US economic growth, Race and Economic Well-Being in the United States, and Trading Off Consumption and COVID-19 Deaths. Prof Pete Klenow is professor of Economic Policy, School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University. He is also Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

Transient Striatal γ Local Field Potentials Signal Movement Initiation in Rats, Structural and electronic properties of dual plasma codeposited mixed-phase amorphous/nanocrystalline thin films, and Proton radiation-induced enhancement of the dark conductivity in composites. Prof. James Kakalios is Professor, School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota. His current research ranges from the Nano to the Neuro, with active studies of the optical and electronic properties of materials to investigations of voltage fluctuations in the brain.

Capital-skill complementarity and inequality, Are Phillips Curves Useful for Forecasting Inflation?, New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression, Long-term changes in labor supply and taxes, and Tarnishing the Golden and Empire States: Land-Use Restrictions and the U.S. Economic Slowdown Prof. Lee Ohanian is Professor of Economics, and Director of the Macroeconomic Research program at UCLA. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Associate Director of the Center for the Advanced Study in Economic Efficiency at Arizona State University. He is an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and previously has advised other Federal Reserve Banks, Foreign Central Banks, and the National Science Foundation.

THE Declarative/Procedural Model: A Neurobiologically Motivated Theory of First and Second Language, Child first language and adult second language are both tied to general-purpose learning systems, and the Neurocognition of Developmental Disorders of Language Prof. Michael Ullman is Professor of Neuroscience, with secondary appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Neurology at Georgetown University. He is Director of the Brain and Language Lab, and Director of the Georgetown EEG/ERP Laboratory. The Brain and Language Lab aims to elucidate how language is learned, represented, and processed in the mind and brain.

Exploring the dark genome: implications for precision medicine, Virtual and In Vitro Antiviral Screening Revive Therapeutic Drugs for COVID-19, Artificial intelligence, drug repurposing and peer review, mining the human proteome for disease biology, drug discovery and repositioning Prof. Tudor Oprea is Professor of Medicine, Pharmaceutical Sciences and Chemistry and Chemical Biology; and Division Chief, Translational Informatics, at the University of New Mexico. His current research is in the development of validated artificial intelligence models for target selection in drug discovery, by combining numerical and text-mined information to model human health via knowledge graphs.

An Experimental Comparison of Carbon Pricing Under Uncertainty in Electricity Markets, Emissions Uncertainty and Environmental Market, Wholesale Market Design, and Transmission Planning Prof. Frank Wolak is Professor of Commodity Price Studies in the Economics Department, Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development and Co-Director of the Natural Gas Initiative at Stanford University. Prof. Wolak has worked on the design and regulatory oversight of the electricity markets internationally throughout Europe, Australia/Asia, Latin America, and Africa. He was also a member of the Emissions Market Advisory Committee (EMAC) that advised the California Air Resources Board on the design and monitoring of the state's cap-and-trade market for Greenhouse Gas Emissions.

Why Libet’s studies don’t pose a threat to free will,  Agency and intervention, Neurotechnologies for Mind Reading, and Neuroethics Prof. Adina Roskies who is Professor of Philosophy and chair of the Cognitive Science Program, and an affiliate of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. Dr. Roskies’ research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy and neuroscience, and include philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and ethics. She has coauthored a book with Stephen Morse, A Primer on Criminal Law and Neuroscience.

Standard model and supersymmetry of particle physics, experiments at the Large Hadron Collider and novel uses of machine learning in experimental Physics. Prof. Manfred Paulini is a Professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University and a member of the CMS experiment operating at the Large Hadron Collider (the LHC) at CERN. He is looking for the production of dark matter particle in collision events at the LHC. In recent years he has started to explore novel machine learning and AI based approaches for event classification in particle physics, where he is interested to use ML to go beyond the classic data analysis approaches that have been used in particle physics for many years.

Intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and learning: animals, humans and education systems, neuroscience basis of curiosity and learning, reward uncertainty and information transmission in the brain. Prof. Jacqueline Gottlieb is Professor of Neuroscience and the founder and director of the Research Cluster on Curiosity at Columbia University. Dr. Gottlieb studies the neural mechanisms of attention and their relationship with information processing, including learning, decision making, and curiosity.

Direct Measurement of the Cosmic Acceleration, The Hubble expansion is isotropic in the epoch of dark energy, How to Detect Inclined Water Maser Disks and Measure Black Hole Masses, Extragalactic Proper Motions: Gravitational Waves and Cosmology, and New Limits on Axionic Dark Matter from the Magnetar. Prof. Jeremy Darling is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He studies black holes, galaxy evolution, and cosmology. Mostly using telescopes, but sometimes just by thinking.

Predator community composition is linked to soil carbon retention across a human land use gradient, and Animals and the zoogeochemistry of the carbon cycle Prof. Oswald Schmitz, Professor of Population and Community Ecology in the Yale University School of Environment. His research aims to make sense of nature’s complexity that comes from interdependencies among the variety of carnivore, herbivore, and plant species that coexist within ecosystems. These insights help to inform environmental stewardship to enhance the conservation of wildlife species and ensure the sustainability of ecosystems, their functions, and the services that they provide to humankind. He teaches courses on the role of humans in nature and how humans can develop the means to coexist harmoniously with nature. His book “The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene” encapsulates much of his thinking about humans and nature, making ecological science accessible to a broader readership.

Artemis - A whole new program to travel to the moon and to establish a habitat there including an observatory, gateway that orbits with self propulsion and designing a launch pad for future exploration of the solar system including Mars. Prof. Jack Burns is a Professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is also Vice President Emeritus for Academic Affairs and Research for the CU System. Prof. Burns has 345 publications in refereed journals, books, and in conference proceedings and abstracts (as listed in NASA’s Astrophysics Data System). His research has been featured in articles and on the covers of Scientific American, Nature, and Science. His teaching and research focus on extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, supercomputer numerical simulations, astrophysics from the Moon, and public policy issues in higher education and science. Burns is director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR), a $6.5 million center recently awarded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute. Burns is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Linking Social and Personal Preferences, and Asset Markets with Asymmetric Reasoning. Prof. William Zame is Professor of Economics and Mathematics at UCLA. His recent research includes work on the impact of culture on economic outcomes in diverse societies, informational asymmetries in macroeconomics, experimental financial markets, and a number of topics in machine learning. He is currently Co-Editor of Economic Theory and Associate Editor of Theoretical Economics.

The cosmological legacy of Planck, design, data, results and insights, Calibration of ALMA Using Planck Observations, and Can CMB Surveys Help the AGN Community? Prof. Bruce Partridge is an emeritus professor of Astronomy at Haverford college. He has served as Education Officer of the American Astronomical Society; president of Commission on Cosmology, International Astronomical Union; and President, Astronomical Society of the Pacific. His research interests include cosmology, galaxy formation, the cosmic microwave background and radio astronomy.

Vitamin A: its many roles—from vision and synaptic plasticity to infant mortality Prof. John Dowling is Research Professor of Neurosciences at Harvard. His interests include the wiring, physiology, pharmacology and genetics of the retina, as well as the effects of vitamin A and photoreceptors on vision.

Extended halo of metal-poor stars in Andromeda, Dwarf galaxies, Star migration, Surface brightness fluctuations and understanding dark matter by studying satellite galaxies. Prof. Raja GuhaThakurta is a Professor and Department Chair of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research focuses on galaxies: their dark matter content, cannibalism history, and chemical enrichment as revealed by spectroscopy of their resolved stellar populations. He uses the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck telescope for his research.

Exoplanets: the history, exploration techniques and demographics. Habitable and free floating planets, and is there anybody out there? Prof. Scott Gaudi is a Professor of Astronomy at Ohio State University. His research focuses on developing and applying ways of searching for planets around other stars, and he has been involved with the discovery of nearly two dozen extrasolar planets to date.

Making lasting memories: Remembering the significant, Consolidating Memories, and Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory Prof. James McGaugh is Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at University of California, Irvine. He is also fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory

Gravitational Waves, Black hole mergers, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) and upcoming space based LISA project. Prof Daniel Holz is a professor of Physics, Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, the Enrico Fermi Institute, and the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics. His research focuses on general relativity in the context of astrophysics and cosmology. He is a member of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) collaboration, and was part of the team that announced the first detection of gravitational waves in early 2016 and the first multi-messenger detection of a binary neutron star in 2017.

Liking, Wanting, and the Incentive-Sensitization Theory of Addiction,  A Liking Versus Wanting Perspective on Emotion and the Brain, and The central amygdala recruits mesocorticolimbic circuitry for pursuit of reward or pain Prof. Kent Berridge is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan.  His research aims for answers to questions such as:   What causes addiction?  How are pleasure and desire generated in the brain?    And how does fear relate to desire in the brain?

Reducing black holes into a fundamental particle, An Effective Field Theory of Quantum Mechanical Black Hole Horizons, Virtual Hawking Radiation, Gravity waves, and LIGO Prof. Ira Rothstein is a professor of Physics at Carnegie Mellon University. He is interested in diverse topics in elementary particle physics, gravity wave physics, astrophysics/cosmology, and QCD. In the realm of high energy physics, he uses the data from the LHC to explain the origin of mass and the nature of dark matter.

21st Century Literacy for Succeeding in College and Beyond, Teaching the Nature of Science using Pseudoscience, The accountability of and on the social media. Prof. Doug Duncan is an emeritus faculty member in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences of the University of Colorado, and former Director of Fiske Planetarium, Before that he was a Carnegie Fellow; on the staff of the Hubble Space Telescope; and held a joint appointment between the Adler Planetarium and the University of Chicago.

Habitable Zones, Remote life-detection criteria, habitable zone boundaries, and the frequency of Earth-like planets around M and late K stars, and  Abiotic Oxygen Levels on Planets: Possible False Positive For Life? Prof. James Kasting is a Professor at Penn State University, where he holds joint appointments in the Departments of Geosciences and in Meteorology and Atmospheric Science. His research focuses on the evolution of planetary atmospheres and climates and on the question of whether life might exist on planets around other stars. In 2018, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. His book, How to Find a Habitable Planet (Princeton University Press), was published in 2010.

The Occurrence and Architecture of Exoplanetary Systems, Doppler and Transit Surveys, Kepler-78, Ultra-Short-Period Planets, and hot Jupiters Dr. Josh Winn is a physicist and astronomer at Princeton University.  His research goals are to explore the properties of planets around other stars, understand how planets form and evolve, and make progress on the age-old question of whether there are other planets capable of supporting life.  His group uses optical telescopes to study exoplanetary systems, especially those in which the star and planet eclipse one another.

The complex development of the human brain, Interneuron Types as Attractors and Controllers, Developmental diversification of cortical inhibitory interneurons, and A viral strategy for targeting and manipulating interneurons across vertebrate species Prof. Gordon Fishell is a professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the Stanley Center at the Broad Institute.  He is a developmental neurobiologist interested in how the architecture of brain circuits are assembled, with a special focus on the diverse populations of inhibitory interneurons.

Red giant masses and ages derived from carbon and nitrogen abundances, Spectroscopic determination of masses for red giants, Young alpha-enriched giant stars in the solar neighborhood, and Dynamical heating across the Milky Way disc. Prof. Marc Pinsonneault is a theorist on the structure and evolution of stars at Ohio State University. His research interests range from the microphysics of stellar models, including composition, energy, and angular momentum transport mechanisms, to the observed properties of stars. An element of his current research is the use of astroseismological data from the Kepler space mission, in combination with APOGEE and other spectroscopic surveys, to obtain novel constraints on stellar physics, stellar populations, and the chemical evolution of the Milky Way.

The world is running out of energy in 100 years, Large-Scale Computation using Astronomical Resources, and the future of Artificial Intelligence. Prof. Gregory Laughlin is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Yale University. He is interested in hydrodynamic simulations, the characterization of extrasolar planets, and planet-forming environments as well as the far future of the universe. He has done research on a variety of topics, including star formation, extrasolar planets, and interstellar objects. With Fred Adams, he is the author of The Five Ages of the Universe

The New Horizons Mission to Pluto, the Juno Mission to Jupiter: What have we learned and what's in store? Prof. Fran Bagenal is a Professor of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder and a researcher in the fields of space plasmas and planetary magnetospheres. Her career spans involvement in the exploration of the outer solar system with NASA’s Voyager, Galileo, New Horizons, and Juno missions.

Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life’s early emergence on Earth,  A Possible Spectroscopic Biosignature of Extraterrestrial Plants, and Characterization of extrasolar terrestrial planets from diurnal photometric variability Prof. Edwin Turner is a Professor of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He also serves as Co-Chair of the NAOJ-Princeton Astrophysics Collaboration Council (N-PACC). He has carried out extensive astronomical observations at Mt. Palomar Observatory, Kitt Peak National Observatory, NRAO's Very Large Array, Apache Point Observatory, the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan’s Subaru Telescope, and with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence,  definitions, origin, progress, problems, and the future. Dr. Chris Bleakley is an Associate Professor and Head of the School of Computer Science at University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland. Chris leads a research group focused on inventing novel algorithms for analyzing real-world sensor data. His latest book ‘Poems that Solve Puzzles: The History and Science of Algorithms tell the story of how algorithms came to revolutionize our modern computerized world.

Qatar, a great field experiment in understanding factors affecting COVID incidence rates, mortality, herd immunity, testing, reinfection, and vaccination and forming policies for the future. Laith Abu-Raddad is a Professor of Population Health Sciences at Cornell University in Qatar. He is also the director of the WHO Collaborating Center for Disease Analytics on HIV, Sexually Transmitted Infections, and Viral Hepatitis. Previously he held academic and research positions at the University of Washington, Imperial College London, and Osaka University.

Phage Therapy: A Renewed Approach to Combat Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria, Prisoner's dilemma in an RNA virus, Virus population extinction via ecological traps, and Dynamics of molecular evolution in RNA virus populations depend on sudden versus gradual environmental change Prof. Paul Turner is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and a Microbiology faculty member at Yale School of Medicine. He studies evolutionary genetics of viruses, particularly phages that infect bacterial pathogens, and RNA viruses transmitted by arthropods. Paul’s honors include Fellowship in the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and American Academy of Microbiology.

Love, Money, and Parenting: How economics can help explain how we raise our kids today, Women's Employment in a Pandemic Recession, and Why has the college wage premium risen rapidly in the US, but not in European economies such as Germany? Prof. Matthias Doepke is a Research Professor in the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. His research spans many areas including parenting, inequality, and their economic effects on society.

The history, puzzles, and miracles of Quantum Mechanics Prof. Michel Janssen is a Professor, Program in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine & School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Minnesota. Books on the subject are below: Anthony Duncan and Michel Janssen, Constructing Quantum Mechanics. Vol. 1. The Scaffold, 1900–1923. Vol. 2. The Arch, 1923–1927. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vol. 1 (2019), Vol. 2 (expected Fall 2022).    Michael Janas, Michael E. Cuffaro and Michel Janssen, Understanding Quantum Raffles. Quantum Mechanics on an Information-Theoretic Approach: Structure and Interpretation. Berlin: Springer (expected Spring 2021). Jeffrey Bub, Bananaworld. Quantum Mechanics for Primates. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 (slightly revised paperback edition: 2018). Tanya Bub and Jeffrey Bub, Totally Random. Why Nobody Understands Quantum Mechanics. A Serious Comic on Entanglement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.

In silico experiments of cytokine-directed clinical trials using agent-based modeling, Examining sepsis using genetic algorithms on an agent-based model, The Crisis of Reproducibility, and the Scientific Role of Multi-scale Modeling Prof. Gary An is a Professor of Surgery and Vice-Chair of Surgical Research at the University of Vermont. He specializes in trauma and surgical critical care. His research interests include computational biology, mathematical modeling, and computer simulation, and translational systems biology.

Strategic Plan for U.S. Particle Physics in the Global Context, Dark Energy Survey, Cosmological Constraints from Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing Prof. Scott Dodelson is a professor of Physics at Carnegie Melon University. He serves as co-chair of the Science Committee for the Dark Energy Survey and is actively involved in the LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration, and work with data from the South Pole Telescope.

Reconceptualizing the Role of Security User,  Community-based production and management, and Macroeconomic Analysis of Routing Anomalies Prof. Jean Camp is a Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. She is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Her research goal is the security that people need, the privacy they want, in systems they can trust.

The Science of Human Individuality, redefining Nature and Nurture, It Runs in the Family, Twin Experiments and traits, The impact of Experience, Memory, and Sex. Prof. David Linden is a Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. His laboratory has worked for many years on the cellular basis of memory storage, recovery of function after brain injury, and a few other topics. He is the author of four bestselling books on the biology of behavior for a general audience. His most recent book is Unique: The Science of Human Individuality.

Life-history evolution, The transition to modernity and chronic disease: mismatch and natural selection, and Molecular Evolutionary Medicine Prof. Stephen Stearns is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. Prof. Stearns specializes in life-history evolution, which links the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, and in evolutionary medicine.

Galactic Settlement and the Fermi Paradox,  Planck Frequencies as Schelling Points in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the practicality and implications of Dyson Spheres. Prof. Jason Wright is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, a member of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds, and director of the Penn State Extraterrestrial Intelligence Center. He works on a variety of problems related to stars, their planets, and life in the universe. His work in SETI includes searches for signs of the extraterrestrial industry via waste heat (e.g. Dyson Spheres). He is also a member of the Habitable Zone Planet Finder team.

Measuring Consumer Preferences for Video Content, The Impact of Mergers on Quality, How Much is Privacy Worth Around the World and Across Platforms?, The persistence of broadband user behavior, Mobile Attention, and the upcoming wave of antitrust investigations. Prof. Jeff Prince is a Professor and Chair of Business Economics and Public Policy at Indiana University. He is also the Chair of Strategic Management and Co-Director of the Institute for Business Analytics. He recently served as Chief Economist at the Federal Communications Commission.

What drives militant politics? Studies from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Western Africa, A case study in Kerala, the enigmatic Southern state of India, and the similarities between Pakistan, India, and the United States in scriptural literalism in religion and politics. Prof. Carol Christine Fair is a Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. Her work is primarily focused on counter-terrorism and South Asian topics. She was a political officer with the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan and a senior research associate at USIP's Center for Conflict Analysis and Prevention. She has served as a Senior Fellow at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center and a Senior Resident Fellow at the Institute of Defense Studies and Analysis. VOTE. MAKE OUR DEMOCRACY BETTER.

Cosmological parameters from SDSS and WMAP,  The construction and operation of the brand new Vera C. Rubin observatory, and Quasars Prof. Michael Strauss is the chair of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. He uses large-scale imaging and spectroscopic surveys of the sky to “map the universe”, with a particular focus on studying the large-scale distribution of galaxies to address questions in cosmology and galaxy properties and evolution. He is also particularly interested in quasars, powered by supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies.

Targeting small molecules with novel transport mechanisms in Cancer and Myocardial Infarction, Growing metal-organic nanotubes, and Selenomelanin for radiation protection. Prof. Nathan Gianneschi is a Professor of Chemistry, Materials Science & Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, and Pharmacology at Northwestern University. He is the Associate Director of the International Institute for Nanotechnology at Northwestern. His research spans biomedical translational polymeric materials, mimicking biological materials, and advancing basic research in nanotechnology.

Links of Spatial Thinking to Achievement in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics?,  Using a discipline-focused lens to examine spatial thinking skills, and the Development of Children’s Gender-Science Stereotypes. Prof. David Uttal is a Professor of Education and of Psychology at Northwestern University.  His research focuses on STEM education, with a particular emphasis on the role of spatial thinking in STEM outcomes.  He directs the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center at Northwestern.

The demographics, formation, migration, and behavior of black holes, what's at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, and the Nobel prizes for Physics 2020. Prof. Jenny Greene is a Professor of Astrophysics at Princeton University. Her broad research interests include measurements of black hole masses, the connection between supermassive black holes and galaxies, stellar and gas kinematics of galactic nuclei, and diffused light in galaxy clusters. She serves on the Leadership Committee of the Prison Teaching Initiative at Princeton University.

Fluency and perceptions of decision making, Numerosity and allocation behavior, and the impact of number roundedness on framing Dr. Gaurav Jain is an assistant professor of marketing at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research examines how individuals make judgments, estimates, and decisions in the absence of complete information.

History of democracy, elections, and outcomes. Impact of social media, and what we could expect in upcoming US elections. Dr. Heidi Tworek, Associate Professor in International History and Public Policy, University of British Columbia and Senior Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation, and Dr. Dipayan Ghosh Co-Director of the Digital Platforms and Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School

Cosmic Microwave Background, The Atacama Cosmology Telescope,  The CCAT-Prime Submillimeter Observatory, and The Simons Observatory Dr. Michael Niemack is an Associate Professor of Astronomy and Physics at Cornell University. His research interests include Cosmology, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, neutrinos, galaxy clusters, and galaxy evolution using cosmic microwave background (CMB) and sub-mm measurements.

The evolution of the universe, expansion, accelerated expansion, the use, and misuse of the cosmological constant, dark energy, dark matter, the dark energy survey, and what could be in store for cosmology in the coming years. Prof. Josh Frieman is Head of the Particle Physics Division at Fermilab, a Department of Energy national laboratory near Chicago that carries out fundamental research in high-energy physics. He is also Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago and is currently President of the Aspen Center for Physics. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, a Fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Economic Rewards to Motivate Blood Donations, Rewarding Volunteers: A Field Experiment, and Societal support for monetary compensation for plasma and kidney donors. Prof. Mario Macis is a professor of economics at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests include how economic incentives interact with psychological factors and social norms to drive individual behavior and policy-relevant outcomes. In particular, he studies the role of incentives in shaping pro-social behavior and attitudes toward morally controversial exchanges. Recently, these two lines of work converged into a research agenda aimed at understanding what determines social support for market-based solutions to social problems.

How Machine Learning and Blockchain are Redesigning the Landscape of Professional Knowledge and Organisation, and Globalisation, Law, and Lawyers in a Time of Crisis Prof. John Flood is a Professor of Law and Society at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. He is also an adjunct professor of law at the Queensland University of Technology and a research associate at the University College London Centre for Blockchain Technologies. He researches the legal profession, globalization of law, and the role of technology in law.

Heterogeneity introduced by EHR system implementation in a de-identified data resource from 100 non-affiliated organizations and Rates and Predictors of Using Opioids in the Emergency Department to Treat Migraine in Adolescents and Young Adults Dr. Mark Hoffman is a research associate professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He is also Chief Research Information Officer in the Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. His research interests include health data de-identification, sharing, and visualization.

Does Crowdfunding Benefit Entrepreneurs and Venture Capital Investors?,  Promoting Solar Panel Investments: Feed-in-Tariff vs. Tax-Rebate, R&D Investments in the Presence of Knowledge Spillover and Debt Financing: Can Risk Shifting Cure Free Riding? Prof. Volodymyr Babich is a Professor of Operations and Information Management at Georgetown University. Prof. Babich’s research interests are the interface of operations and finance, supply risk management, supply chain management, stochastic modeling, and risk management. He serves as an associate editor for Management Science, M&SOM, and Naval Research Logistics, and as a senior editor for Production and Operations Management journals.

The electric grid: infrastructure, risk management, security, and upgrading, optimization of scheduling, storage, pricing and production flexibility, co-optimization of electric bus transportation, storage, and water distribution systems. Dr. Masood Parvania is an Associate Professor and Associate Chair for Research and Advancement at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Utah. His research interests are on the applications of mathematical optimization methods, calculus of variations, and scientific computing to the operation and planning of interdependent critical infrastructure, cyber-physical power, and energy systems, and modeling and integration of distributed renewable energy resources.

The early evolution of the universe, leptogenesis, baryogenesis, and nucleosynthesis in the big bang and particle physics mysteries Prof. Keith Olive is a theoretical physicist, and director at the William I Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, specializing in particle physics and cosmology. His main topics of research are big bang nucleosynthesis, particle dark matter; big bang baryogenesis, and inflation.

Adversarial Models for Opponent Intent Inferencing, Intelligence Analyses, and the Insider Threat,  and Discriminating deception from truth and misinformation: an intent-level approach Prof. Eugene Santos who is a  Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College. Dr. Santos’ work on artificial intelligence intersections with the areas of information, cognition, human factors, and mathematics. His current focus is on computational intent, dynamic human behavior, and decision-making with an emphasis on learning nonlinear and emergent behaviors and explainable AI. Dr. Santos has applied his work with the goal of a better understanding of how we, both as individuals and our society, can best leverage knowledge through AI to improve our world for social good. He is a Fellow of the AAAS and IEEE.

A brief history of the universe and its possible death scenarios, WMAP, ACT, and WFIRST projects, inflation, dark energy, dark matter, and alternative theories, and artificial intelligence to aid cosmology and astrophysics. Prof. David Spergel is the director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics at Flatiron Institute and Emeritus Professor Princeton University. His research interests range from the search for planets around nearby stars to the shape of the universe. Using microwave background observations from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and the Atacama Cosmology Telescope, he has measured the age, shape, and composition of the universe. He is currently co-chair of the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) science team. WFIRST will study the nature of dark energy, complete the demographic survey of exoplanets, characterize the atmospheres of nearby planets and survey the universe with more than 100 times the field of view of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Evolution, Ideology, and Human Nature, New Evidence about Human Nature, Biocultural Synthesis, Domination Systems, and Partnership Systems, Four cornerstones of change: Childhood Relations, Gender Relations, Economic Relations, and Narratives. Prof. Riane Eisler who is a systems scientist and cultural historian whose research focuses on how to construct a more equitable and less violent world based on partnership rather than domination. She is president of the Center for Partnership Studies (CPS), and Editor in Chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies, She has written many books applying her research to evolution, religion, education, sexuality, economics, and politics, including Nurturing Our Humanity

Frontiers of Materials Research, Metals, Glasses, and Quantum Materials, Simulation and Computational Tools, and AI in Materials Research Prof. Nadya Mason is a professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she specializes in experimental studies of materials. Prof. Mason’s research focuses on the electronic properties of small-scale materials, such as nano-scale wires and atomically thin membranes. Her research is relevant to applications involving nano-scale and quantum computing elements. She currently serves as Director of the Illinois Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (I-MRSEC), a multidisciplinary research and education center funded by the National Science Foundation.

Economic Diversity and the Resource Curse, Gravity, Borders, and Regionalism, and Globalization, Income Disparity, and Inclusive Development Dr. Fred Olayele is the Chief Economist and Head of the Economic Research & Policy Group with New York City Economic Development Corporation. He oversees economic research and policy initiatives aimed at making New York City the global model for inclusive growth and innovation. He is also a Research Professor at the Sprott School of Business, Carleton University, Canada.

Effects of food, sleep and the microbiome on Alzheimer’s Disease, Parkinson’s Disease and other neurodegenerative diseases Prof. Giulio Pasinetti is a Professor of Neurology, Neuroscience, and Geriatrics at the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (ISMMS). He also serves as the Director of Basic and Biomedical Research in the Center for Geriatric Research and Training at the Bronx Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He is also the Director of the Center for Molecular Integrative Neuroresilience at Mount Sinai.

Suspense and Surprise: How to write novels and enjoy sports/politics, Why torture or money for information schemes are not advisable, Rotation to mitigate epidemics, Allocating tests in a pandemic, and a cake-cutting solution to gerrymandering. Prof. Jeff Ely is the director of the mathematical methods in Social Sciences at Northwestern University. He is a microeconomic theorist with interests ranging from pure game theory to applied microeconomics to behavioral and experimental economics. His work includes contributions to the foundations of Game Theory under incomplete information, repeated games, and the evolution of preferences. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. He was a founding co-editor of the open-access journal Theoretical Economics.

Optimal Commissions and Subscriptions in Networked Markets, Dynamic Learning and Market Making in Spread Betting, Credit Shock Propagation in Supply Chains, and the Impact of COVID-19 on Supply Chain Credit Risk Prof. John Birge is a Professor of Operations Management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His work focuses on application, theory, and computation for decision making under uncertainty with applications in the management of operations in finance, energy, health care, manufacturing, public policy, and transportation. He is an INFORMS Fellow, MSOM Society Distinguished Fellow, member of the US National Academy of Engineering, and Editor-in-Chief of Operations Research.

Forward-Looking Behavior: The Case of Consumer Stockpiling, Late-Mover Advantages: The Case of Statins, the Zero-price Effect, The Value of Perfect Information, Consumer assessment of Quality of products? Evidence from the diaper market Prof. Andrew Ching is a professor at the Carey Business School at Johns Hopkins University, where he is cross-appointed to the Department of Economics and the Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is currently serving as an Associate Editor for Management Science, and a member of editorial boards for Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research. His research focuses on developing new empirical structural models and estimation methods to understand the forward-looking, strategic, learning, and bounded rational behavior of consumers and firms.

Disparities in Breast Cancer and African Ancestry, Mammographic screening from age 40 years, Disparities in Breast Cancer Surgery Delay, Prophylactic mastectomy in BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 patients. Dr. Deepa HalaHarvi is a breast cancer surgeon at Ohio Health and a breast cancer survivor. She is also an associate program director for the breast surgery fellowship at Grant Medical center. She has started a survivorship series of lectures at Ohio Health for cancer survivors.

Investor Response to Extreme Language in Earnings Conference Calls, Business Cycle and Industry Returns, Pension Overhang and Corporate Investment, Impact of E-Commerce on Employees at Brick-and-Mortar Retailers, and Investment Consultants’ Search Behavior Prof. Sudheer Chava is a Professor of Finance at Scheller College of Business at Georgia Institute of Technology and leads the Financial Services Innovation Lab. Sudheer’s research interests are in Credit Risk, Banking, FinTech, Household Finance, Empirical Asset Pricing, and Corporate Finance.

The history and status of Human Language Technologies, Automatic Classification of Primary Progressive Aphasia Patients Using Lexical and Acoustic Features, and speech characteristics of young and older healthy adults Prof. Mark Liberman is a Professor of Linguistics and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His many research interests include phonetics, information extraction, language evolution, and speech.  He is the founder and director of the Linguistic Data Consortium

The Political Logic of Economic Backwardness in North Korea,  China’s New Role of Assertiveness in the 21st Century International System, and Chinese High-Tech in the Crosshairs of Geopolitics Prof. Francis Schortgen is a Professor of Political Science & International Affairs and Business at the University of Mount Union. Prior to going into academia, he worked in the business consulting industry in Seoul, South Korea.

Non-profit society: Utopia or necessity, Changes in the collective consciousness, Monetary Reform, Money as a medium of exchange, and Strengthening social security Prof. Sašo Tomažič is a professor of Electrical Engineering and the head of the Laboratory of Information Technology at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has authored or co-authored more than two hundred scientific papers in the field of ICT and signal processing. However, since 2006, when he predicted in his lectures at several conferences the crisis that occurred two years later, he has been engaged in research on the causes of economic crises and the measures that would be necessary to prevent them in the future.

COVID and long term negative effects on the heart, POTS, Takotsubo Syndrome, Chronic Myocarditis, and other Myocardial injuries, and the need to prevent disease by individual actions to reduce long term disease burden. Prof. Michael Miller is a Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.  He has authored numerous scientific papers in cardiovascular disease with a primary focus on prevention. His most recent book is “Heal Your Heart”.

Are social media and search companies natural monopolies?, Increasing competition on the Internet, Machine bias in the commercialization of decision-making,  Digital deceit, and precision propaganda, and Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design. Dr. Dipayan Ghosh who is co-director of the Digital Platforms & Democracy Project at the Harvard Kennedy School and faculty at Harvard Law School. He is the author of Terms of Disservice: How Silicon Valley is Destructive by Design He previously led strategic efforts on privacy at Facebook and served as an economic advisor in the White House during the Obama administration.

Attitudes, Aptitudes, and the Roots of the Great Enrichment: How Attitudes (cultural beliefs) and aptitudes (technical competence) played central roles in the British Industrial Revolution and the origins of modern growth Prof Joel Mokyr is a Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University and a Professor of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He specializes in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change. His most recent book is A Culture of Growth. He has authored over 100 articles and books in his field.

The Tesserae Project: Large-Scale, Longitudinal, In Situ, Multimodal Sensing of Information Workers, Face-to-Face Proximity Estimation Using Bluetooth On Smartphones, and the Interplay Between Individuals’ Evolving Interaction Patterns and Traits in Dynamic Multiplex Social Networks. Prof. Aaron Striegel is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Notre Dame. Prof. Striegel’s research interests focus on instrumenting the wireless networked ecosystem to gain insight with respect to user behavior and optimizing network performance. Flagship projects of Prof. Striegel include the NetSense, NetHealth, and the Tesserae project involving the instrumentation and analysis of data from hundreds of smartphones and wearables over a nearly seven-year period of continuous data streaming.

Bridging the Covid-19 recession, Rethinking  monetary and fiscal policy In an era Of low-Interest rates,  Monetary policy effect on refinancing  Prof. Martin Eichenbaum is a professor of economics at Northwestern University and the co-director of the Center for International Economics and Development. His research focuses on macroeconomics, international economics, and monetary theory and policy. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review.

Is Medicaid worth the cost?, Universal health coverage in China, Precision population health management, Urbanicity, and hypertension, Earned Income Tax Credit and health effects, Psychological implications of the pandemic, and Health and economic consequences of emission standards Prof. Peter Muennig is a Professor at Columbia University’s Department of Health Policy and Management. He uses Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and other methods to study the social determinants of health from a health policy perspective. His work spans broad areas of non-medical health policy, linking RCTs with cost-effectiveness analyses to determine the best mix of social policies for optimizing population health.

The cloud: to come the full circle of computing, DcNet: A Data Center Network Architecture that supports live VM migration, and towards disaggregating the Software-defined networking (SDN) Control Plane. Prof. Douglas Comer is a Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. He was the chair of DARPA's Distributed Systems Architecture Board. Prof. Comer has written a series of best-selling technical books on the Internet and Computer Networks, Operating Systems, and Computer Architecture. He is also a member of the Internet Hall of Fame.

The cost of victory in WWII, The fiction of American Century, Nixon and Brezhnev, Revisiting Roosevelt: How presidential empathy can improve politics, and Why the presidency is too big to succeed, and how it could be fixed. Prof. Jeremi Suri is the Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is a professor in the university's Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Prof. Suri is the author or editor of nine books on contemporary politics and foreign policy, most recently The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office.

Legal AI, creative informatics, and the quest for executable justice, A new approach to visualizing legal argumentation, Copyright and the law and ethics of machine co-production., Technology and the future of inheritance law. Prof. Burkhard Schafer is the chair of Computational Legal Theory at the University of Edinburgh. His main field of interest is the interaction between law, science, and computer technology from comparative and legal-theoretical perspectives. His research encompasses both the problems that technology and technological change pose to the law – technology law – and the use of technology in the justice system and the legal services industry – legal informatics.

Traffic fatality rate: Why US is the worst among developed countries, Zurich: Where people are welcome and cars are not, The broken algorithm that poisoned American transportation, and Burying past planning mistakes in American cities. Prof. Norman Garrick is a Professor of Civil Engineering at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Garrick is also a former member of the national board of The Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). He specializes in the planning and design of urban transportation systems, including transit, streets, street networks, parking, bicycle, and pedestrian facilities. Dr. Garrick is the recipient of the Transportation Research Board’s Award for Best Research Paper in policy and organization and is a Fulbright Fellow.

Impulsive choice-making,  Probability matching decisions, Structural comparisons in consumer choice, Naturalistic and Lab-based decision-making,  and Strategies for Economic Development Outside of Urban Corridors Prof. Art Markman, who is a Professor of Psychology, Human Dimensions of Organizations, and Marketing at the University of Texas at Austin and Executive Director of the IC2 Institute. He has written over 150 scholarly papers on topics including reasoning, decision making, and motivation. He is the author of several books including Smart Thinking, Smart Change, Brain Briefs, and Bring Your Brain to Work.

A Policy Index to Create a Sustainable, Shared-Prosperity Economy, and Buddhist Economics: an enlightened approach to the dismal science Prof. Clair Brown is a Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. Clair has published research on many aspects of inequality and sustainability. Her book Buddhist Economics: An enlightened approach to the dismal science provides an economic framework that integrates global sustainability, shared prosperity, and care for the human spirit. Her research team created the Sustainable, Share-Prosperity Index (SSPI). Clair is a volunteer with 350 Bay Area Action, where she co-chairs the Legislative Committee to work on passing key climate justice bills in California.

Towards a Theory of the Aesthetic Properties of Persons, Glamour as an Aesthetic Property of Persons, Objective Beauty, and  Psychoanalysis, Imagination, and Imaginative Resistance Prof. Carol Gould is a Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, where she teaches primarily Aesthetics, Philosophy of Psychiatry, and Ancient Greek Philosophy, areas in which she publishes widely. Many of her recent publications concern the relation between aesthetics, ethics, and personhood. She is currently completing a book manuscript on True Glamour,  an unexplored topic in philosophy that stands at the intersection of Aesthetics, Ethics, and Philosophy of Psychiatry.

A blueprint for change in Management Education, Turnover and Retention Research, and Better ways to predict who is going to quit. Prof. Brooks Holtom is a Professor of Management at Georgetown University. His research focuses on how organizations acquire, develop, and retain human and social capital. He received the Human Resource Management Scholarly Achievement Award. He has performed research in or served as a consultant to many organizations.

Crowdsourcing and homeland security, Top-level domain interceptor,  The difficulty of defining metrics and Arrow's theorem, and modeling and battling COVID-19 Prof. George Markowsky is a Professor and former Chair of Computer Science at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, where he runs the Cyber Society Lab. He was Chair and Professor of Computer Science at the University of Maine, a Visiting Scholar at the Rochester Institute of Technology, a Visiting Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Manager of Special Projects in the Computer Science Department at IBM's Watson Research Center. His research interests are theoretical methods in computer science and the impact of computers on society.

Whole Community Health, Pilot project by Kenan Charitable Trust in two North Carolina counties - 6 interconnected pillars of opportunity: Economic stability, Education, Healthy food, High-quality healthcare, Social integration, and safe physical environment. Prof.  Jeanne Milliken Bonds is a Professor of the Practice, Impact Investment, and Sustainable Finance at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Jeanne is a former Leader in Regional Community Development for the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond. In her previous role, she provided leadership for strategic stakeholder collaboration and community-level solutions, focusing on low- and moderate-income and underserved communities in support of the Federal Reserve System’s Community Development function.

Design Theory: A foundation of a new paradigm for design science and engineering, Shared Memory in Design: A Unifying Theme for Research and Practice, Dialogues, Diversity, and Design Prof. Eswaran Subrahmanian is a Research Professor in the Engineering Research Accelerator and the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. His research in design was inspired by the tradition of the study of Design at CMU since the early 1970s. His research interests are Design theory, Collaborative design information systems, design education,  design and society, and mathematical foundation for information modeling for design. He is the Co-chair of the Special Interest Group of Design Theory of the Design Society, Distinguished Scientist of the ACM, and Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Human and technical cyber risks, Prioritizing strategic risks, Effect-centric approach to risk in nuclear power plants, A systems approach to quantifying and managing risk in critical infrastructure. Dr. Charles Harry who is the director of operations at the Maryland Global Initiative in Cybersecurity (MaGIC), an associate research professor in the School of Public Policy, at the University of Maryland and a senior research associate at the Center for International Security Studies at Maryland. He is also part of the US Chamber of Commerce’s Cyber Advisory Panel.

The scale of the healthcare problem,  A suggestion for a bipartisan solution, Innovating in Healthcare, and the SEC for the healthcare system Prof. Regina Herzlinger is a professor at Harvard Business School. She is the first woman to be tenured and chaired at Harvard Business School and the first to serve on many corporate health care/medical technology boards. Her upcoming book, Innovating In Health Care, will be published in the fall of 2020.

The Rise and Stall of stakeholder influence: How the digital age limits social control and Designing CSR Initiatives for Greater Social Impact Prof Michael L. Barnett is Professor of Management & Global Business at Rutgers Business School and Academic Director of the Rutgers Institute for Corporate Social Innovation. Mike currently serves as an International Research Fellow of the Oxford University Centre for Corporate Reputation, Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Social Innovations Group at EGADE Business School in Mexico, Affiliate Visiting Scholar at the Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma, and Fellow of the Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers University.

Weighing the evidence from clinical trials and faulty belief systems in obesity control, errors in self-reporting of energy balance, dynamic model for predicting obesity, machine learning to predict injuries in combat training, the Vitruvian Man (Woman), and how many steps per day to stay fit. Prof. Diana Thomas is a professor of mathematical sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She holds joint research appointments at Columbia University, Obesity Research Center, and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and serves on the editorial board for the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, PloS One, and Nutrition and Diabetes. She has published over 140 peer-reviewed articles in exercise, fitness, nutrition, and body weight regulation.

Healing an injured heart, immune cells  to prevent detrimental repair caused by excessive fibrosis,  acellular bioscaffolds to promote functional tissue repair, Kryptonite Bone Cement to prevent sternal displacement, ROI for surgeon-scientists, precision surgery, and what is it like to be a cardiac surgeon Prof. Paul Fedak is a cardiac surgeon, translational scientist, and organizational leader at the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary. Dr. Fedak is committed to the innovation and translation of new surgical therapies for patients with advanced heart disease.

Artificial Intelligence with human-like reasoning, commonsense reasoning, computational creativity, conceptual representation and categorization,  integration of typicality, probability and cognitive heuristics, combinatorial and transformational intelligence and the adequacies and drawbacks of using the human brain as a model of intelligence. Dr. Antonio Lieto is a researcher in Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science at the University of Turin in Italy and a research associate at the ICAR-CNR  Institute in Palermo (Italy).  His research focuses on Knowledge Representation and Automated Reasoning, Commonsense Reasoning, Semantic and Language Technologies, Cognitive Systems, and Architectures. On these topics, he has published more than 70 papers in international conferences, journals, and books.

Origin, evolution, and transmission of viruses, the arrival of COVID vaccines and drugs, managing a pandemic - what can be done next time? Group Chat: Prof. James K. Bashkin, Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry, University of Missouri- St. Louis Dr. R. Fredrik Inglis, Assistant Professor of Biology, University of Missouri- St. Louis Dr. Jeff Smith, Post-Doctoral Fellow, University of Missouri- St. Louis

Climate change and finance, monetary authority and natural capital, the discount premium for Carbon footprint, digital currencies, and what the Fed could do to get it right? Frank Van Gansbeke is a Professor of Practice At Middlebury College. Frank has more than 30 years of global Senior Executive experience in Corporate Finance and Capital Markets. Frank contributes articles to Forbes, connecting dots in international markets, sustainable finance, and Fintech.

Nanofiber innovation for wound healing and heat resistance, Lab-grown meat,  Human pancreas, brain, and heart on a chip, and STEM-based education as a necessary tool to counteract future shocks. Prof Kit Parker is a Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Prof Parker is also the director of the multidisciplinary SEAS Disease Biophysics Group. Kit researches cardiac cell biology and tissue engineering, traumatic brain injury, and biological applications of micro- and nanotechnologies. Working in both Biomimetic Microsystems and Programmable Nanomaterials, he is involved in projects ranging from developing nano fabrics for applications in tissue regeneration to creating organs-on-chips to address diseases such as asthma, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, brain injury, and congenital heart disease. Previously, Kit served as a member of the Defense Science Research Council, an advisory activity to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), for nearly a decade. He also served on the Defense Science Board Task Force on Autonomy, reviewing the entirety of the DoD’s research portfolio on unmanned systems.  Kit is an LTC in the United States Army reserve component and has served two combat tours in Afghanistan where he was awarded the Bronze Star, the Army Commendation Medal with V device, and the Combat Infantryman’s Badge.

Novel mechanisms in Neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's,  Lipid abnormalities, Cytokine storm, and inflammation, Spanish Flu and COVID similarities, and possible long term effects. Prof. Ole Isacson works on basic and clinical research to prevent and treat Parkinson's disease and related neurological and age disorders. He is the founding Director of the Neuroregeneration Research Institute at McLean Hospital, Professor of Neurology (Neuroscience) at Harvard Medical School, Professor of Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital, and was elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is the author or co-author of over 300 scientific research publications in neuroscience and neurology and three books in his field.

Supplier diversity and Carbon footprint, Customer learning in Call centers, Net-metering and utility profits, Blockchain to prevent counterfeiting, and strategic effects of COVID shock on global supply chains. Prof. Jay Swaminathan is the Professor of Operations and Faculty Director of the ReThinc Value Chains Lab at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a Distinguished Fellow of The Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS), Manufacturing and Service Operations Management Society (MSOM), and Production and Operations Management Society (POMS). His work with UNICEF provided the impetus for changes in the global supply chain planning.

Telehealth in primary care and specialties, Home-health technologies aiding telehealth, AI-assisted mammographic examinations, Patient photos aiding detection accuracy, Effects of fatigue on radiology residents, and Optimizing ergonomics for breast imaging. Prof. Elizabeth Krupinski is Professor and Vice-Chair of Research at Emory University in the Department of Radiology. Her interests are in medical image perception, observer performance, decision making, and human factors. She is the Associate Director of Evaluation for the Arizona Telemedicine Program and Co-Director of the Southwest Telehealth Resource Center. She is also the Co-Editor of the Journal of Telemedicine & Telecare and Editor of Telemedicine Reports.

Effect of subscription programs,  price promotions and churn prevention programs on firm profitability, finding nonobvious Key Opinion Leaders to accelerate product diffusion,  and oral and written communications - how the medium shapes the message. Prof. Raghuram Iyengar is a professor of marketing at the Wharton School and faculty director of Wharton Customer Analytics focusing on the practice of data-driven business decision making. Professor Iyengar’s research interests are in the area of pricing and social networks and his teaching interests are in market research and analytics. In the area of pricing, his work focuses on the impact of multi-part pricing schemes on consumer response.

Medical & health tourism - modalities, and trends, service quality expectations, bundled contracting between employers and providers, and effects of the pandemic on the industry Dr. David Vequist is the founder and Director of the Center for Medical Tourism Research (CMTR) - the very first academic research center devoted to medical tourism research. He is also a Professor of Management in the H-E-B School of Business & Administration at the University of the Incarnate Word (UIW) in San Antonio, Texas

COVID - Identifying hotspots, mRNA splicing mutations, the proposed molecular mechanism for severe infections, and possible vaccines, and therapies Prof. Peter Rogan is a professor of Genome Bioinformatics at the University of Western Ontario. His lab focuses on bioinformatic technologies at the population-scale to address important biomedical challenges in genomics and other areas.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, Artificial Intelligence driving the next revolution, Regulatory policy frameworks and pilot projects for policy for AI Mr. Lofred Madzou is a Project Lead for AI at the World Economic Forum, where he is responsible for managing various global multi-stakeholder AI policy projects. Before that, he was a Policy Officer advising the French Government on AI Policy and Regulation. He has co-written chapter 5 of the French National AI Strategy – entitled “What Ethics for AI?”.

Intranasal delivery of agents to the brain, Adult stems cells and Insulin for treatment of brain injury and degenerative diseases, Possible effects of COVID-19 on the brain, long term complications, and policy choices. Dr. William H. Frey II is a Senior Research Director of the Center for Memory & Aging at the HealthPartners Neuroscience Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. Dr. Frey’s focus has been the use of a non-invasive intranasal method for bypassing the blood-brain barrier to target therapeutic agents to the brain to treat neurological and psychiatric disorders while reducing unwanted side effects. These conditions include Mild Cognitive Impairment, Stroke, Traumatic Brain Injury, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Multiple Sclerosis, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and other brain diseases. He is also a faculty member in the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the University of Minnesota. He can be reached at neuroresearch@healthpartners.com / 651-254-3736

Remittances, the good, the bad, and the ugly, COVID, a systemic shock with significant negative effects on fragile countries and regions,  What is a Whale worth and how can we keep it? Dr. Ralph Chami is Assistant Director, Institute for Capacity Development, at the International Monetary Fund. He is in charge of capacity development for the Western Hemisphere Region. Before joining the IMF, he was on the faculty of Finance at the University of Notre Dame.

Neuroprotective and neurotoxic effects of Nuclear Factor kappa B ( NF-kB), Alzheimer's disease, Economic burden of dementia, Brain region and sex-specific alterations in mitochondrial function, Epigenetics and dietary impacts on spatial memory and brain plasticity Prof. Ben Albensi is a professor of pharmacology & therapeutics at the Univ. of Manitoba. His lab at St. Boniface Hospital focuses on understanding the neurobiological basis of normal memory and how memory gets impaired in dementia. His lab studies nuclear factor kappa B ( NF-kB), which is a key mediator of brain inflammation thought to be involved in Alzheimer’s disease.

Brain waves and Natural Language Processing,  N400 amplitude and vector space model behavior,  Contextual embeddings in words, Composition in Sentence Vector Representations, and BERT, what it is Not. Dr. Allyson Ettinger is a computational linguist and an assistant professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, working on natural language processing and computational cognitive modeling. Her interdisciplinary work draws on methods and insights from cognitive science, linguistics, and computer science to examine meaning-extraction and predictive processes executed during language processing in humans and in artificial intelligence systems.

Rejuvenation of Rivers and Lakes in India, Policy in environmental choices, Cost externalization, Decentralized and small-scale wastewater treatment,  nutrient removal from wastewater,  and jumpstarting entrepreneurship through MarketPlaceLiteracy.  Prof. Krishnanand Maillacheruvu is a Professor of Civil Engineering and Construction at Bradley University. His teaching interests include various areas of civil and environmental engineering, sustainability, ethics, and public policy. In addition to more than 50 publications in international journals and conferences, Krishnanand has co-authored three book chapters in the field of environmental engineering

Neurological development of the young brain,  The importance of educational process, content, and environment, Left/Right brain specialization, Language, and Mathematics processing in the brain. Prof. Gerry Leisman is Professor of Neuro and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Haifa and Director of the National Institute for Brain and Rehabilitation Sciences in Nazareth, Israel, He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Functional Neurology, Rehabilitation, and Ergonomics. He is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, is a Senior Member of the Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society in IEEE and a Life Fellow of the International Association of Functional Neurology and Rehabilitation.

Early detection of localized COVID/disease outbreaks, Age as the dominant consideration in COVID intervention strategy, and vaccine/drug surveillance strategies. Prof. Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is an expert on infectious disease outbreaks. As a biostatistician, he has developed methods for the early detection and monitoring of disease outbreaks, currently used by many public health departments for COVID-19 and other diseases. He has also developed methods for the early detection of drug and vaccine adverse events.

Computational Materials Sciences, Atomic-Scale Discoveries with Machine Learning, Hydrogen for storage and transport of energy, Hydrogen as the new natural gas. Prof Sean Smith is a Professor of computational nanomaterials science and technology at the Australian National University and Director of Australia’s national supercomputing facility, NCI Australia. He has extensive theoretical and computational research experience in chemistry, nanomaterials, and nano-bio science and technology. Prior to returning to Australia, he directed the US Department of Energy-funded Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences (CNMS) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Sean has published over 260 refereed journal papers with more than 15000 citations.

Open Science Grid,  Distributed Computing, Midscale collaborations, South Pole Telescope, ENZO: Adaptive mesh code for Astrophysics, Hydrodynamic simulations, and Fraud Detection. Dr. Pascal Paschos is a computational scientist at the University of Chicago and an instructor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Chicago State University. Previously he was in academic research at UC California San Diego on Computational cosmology, he moved to Chicago where he worked in High-Performance Computing at Northwestern University. Later, he joined the Maniac Lab at the University of Chicago where he is involved in accelerating computational research using advanced cyberinfrastructure for several international high energy physics experiments and serves as the Open Science Grid area coordinator for midscale collaborations.

Asset pricing methodology confusion, Required Yield Theory (RYT), Connectalism, Mindfulness, and Compassion in Finance Prof. Christophe Faugère is a professor of finance at the Kedge Business School in France. He is the co-inventor of the “Required Yield Theory”, a financial theory that provides more robust insights into the valuation of broad market indexes such as S&P 500 and gold. He has published articles in leading American academic journals, such as The Journal of Portfolio Management and Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments.

Personal finance decisions, AI-based behavioral finance interventions, Robo-advising, Framing advisory fees, Funding biases and crowdfunding Prof. Orly Sade is the  Chair in Business Administration and an Associate Professor of Finance at the Department of Finance, School of Business Administration, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a member of the scientific board of the experimental finance society. She is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Stern School of Business, NYU, and has been a visiting Associate Professor at additional leading universities around the world (NYU Shanghai and  IE Madrid and NES, Moscow). She has received letters of recognition for excellent teaching, and her research has been published in leading international academic journals and has been presented at leading academic conferences. Professor Orly Sade served as director of the BA program at The Hebrew University and received the Abe Gray awards from the President of the Hebrew University. She has been awarded several research grants, including multiple grants from the Israel Science Foundation.

Mortgage securitization, Measuring Bank Risk, Taxpayer returns from Bailouts, Dividends during a pandemic, and the principal-agent problem in structuring contracts with banks for bailouts.  Prof Amiyatosh Purnanandam is professor finance at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and the chair of the finance area. His research focuses on corporate finance, banking, and financial crisis. He has closely studied topics such as the effects of banking crises on the real economy, the role played by securitization during the subprime mortgage crisis and the economics of government bailout of the financial sector.

Demystifying the Business of Performing Arts, "Sacred," the movie, Learning from Germany on public media, and Organizations for people that succeed. Prof. William Baker is a Professor and Journalist-in-Residence at Fordham University in NY.  He is also a Professor of media & entertainment at IESE Business School, Barcelona, Spain, and President Emeritus of WNET-Thirteen, New York’s public television station. Prof. Baker is the recipient of seven Emmy Awards, two Columbia DuPont Journalism Awards, and honored in 2016 by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for his work in the performing arts.

Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, Human Connectome Project for disordered emotional states, Imaging systems for oral cancer screening, and Better camera designs for convolutional neural networks using synthetic images Prof Brian A. Wandell is a professor at the Psychology Department of Stanford University.  He is also a member of Electrical Engineering, Ophthalmology, and the Graduate School of Education. He is the founding Director of Stanford’s Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging and he founded the Stanford Center for Image Systems Engineering Program.  Prof. Wandell’s research centers on imaging science and technology, spanning neuroscience measurements of the visual cortex and reading development to simulation and design of imaging systems.

History of oil prices and possible future paths Dr. Rouben Indjikian, an adjunct professor of energy, commodities, trade finance, digital economy, and international economics at Webster University in Geneva, Switzerland. Dr. Indjikian had a distinguished career of nearly 30 years at UNCTAD (The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development ) where, as an economist and manager, he was in charge of analysis, policy advice, and technical assistance in the areas of international trade, finance, e-commerce, and commodities.

Supply chain risk in pharmaceutical manufacturing and the advantages of continuous manufacturing  Prof. Fernando Muzzio is a Professor of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering at Rutgers University and the Director of the NSF Engineering Research Center in Structured Organic Particulate Systems. Prof. Muzzio has authored over 250 peer-reviewed papers and numerous book chapters and patents. He is one of the founding co-chairs of the International Institute for Advanced Pharmaceutical Manufacturing.

Logistics Manager's Index as a leading indicator of economic activity, Supply Chain Financing, and Effects of COVID on the global supply chain Prof. Dale Rogers is a Professor of Business at Arizona State University. He is also the Director of the Frontier Economies Logistics Lab and the Co-Director of the Internet edge Supply Chain Lab at ASU. Dale is a leading researcher in the fields of reverse logistics, sustainable supply chain management, supply chain finance, and secondary markets.

Cancer - why have we failed, and how can we get better? The quest to find and destroy the first cell to minimize human strife. Prof. Azra Raza is a Professor of Medicine and Director of the MDS (Myelodysplastic Syndrome) Center at Columbia University. She is a practicing oncologist seeing 30-40 cancer patients weekly. She worked with President Clinton designing Breakthrough Developments in Science and Technology and with Vice President Joe Biden for the Cancer Moonshot initiative. Her latest book, THE FIRST CELL: And the human costs of pursuing cancer to the last was published in October 2019.

Reasons for the science-policy disconnect, statistical inference, threats to scalability, publication bias, and speculation on global economic effects of COVID.  Dr. Omar Al-Ubaydli is the Director of Research at Derasat, a think tank in the Kingdom of Bahrain, an affiliated associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and affiliated senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center. His research interests include political economy, experimental economics, and the economics of the GCC countries. Omar previously served as a member of the Commonwealth of Virginia's Joint Advisory Board of Economists and a Visiting Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago.

Effects of Immigrants on Firms’ Foreign Location Choice and Performance and Immigrant Entrepreneurs as Pathways to Foreign VC Investments Dr. Zeke Hernandez is the Max and Bernice Garchik Family Presidential Associate Professor at the Wharton Business School. He studies global strategy, with an emphasis on how immigrants and innovation help firms successfully globalize.

Artificial Intelligence, Automated Science, Self-driving Scientific Experimentation, Active Learning, High Throughput Screening, R&D optimization Prof. Robert Murphy is a Professor of Computational Biology, Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, and Machine Learning at Carnegie Mellon University.  He is also an Honorary Professor of Biology at the University of Freiburg, Germany, Fellow of the IEEE and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering, and a Senior Member of the International Society for Computational Biology.  He founded the Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University and served as its head from 2009 to 2020. His research interests include machine learning of image-derived models of cell organization and analysis and modeling of protein location changes across cell types and diseases.

Causes of Cancer, Healthcare access, Breast Cancer, Emerging Techniques in Breast Cancer Surgery, SHAVE trial Prof. Anees Chagpar is a Professor in the Department of Surgery at Yale School of Medicine. She is a well-known breast surgical oncologist who participates in investigator-initiated and cooperative group clinical trials, as well as translational and clinical research. The results of one of her recent clinical trials to improve outcomes in breast cancer surgery were published in the New England Journal of Medicine. She teaches an online course on Coursera entitled “An Introduction to Breast Cancer”, and co-hosts a radio show and podcast called “Yale Cancer Answers”.

The economic impact of LGBT rights in firms and countries, policy trends, wage gaps and reasons for optimism Prof. M. V. Lee Badgett is a professor of economics and co-director of the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is also a Williams Distinguished Scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute. Her research focuses on economic inequality for LGBT people, including wage gaps, employment discrimination, and poverty, and on the global cost of homophobia and transphobia. Her latest book is The Economic Case for LGBT Equality: Why Fair and Equal Treatment Benefits Us All (Beacon Press, 2020).

Computer Assisted Mobility, Intelligent Wheelchair design, Human/Machine interactions, and Human Engineering Research Laboratories. Prof. Rory Cooper holds several positions including Associate Dean for Inclusion and Paralyzed Veterans of America, Professor of Rehabilitation Science and Technology, and Orthopedic Surgery at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also the Founding Director and the VA Senior Research Career Scientist at the Human Engineering Research Laboratories. He is also a Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences.

Cheaper and faster sterilization of PPE, HPV eliminating antiviral and anticancer agents,  Modulating DNA with polyamides, Green Chemistry  Prof. James Bashkin is a Professor of Chemistry and Bio-Chemistry at the University of Missouri, St.Louis. Prior to this, he was an NIH postdoctoral fellow at Harvard before joining Monsanto Corporate Research, which later became Pharmacia and then Pfizer. His recent research interest has been at the interface of chemistry and biology, in areas such as "chemical genomics," the design of antiviral and anticancer agents, and Green Chemistry.

Human evolution, Out of Africa migrations, Neanderthals and Denisovans, DNA methylation effects on the body parts, Gene organizer, Epigenetics in assessing ancient environments and behavior of humans. Prof. Liran Carmel is a professor of computational biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. Liran has won many awards, including the Michael Milken prize, the Farkash award, and the Eshkol fellowship. Liran is studying a host of topics in molecular evolution, RNA biology, and genetics and is particularly interested in human evolution and in understanding the very recent evolutionary adaptations that led to the development of human-specific traits. He is among the founders of paleo-epigenetics, a field of study where epigenetic signals are reconstructed in ancient genomes, thus allowing to obtain information on ancient gene activity patterns.

Trust as an operating system, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Types of leaders, Entrepreneurial leadership, Creating successful companies and Startups  Joel Peterson is the 12-year Chairman of JetBlue Airways, retiring in May 2020, former Chairman of The Hoover Institution, and the Founding Partner of Peterson Partners, a Salt Lake City-based investment management firm with $1B under management. Since 1992, Peterson has been on the faculty at the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, teaching courses in real estate investment, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

Antimicrobial research, surrogate invertebrate hosts, in vivo high throughput screening, methicillin-resistant MRSA, colonization, and the need for fast and accurate diagnostics. Prof. Eleftherios Mylonakis is a Professor of Infectious Diseases at Brown University and the Chief of Infectious Diseases at Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals. He is also the Director of the COBRE Center for Antimicrobial Resistance and Therapeutic Discovery. He is Assistant Dean for Outpatient Investigations and Director of the Center for Outpatient and Longitudinal Medical Research at the Alpert Medical School of Brown University and Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. He has 8 patents and almost 400 articles in peer-reviewed literature.

Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization, Simons Observatory, Origins of the Universe, Hubble constant discrepancy, Multiverse  Prof. Brian Keating is a Professor of Physics at the Center for Astrophysics & Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. Prof. Keating's research area is the study of the cosmic microwave background and its relationship to the origin and evolution of the universe. In 2001 he conceived the first BICEP experiment (Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization), located at the South Pole. Later he became Director of the Simons Observatory, co-located with the ACT telescopes in northern Chile. The project includes over 250 collaborators from over 30 institutions around the world.

Artificial Intelligence, Artificial General Intelligence, Non-human intelligence, Machine Reasoning, Policy, and the AI future of society Prof Bart Selman is a Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University. He is the incoming President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), the main international professional society for AI researchers and practitioners. Last year, he co-chaired a national study to determine a 20-year Roadmap for AI research, to guide US government investments in AI research. Prof. Selman was previously at AT&T Bell Laboratories. He has authored numerous publications and has won many awards.

The start-up ecosystem in life sciences, Stakeholders in a start-up, Basic v/s translational research, and health systems  Mr. Jim Jordan is the President of the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse and the Managing Director of the Accelerator Funds. Jim has served as a Distinguished Service Professor of Healthcare & Biotechnology Management at Carnegie Mellon University. He has written two books; Innovation, Commercialization, and Start-ups in Life Sciences, The Intellectual Property Pyramid Assessment, and is currently working on his third book, Health Systems.

Adaptive control for COVID-19 in India, A field experiment for health insurance in India, the evolution of influenza with vaccination Prof Anup Malani is a Professor at the University of Chicago Law School and a Professor at the Pritzker School of Medicine at the University of Chicago.  He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Boston, a Senior Fellow at the Schaeffer Center at the University of Southern California, and an editor at the Journal of Law and Economics. Prof. Malani is the co-founder and Faculty Director of the International Innovation Corps, a social service program that sends teams of US and foreign university graduates to work on innovative development projects with government officials in India.

Battery technologies, species of electrolytes, materials science innovation, the safety of products, and the need for inclusion in education Prof. Steve Greenbaum is a Professor of Physics at Hunter College in the City University of New York and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Prof. Greenbaum's main research interest involves spectroscopic studies of disordered solids by magnetic resonance and synchrotron x-ray absorption, most of which have recently centered on materials for electrochemical energy storage and conversion. He has authored or co-authored over 260 peer-reviewed publications and given over 60 invited talks at national or international conferences.

Pharmaceutical R&D trends and costs, Value chain paradigms, Basic v/s translational research, Investment needs, and COVID 19 Prof. Kenneth Kaitin is a professor of Public Health and Medicine at Tufts School of Medicine and the Director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. He is also an Advisory Professor at Shanghai Medical College at Fudan University in Shanghai, and a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense on bioterror countermeasures. Ken’s research focuses on the economic, scientific, regulatory, and political factors that affect pharmaceutical development.

Future of business law, Corporate legal strategy, Turning compliance into a competitive advantage Prof. Robert Bird is a Professor of Business Law and the Chair in Business Ethics at the University of Connecticut. Robert's wide-ranging research focuses on corporate social responsibility, corporate compliance, employment law, legal strategy, and the intersection of law and business. His work has been published widely and he has received numerous teaching and research awards and is currently the President-Elect of the Academy of Legal Studies in Business.

Investment-q paradox,  persistent investment decline, Tobin's q decomposition, asset utilization as a driver of investment rate, and failure of common explanations.   Prof. David Ikenberry was the Chair of Finance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Associate Dean of the Executive programs. Later he served as the Dean of the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and now serves as the full professor in the School. He was an early pioneer among researchers examining long-horizon stock returns, particularly returns subsequent to major corporate news events. Much of his work relates to behavioral finance and the extent to which news is incorporated into market prices. His most noted work has studied open market stock repurchase programs. Please excuse the slight overlap in the audio.

Alzheimer's disease, oxidative stress, mitochondria abnormalities, diagnostics, amyloid-beta plaques, aging Prof. George Perry is a Professor of Biology and Chemistry at The University of Texas at San Antonio. Prof Perry is recognized in the field of Alzheimer's disease research particularly for his work on oxidative stress.  Perry's research is primarily focused on how Alzheimer’s disease develops and the physiological consequences of the disease at a cellular level. He is currently working to determine the sequence of events leading to damage caused by and the source of increased oxygen radicals.

Artificial Intelligence, Breast cancer diagnostics, Teleradiology, Social return to technology commercialization  Prof. Richard Mammone, a professor of engineering and business at Rutgers University. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, recipient of the Thomas Edison Patent Award and inductee of the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame. He has published over 200 papers and has 30 patents. He was a founding editorial board member of the IEEE Neural Network Society and was the Associate Vice President of Innovation and Partnerships of Rutgers.

Food, Nutrition, Obesity, supply chains, food security Marion Nestle is a Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, at New York University. She is also a Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. Her research and writing examine scientific and socioeconomic influences on food choice and its consequences, emphasizing the role of food industry marketing. She is the author of six prize-winning books. She has received many awards and honors for her excellent teaching, research, and writing.

Public-private partnerships, education systems, ethics and leadership  Dr. Stanley Litow is a Professor at Columbia and Duke University, and serve as Innovator in Residence at Duke. He is a speaker, writer and subject matter expert on Education and Corporate Social Responsibility and had a career in the public, private and not for profit sectors, including President of the IBM Foundation, Deputy Schools Chancellor for New York City, and Founder of Interface. He has served on several Presidential Commissions and currently serves as a Trustee of the State University of New York. He is also a columnist for Barron's.

Mental illnesses, stigma, ADHD, design of education, Berkeley girls longitudinal study  Professor Stephen Hinshaw is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of Psychiatry at UCSF.  His work focuses on developmental psychopathology, clinical interventions in attention deficits and hyperactivity, and mental illness stigma.  His excellent teaching and research over the years brought him numerous awards including those from the Society for Science of Clinical Psychology, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the American Psychological Association. He has authored over 360 articles and chapters plus 12 books

Hunger in America, SNAP/Food Stamps, SSTAR Act, Obesity, Decision-making Dr. Sara Abiola is an assistant professor of health policy & management at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health and co-director of the Better Health Systems Lab that analyzes law, policy, and technological innovations designed to facilitate health systems strengthening and transformation through multisector collaboration and integration. She has constructed legal databases to map noncommunicable disease prevention policy and food policy at the global and national level and currently explores statutory and regulatory mechanisms to integrate the delivery of health and social services to address inequality and the social determinants of health.

Population health, Transformational Collaborative Outcomes Management (TCOM). Dr. John S. Lyons is a Professor of Health Management and Policy and the Director of the Center of Innovation in Population Health at the University of Kentucky.   After receiving a doctorate in clinical psychology, John has founded the Mental Health Services and Policy Program at Northwestern University, been the inaugural chair of Child and Youth Mental Health at the University of Ottawa, and a Senior Policy Fellow at the University of Chicago.  He has designed and implemented outcomes management approaches in all fifty states and on every continent except Antarctica.

Memristors, Neuromorphic Computing, Mysteries of the brain and the future of Computing  Dr. Mehdi Anwar is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Connecticut. As a Jefferson Science Fellow, he served as Special Adviser for Technology Transfer and Innovation in the office of Intellectual Property Enforcement, Economic Bureau, U. S. Department of State. At present, Dr. Anwar is assisting U. S. Department of State and other U. S. Government organizations and the United Nations Office for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries, and Small Island Developing States to stand up the newly established United Nations Technology Bank.

Microstructures of financial markets, order routing, high-frequency trading, oil prices  ..... Prof. Bruce Mizrach is a professor in the Department of Economics at Rutgers University. He has held appointments at Boston College, the Wharton School, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York,  and NYU Stern School of business. Bruce is the founder and editor of Studies in Nonlinear Dynamics and Econometrics, which is devoted to using the nonlinear analysis to understand economic and financial markets. His most recent work is on the market microstructure of electronic limit order markets in bonds, equities, and commodity markets.

Causes of chronic liver diseases, emerging treatments, COVID-19 Dr. Scott Friedman is the Dean for Therapeutic Discovery and Chief of the Division of Liver Diseases, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He has performed pioneering research into the underlying causes of scarring, or fibrosis associated with chronic liver disease, affecting millions worldwide. His work has spawned an entire field that is now realizing its translational and therapeutic potential, with new anti-fibrotic therapies for liver disease reaching clinical trials.

Evolution of cancer, plague, pandemics, COVID, policymaking under uncertainty Jeffrey Townsend is the Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the Yale School of Public Health and Yale University. He is an experimentalist and a theoretician; someone who performed the first experiments to show how extensively genome-wide gene expression varies in one individual organism to another within a population; who has developed theory to reveal not just what is known, but what is unknown and unknowable in how organisms have descended from their ancestors; who has pioneered both experimental and theoretical approaches enabling us to understand the evolutionary changes that give an organism its form, function, and ability to survive and propagate. Currently, he spends the majority of his time working on evolutionary theory applied to tumor genome sequencing, revealing how cancer evolves from normal tissue to malignant tissue—how cancer evolves within us.

Decisions under uncertainty, shocks, supply chains, and autonomous vehicles Prof Warren Powell taught at Princeton for almost 40 years, where he was drawn to the opportunity of bringing advanced analytics to the trucking industry which introduced him to the challenge of making high-dimensional decisions (such as assigning drivers to loads) under uncertainty.  This problem guided a lifetime of research in stochastic optimization using approximate dynamic programming. His research produced over 250 papers and two books with the help of 60 graduate students and post-docs, supported by $50 million in research funding.

Democratizing our data - A manifesto. Improving the design of metrics, collection of data, analysis and decision-making at the federal level Prof. Julia Lane is a Professor at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service and an NYU Fellow for Innovation Analytics. She is a senior advisor in the Office of the Federal CIO at the White House, supporting the implementation of the Federal Data Strategy. She cofounded the Coleridge Initiative, whose goal is to use data to transform the way governments access and use data for the social good through training programs, research projects, and a secure data facility.

Humans, bacteria, intelligence, consciousness, life and everything else Ian Williams was born in England in 1954. He trained as a biochemist at the Universities of Bristol and Oxford and received an MFA from Bennington College in Vermont. He worked for Pfizer for twenty years heading the Molecular Sciences Department and serving in the Research strategy group. He and his wife, Nancy Hutson, have a farm in Connecticut containing over 50 large-scale sculptures that Williams has made over the last decade. Together with Nancy, he has ridden in horseback safaris in many parts of the world. He may be reached at ian.inc@mac.com

COVID-19, clinical trial processes, pharmaceutical R&D, vaccine development, use of preventative medications, Alzheimer's disease, PTSD After obtaining his medical degree in Belgium in 1972, Pierre Etienne moved to McGill University, where he did postgraduate work in neurochemistry. There he directed a program on the biochemical, physiological, and neuropathological basis of Alzheimer's disease. After a brief passage in experimental medicine at Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), he went back to McGill in 1987, dividing his time between the Montreal Neurological Institute and the Allan Memorial Institute. In 1989 he joined Pfizer as Director of Experimental Medicine, responsible for all Phase 2 A programs for US and Japan discovered compounds. In 2003, he became CEO of PhageTech, Inc., a privately-held biotechnology company based in Montreal, Canada. PhageTech exploited a proprietary platform based on phage-bacterial intracellular interactions to research and develop new classes of synthetic antibiotics. Phagetech later became Targanta Therapeutics that went public on NASDAQ (TARG) in the summer of 2008. In December 2009, he started a new life as a physician at the Douglas Institute. In July 2011, he was appointed Director of the Clinical Research Division. He is the co-Director of the Alzheimer’s disease prevention program (Stop-AD).