Jelle Atema Ph.D.
Jelle Atema is a marine biologist, and the Professor of Biology at Boston University, a Research Fellow for the Department of Cognitive & Neural Systems, an Adjunct Scientist for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and an Adjunct Scientist for the Marine Biological Laboratory. The labs he works out of in Boston University and Woods Hole focus on three seemingly disparate research areas: chemical ecology of lobsters, navigation in sharks, and dispersal in larval reef fishes. These efforts are linked by a common theme: understanding how marine animals sense their environment, how they use this information to make decisions leading to food and mates while avoiding danger, and how these decisions play out in population dynamics.

Timothy Goldsmith Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus at Yale University and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Goldsmith is noted for his work on the vision of insects and crustaceans as well as the color vision of birds, particularly budgerigars. His work offers a virtual peek into the visual world of birds and bees.

Dr. Goldsmith has also authored two books on the evolution of human nature and a book for children that may have finally found a sympathetic publisher. In the past he has beenactively invested in the reform of pre-college science education and has served on the advisory committees of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. He is a former Chair of the Board of Directors of the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of curricular materials for school science classes and the assessment and improvement science teaching.

Katy Payne
Katy Payne is a researcher in the Bioacoustics Research Program at the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell University. Ms. Payne began her career studying the evolving songs of the humpback whale. She shifted her focus to elephants in 1984, when she and two colleagues discovered infrasonic calling in elephants by recording at a zoo. The studies that followed from this discovery have shown that elephants use their low-frequency calls to coordinate their social behavior over long distances. She founded The Elephant Listening Project (ELP) in 1999 to help in the conservation of the African forest elephant. With colleagues, she developed an acoustic monitoring system, using elephants' calls to locate, count and describe herds and populations, while the sounds of gunshots reveal the whereabouts of poachers. Payne retired from the project in 2006 and it is now headed up by Dr. Peter Wrege, where it is at work in the Central African Republic and Gabon.

She describes the fascinating trajectory of her interest in elephant communication in the delightful book Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants. Ms. Payne is now writing a book about forest elephants, and continues to play a critical role in all ELP's activities.

R. Stimson Wilcox Ph.D.
Stim Wilcox is Associate Professor of Biological Sciences at Binghamton University of SUNY. His primary interest lies in the behavioral ecology and communication of animals particularly mating strategies, territorality, aggressive mimicry, communication, and alternative strategies and tactics. He also studies predator-prey interactions that are mediated by underwater, low-frequency pressure waves and works mainly with water striders, jumping spiders and fish, and work both in the field and the laboratory.

In 1987, Dr. Wilcox teamed up with Robert Jackson of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, and began studying jumping spiders of the genus Portia, which are aggressive mimics. These amazing spiders show a wide range of instinctive ploys to capture other spiders in their webs, as well as learning abilities, the ability to solve problems, and even to think a little, including maintaining cognitive maps for over an hour, during such predatory ploys as detouring behavior when stalking prey spiders.

Dr. Wilcox has been featured on PBS American Scientific Frontiers and in BBC films.

Carl Zimmer
The New York Times Book Review calls Carl Zimmer "as fine a science essayist as we have." In his books, essays, articles, and blog posts, Zimmer reports from the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life. He is a popular speaker at universities, medical schools, museums, and festivals, and he is also a frequent guest on radio programs such as Radio Lab and This American Life.

Zimmer is the author of ten books about science. In addition to writing books, Zimmer has written hundreds of articles for the New York Times and magazines including National Geographic, Time, Scientific American, Science, and Popular Science. From 1994 to 1998 Zimmer was a senior editor at Discover, where he remains a contributing editor and writes a monthly column about the brain. In 2011 he was elected to the board of directors of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.