Ram Samudrala is a professor of computational biology at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. He researches protein and proteome folding, structure, function, interaction, design, and evolution spanning atomic to organismal levels of description. He has copublished more than 100 manuscripts in a variety of journals including Science,Nature,PLoS Biology, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, with a H-index of 30 and an average journal impact factor of 5.8.

Samudrala is also a musician who has published and recorded work under the pseudonym TWISTED HELICES. In 1994, he published the Free music Philosophy, which accurately predicted how the ease of copying and transmitting digital information by the Internet would lead to unprecedented violations of copyright laws and new models of distribution for music and other digital media. His work in this area was reported as early as 1997 by diverse media outlets including Billboard,Forbes,Levi's Original Music Magazine,The Free Radical,Wired and The New York Times.

Robert Hazen is a research scientist at the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Geophysical Laboratory and Clarence Robinson Professor of Earth Science at George Mason University, in the United States, received a B.S. and S.M. in geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1971, and a Ph.D. at Harvard University in earth Science 1975. After studies as NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at Cambridge University in England, he joined the Carnegie Institution’s research effort.

Hazen is author of more than 350 articles and 20 books on science, history, and music. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has received the Mineralogical Society of America Award (1982), the American Chemical Society Ipatieff Prize (1986), the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award (1989), the Educational Press Association Award (1992), the Elizabeth Wood Science Writing Award (1998), and the Distinguished Public Service Medal of the Mineralogical Society of America (2009). He has presented numerous named lectures at universities, and is currently Sigma Xi Distinguished Lecturer (2008–2010). He served as Distinguished Lecturer for the Mineralogical Society of America, and is a Past President of the Society. Hazen’s recent research focuses on the role of minerals in the origin of life, including such processes as mineral-catalyzed organic synthesis and the selective adsorption of organic molecules on mineral surfaces. He has also developed a new approach to mineralogy, called “mineral evolution,” which explores the co-evolution of the geo- and biospheres. He is also an adviser to the Microbes Mind Forum.

Marc Kuchner (born August 7, 1972) is an American astrophysicist, a staff member at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Together with Wesley Traub, he invented the band-limited coronagraph, a design for the proposed Terrestrial Planet Finder telescope, also to be used on the James Webb Space Telescope. He helped popularize the ideas of ocean planets,carbon planets, and Helium planets and made some of the first observations of a debris disk orbiting G29-38, a metal-rich White Dwarf. Kuchner received his bachelor's degree in physics from Harvard in 1994 and his Ph.D. in astronomy from Caltech in 2000. Kuchner was awarded the 2009 SPIE early career achievement award for his work on coronagraphy. Kuchner appears as an expert commentator in the emmy nominated National Geographic television show "Alien Earths" and frequently answers the "Ask Astro" questions in Astronomy Magazine.

Janet Louise Siefert received her PhD from the University of Houston and currently is a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Department of Statistics at Rice University. She is an origin of life researcher who received her training from Dr. George E. Fox, co-discoverer of the third domain of life. Her work deals with understanding life's origins through microbial ecology, working primarily in Cuatro Ciénegas, Mexico, a desert oasis protected by the Mexican government and known to exhibit endemism equal to the Galapagos. She is the first woman to serve as chairman of the Gordon Research Conference on the Origin of Life and the first president of ISSOL: the International Astrobiology Society. Her work has been featured on Discovery,National Geographic, and the History Channel.

Bonnie Lynn Bassler (born 1962) is an American molecular biologist. She has been a professor at Princeton University since 1994.

Born in Chicago and raised in Danville, California, Bassler received a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from the University of California, Davis and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University. She made key insights into the mechanism by which bacteria communicate, known as quorum sensing. In 2002 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Bassler was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

Bassler has been nominated by the American Society for Microbiology to be one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty Speakers who will speak about her work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010. Bonnie Bassler is a member of the USA Science & Engineering Festival's Nifty Fifty, a collection of the most influential scientists and engineers in the United States that are dedicated to reinvigorating the interest of young people in science and engineering.