Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, FRSL, FMedSci, DL (born 7 February 1958, in Northumberland), known as Matt Ridley, is a British scientist, journalist and author. He also is a former Chairman of Northern Rock. He has written several science books including the The Red Queen (1994), Genome (1999) and The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves (2010). Ridley has been short-listed twice for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. In 2011, he won the Hayek Prize, which "honors the book published within the past two years that best reflects Hayek’s vision of economic and individual liberty." Ridley also gave the Angus Millar Lecture on "scientific heresy" at the RSA in 2011 and his TED.com talk on "when ideas have sex" has been viewed 1.4 million times. He was recently elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and won the Julian Simon award in March 2012.

Ridley was educated at Eton College from 1970–1975 and then went on to Magdalen College of the University of Oxford and completed a BA degree with first class honours in zoology and then a DPhil degree in zoology in 1983.

Greg Barker is director and producer of the documentary feature Sergio, which was shortlisted for a 2010 Academy Award. LA Times critic Kenneth Turan described Sergio as “a documentary of exceptional power,” and Variety said “Barker turns his biopic into a thriller...and creates riveting cinema.”

A former Freelance Journalist and war correspondent, Barker spent most of his adult life overseas working with organizations such as CNN, BBC and Reuters, before recently returning to his native California. He’s worked in over 50 countries across six continents, and made a string of international films for the flagship Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) television series Frontline, including the feature-length Ghosts of Rwanda, seven years in the making, which won numerous awards.

He has an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and was on the jury for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.

Filmmaker Greg Barker Pays Homage to Humanitarian Sergio Vieira de Mello Venice Magazine

Jon Snow (born 28 September 1947) is an English journalist and presenter, currently employed by ITN. He is best known for presenting Channel 4 News.

He was Chancellor of Oxford Brookes University from 2001 to 2008.

Snow was born in Ardingly, Sussex. He is the son of schoolmaster and Bishop of Whitby, George D'Oyly Snow, grandson of First World War general Thomas D'Oyly Snow (about whom he writes in his Foreword to Ronald Skirth's war memoir The Reluctant Tommy), and cousin of retired BBC television news presenter Peter Snow.

Snow was educated at independent school, Ardingly College, where his father was headmaster. He later attended the independent St Edward's School in Oxford. At age 18 he was for a year a VSO volunteer teaching in northern Uganda.

After mixed success in his first attempt to pass his A level qualifications he moved to the Yorkshire Coast College, Scarborough, where he later obtained the necessary qualifications to gain a place studying law at the University of Liverpool. However, he did not complete the degree, being rusticated for his part in a student protest. However he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Letters at Liverpool University in 2011.

Dan Ariely (born April 29, 1968) is an Israeli American professor of psychology and behavioral economics. He teaches at Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight.Ariely's talks on TED have been watched 2.8 million times. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best sellers.

Dan Ariely was born in New York while his father was studying for an MBA degree at Columbia University. The family returned to Israel when he was three. He grew up in Ramat Hasharon. In his senior year of high school, he was active in Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed, an Israeli youth movement. While preparing a ktovet esh (fire inscription) for a traditional nighttime ceremony, the flammable materials he was mixing exploded, causing third-degree burns over 70 percent of his body.

Ariely was a physics and mathematics major at Tel Aviv University, but transferred to philosophy and psychology when he found the writing too physically taxing. However, in his last year he dropped philosophy and concentrated solely on psychology, in which he received his B.A. He also holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He did a second doctorate in business administration at Duke University at the urging of Nobel economic sciences laureate Daniel Kahneman.

Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.

Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.

Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.