She has been commissioned by MINI Cooper, Ralph Lauren, Sony, and Porsche. Alexa Meade has collaborated with world-renowned magician David Blaine and space-time researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Her TED Talk “Your Body is my Canvas,” has been viewed millions of times. The critically-acclaimed short film “Color of Reality” brings together Alexa Meade’s painting style with the movement artistry of Jon Boogz and Lil Buck to tell a story about gun violence and racial tensions in American society. It was part of the National Civil Rights Museum “Freedom Awards Ceremony,” screened at the Lincoln Center, and honored by CNN Great Big Story’s “Art as Impact Award.”

For fun, Alexa Meade and her boyfriend Chris Hughes are turning their Los Angeles apartment into an optical illusion wonderland dubbed the “Funhouse House,” replete with the planet’s tiniest disco in the breakfast nook and a spaceship in the bedroom closet. They have one cat and he is named “The Kids.”

In previous lives, he was New York Bureau Chief and Executive Editor of Red Herring magazine as well as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs.

His latest book, The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite, was published by HarperCollins in April 2017. McDonald is also the author of the Firm: The Story of McKinsey and its Secret Influence on American Business (Simon & Schuster, 2013) and Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase (S&S, 2009).

Duff attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, receiving a Bachelor of Science in Economics in 1992. He lives in the Catskills.

He is the author of several books, including “You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen,” “A Chinaman’s Chance,” “The Gardens of Democracy,” and “The Accidental Asian.”

Eric served as a White House speechwriter and policy adviser for President Bill Clinton. He is a regular columnist for CNN.com and a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com.

He has been science advisor for many TV shows and movies, including Nat Geo’s Genius (featuring Einstein), Marvel’s Agent Carter, Star Trek: Discovery, Thor: Ragnarok, and more.

Johnson also writes about science, and is an enthusiastic sketch artist. He has written and drawn a graphic novel featuring science called The Dialogues: Conversations about the Nature of the Universe, which will be published by MIT Press in Fall 2017.

Johnson’s research concerns the origin and evolution of the Universe and its fundamental constituents. He works mainly on superstring theory, quantum gravity, and M-theory, studying objects such as black holes and D-branes, using various techniques from Mathematics and Physics to address issues of relevance to particle physics, cosmology and astrophysics.

Johnson’s work has also led to new descriptions of physics relevant to the quark-gluon plasma, and various quantum critical phenomena in condensed matter physics.

In his role as director of Northwestern’s Relationships and Motivation Lab, he has published 130+ scientific articles and is a regular contributor to the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

His research, which is supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, has been honored with the Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize.

In 2013, he was the first to identify the potential for CRISPR “gene drive” systems to alter wild populations of organisms. Recognizing the implications of an advance that could enable individual scientists to alter the shared environment, he and his colleagues chose to break with scientific tradition by revealing their findings and calling for open discussion and safeguards before they demonstrated the technology in the laboratory.

At MIT, Esvelt’s laboratory develops safer “daisy drives” that only spread locally, as well as ways of restoring populations to their original genetics. Together with the communities of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard, they are advancing the “Mice Against Ticks” project aiming to prevent tick-borne disease.

Other research interests include unraveling the workings of molecular evolution, controlling the fitness of microbes in the gut, and reducing animal suffering. An outspoken advocate of freely sharing research plans to accelerate discovery and improve safety, Esvelt seeks to use gene drive as a catalyst to reform the scientific ecosystem.

Abdul is a product of Michigan public schools. He captained his high-school football, wrestling, and lacrosse teams, and went on to play lacrosse for the University of Michigan. He graduated in 2007, where he was honored to deliver the student commencement speech alongside President Bill Clinton.

Abdul went on to become a Rhodes Scholar, earning a doctorate from Oxford University and a medical degree from Columbia University. As a public health professor, Abdul became an internationally recognized expert in health policy and health inequalities. At 30, Abdul became the youngest health official of a major American city when he was brought home by Mayor Mike Duggan to rebuild Detroit’s Health Department after it was privatized during the city’s bankruptcy.

As Health Director, he was responsible for the health and safety of over 670,000 Detroiters, working tirelessly to ensure government accountability and transparency, promote health, and reduce cross-generational poverty After witnessing the systematic failures of government only a few miles away in Flint, Abdul worked hard to ensure that children attending Detroit schools and daycares were drinking lead-free water. He has also served expectant mothers and women by creating programs aimed at reducing infant mortality and unplanned pregnancy.

He built a program to give schoolchildren across the city glasses if they needed them. Abdul also stood up for children with asthma by taking on corporations that wanted to pump more harmful pollutants into our air, working with them to reduce emissions and invest in parks.

Though the work continues, under Abdul’s leadership, the Detroit Health Department has become a state and national leader in public health innovation and environmental justice, in one of the fastest municipal public health turnarounds in American history.

Abdul is called to public service by a core belief in people. He believes that all people can thrive when we value each other and our communities, we seek to protect and defend our vulnerable, and when we create the kinds of opportunities that empower people to dream for a better future. Abdul lives in Detroit with his wife, Sarah, a mental health doctor. He loves water sports, working out, good biographies, coffee, and Michigan sports.

Ben and his team of 20 at the non-profit BioBus have since created a new paradigm in science education that has empowered 200,000 students to reach their full scientific potential. ​

Students, primarily in low-income NYC communities, have discovered the spark of science excitement aboard high-tech mobile labs staffed by Ph.D. and masters level scientists. At BioBus’s network of BioBase community labs, students hone their scientific skills through in-depth research projects, while classroom teachers learn to do research projects in their classroom.

BioBus supporters include the Simons Foundation, The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, New York State, the City of New York, Columbia University, Olympus America, and many individuals. BioBus’s externally validated model  is an efficient, scalable method for achieving a radical broadening of scientific participation and understanding that has the potential to not only transform the role of science in communities across the nation and around the world, but to empower those communities to instigate broad change. Learn more and get involved at​ www.biobus.org​ and follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India. Professor Desai’s areas of expertise include tax policy, international finance, and corporate finance. His work has emphasized the appropriate design of tax policy in a globalized setting, the links between corporate governance and taxation, and the internal capital markets of multinational firms.

He is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Public Economics and Corporate Finance Programs, and served as the co-director of the NBER’s India program. He has testified several times to Congressional bodies on various tax policy questions.

Professor Desai has taught extensively as an award-winning teacher at HBS and at Harvard University. He has taught public economics and entrepreneurship to undergraduates, finance and international finance to MBA students and executives, and tax law and policy to law students.

Recently, Professor Desai created an online finance course through the HBX platform titled Leading with Finance. His most recent book is The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return, published in May 2017. His professional experiences include working at CS First Boston, McKinsey & Co., and advising a number of firms and governmental organizations.

In 2013 she started Lab4U to democratize science and change the way science is taught with a lab in the pocket.

Komal has been a recipient of the Cartier Women Initiative Awards 2015, Toyota Mother of Invention Award 2017 and internationally recognized by The New York Times, Forbes, People Magazine, and the BBC for her work at Lab4U as a top female entrepreneur.