Naomi Klein is the award-winning author of international bestsellers including This Changes Everything, The Shock Doctrine, No Logo, No Is Not Enough, and On Fire, which have been published in more than thirty-five languages. She is an associate professor in the department of geography at the University of British Columbia, the founding codirector of UBC’s Centre for Climate Justice, and an honorary professor of Media and Climate at Rutgers University. Her writing has appeared in leading publications around the world, and she is a columnist for The Guardian.

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, including Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. His latest book is The Internet Con. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Frans de Waal, author of Mama’s Last Hug, is C. H. Candler Professor Emeritus of Primate Behavior at Emory University and the former director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

A lifelong advocate for wildlife, Beth Pratt has worked in environmental leadership roles for over twenty-five years and in two of the country’s largest national parks: Yosemite and Yellowstone. As the California Regional Executive Director for the National Wildlife Federation, Pratt leads the #SaveLACougars campaign to build the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which broke ground on Earth Day, April 22, 2022. Her innovative conservation work has been featured by the Los Angeles Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and more. Author of I Heart Wildlife and When Mountain Lions are Neighbors, her new book Yosemite Wildlife will be published in 2024. She has also contributed to the books The Nature of Yosemite and Inspiring Generations as well as given a TEDx talk, How a Lonely Cougar in Los Angeles Inspired the World and is featured in the documentary, The Cat that Changed America. Pratt spends much of her time in Los Angeles but makes her home outside of Yosemite with her five dogs, two cats, and the wildlife that frequent her backyard.

Martha Groves, a lifelong journalist, had the good fortune to be the first reporter to write about P-22. After earning her master’s degree at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she worked as an editor and arts and culture reporter at the Chicago Daily News. She moved to the Philadelphia Inquirer and then the Los Angeles Times, where she covered retailing, the economy of the West, tech, farming, management, education, and the Westside region. Since her retirement from the Times in 2015, she has been a freelance reporter and editor. She is a native Hoosier. In 1994, she adopted her daughter, Nora, in China. She is an avid traveler, hiker, and concertgoer and serves on the board of the Los Angeles Master Chorale.

Author Sherry Mangel-Ferber is a retired teacher who lives in Liberty Canyon in the Santa Monica Mountains. She is a volunteer for SaveLACougars and enjoys returning to the classroom to teach about the local wildlife. She spends as much time as possible outdoors, hiking, taking photographs of the scenic wonders of the area and, when possible, of the wildlife as well. When she is not outdoors, she can be found sewing, doing needlepoint, reading, baking, spending time with friends, or with her two rescue cats, Kit and Kaboodle.

Laura J. Nelson is an investigative and enterprise reporter at the Los Angeles Times. Her work has exposed and explained chaos in the U.S. Postal System, inequities in COVID-19 vaccine distribution, and the spread of far-right extremism in California’s world of health, wellness, and spirituality. She previously covered transportation, mobility, and commuting for The Times. Nelson was part of the team that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the San Bernardino terrorist attack, as well as the team that was a 2020 Pulitzer finalist for its coverage of a dive-boat fire that killed 34 people off the coast of Santa Barbara. Nelson grew up in Kansas and joined The Times in 2012.

Miguel Ordeñana is an environmental educator and wildlife biologist. He works at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County as a Senior Manager in the Community Science office. As a community science senior manager, Miguel promotes and creates community science projects and recruits and trains participants. Miguel utilizes his mammal research background by conducting urban mammal research in L.A. and leads NHMLAC’s Southern California Squirrel Survey and Backyard Bat Survey. Miguel serves as an advisor on a jaguar project in southwestern Nicaragua that he initiated in 2012 as well as a Board Member for the Friends of Griffith Park and National Wildlife Federation. Miguel is dedicated to making science and access to nature more equitable with the goal of increasing the representation and retention of underrepresented communities within the environmental field. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Studies from the University of Southern California and an M.S. in Ecology from the University of California Davis.

Alan Salazar (Puchuk Ya’ia’c, “Fast Runner”) is a Chumash and Tataviam elder. He draws on decades of experience as a preschool teacher, juvenile probation officer, monitor and cultural resource advisor, a traditional paddler, and builder of Chumash canoes, a spiritual adviser, and a traditional storyteller. Lifelong devoted to furthering Native American causes, he is a founding member of the Kern County Native American Heritage Preservation Council and the Chumash Maritime Association, a member of the California Indian Advisory Council for the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History, and a community advisor with the Ventura County Indian Education Consortium. He traces his family ancestry to the Chumash village of Ta’apu, now known as Simi Valley, and the Tataviam village of Chaguayanga near Castaic, Ca. His ancestors were brought into the San Fernando Mission starting in 1799.

Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks; Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Finding Beauty in a Broken World; and When Women Were Birds, among other books. Her work is widely taught and anthologized around the world. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School and divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Castle Valley, Utah.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, EdD, studies the psychological and neurobiological bases of social emotion, self-awareness, and culture and their implications for learning, development, and schools. She is a Professor of Education at the USC Rossier School of Education, a Professor of Psychology at the Brain and Creativity Institute, a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Program Faculty at the University of Southern California, and Director of the USC Center for Affective Neuroscience, Development, Learning and Education (CANDLE).

Achuta Kadambi is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCLA. With applications to cyberphysical systems and digital health, his research has been recognized with best paper awards, fellowships, and the Lemelson-MIT student prize. His imaging research has resulted in 15t US patent filings, specifically for AI applications for autonomous cars. Kadambi received his Ph.D. From MIT.

Carl Zimmer is a columnist for the New York Times, where is his column "Matter" has appeared regularly since 2013. Over the course of his career, he has published 13 books about Science. His latest book is She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. It won the 2019 National Academies Communication Award as well as many other honors.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, host of the Mindscape podcast, and author of From Eternity to Here, The Particle at the End of the Universe, and The Big Picture. He has been awarded prizes and fellowships by the National Science Foundation, NASA, the American Institute of Physics, and the Royal Society of London, among many others. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, writer Jennifer Ouellette.

Achuta Kadambi received a Ph.D. degree from MIT and joined UCLA as an Assistant Professor. His publications have been presented as Orals at CVPR, ICCV, ICCP, and SIGGRAPH. He is currently co-authoring a textbook (Computational Imaging, MIT Press 2021) and is also a co-founder of a robotic imaging startup. Achuta's research has received several recognitions, including the NSF Career Award, Forbes 30 under 30 (Science), Google Faculty Award, Sony Imaging Young Faculty Award, and Army Young Investigator Award (ARO-YIP).

Nellie Bowles is a domestic correspondent for the New York Times, focused on business and culture stories. She is writing a book of essays and posting a short one about religion online once a month or so. Prior to joining the Times, she was a correspondent for VICE News Tonight on HBO and a writer for the Guardian, Recode, and California Sunday.

Dr. Pyle received her Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee in 2002 and completed her postdoctoral fellowship work with Peter Donovan in 2006 at Johns Hopkins University. She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Molecular Genetics at UCLA and a member of the Eli and Edythe Broad Stem Cell Center, the Center for Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and the Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center at UCLA. Dr. Pyle’s lab uses multi-disciplinary approaches to study human pluripotent stem cell biology and the differentiation of these cells for use in regenerative medicine. Dr. Pyle’s lab studies both basic aspects of stem cell biology as well as more translational aspects of human pluripotent stem cell differentiation towards skeletal muscle for use in therapeutic approaches for patients with muscular dystrophy.

Karen Kaplan is the science and medicine editor at the Los Angeles Times. Before joining the science group in 2005, she covered technology in the Business section for ten years. She is a graduate of MIT and Columbia University. In a parallel universe without journalism, she’d have a career in economics, genetics, biostatistics, or some other field that describes the world in math.

Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Science Journalism. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.

Lera Boroditsky is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD and Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world, and language (or how humans get so smart).