Winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, Joseph E. Stiglitz is the best-selling author of Making Globalization Work, Globalization and Its Discontents, and The Three Trillion Dollar War, co-authored with Linda Bilmes. He was chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and served as senior vice president and chief economist at the World Bank. He teaches at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Jim Newton is a veteran journalist, author, and educator. He began his career as a clerk to James Reston at The New York Times and spent 25 years as a reporter, bureau chief, columnist, and editor at the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of two critically acclaimed biographies, Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made and Eisenhower: The White House Years. Last year, he collaborated with former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta on Panetta's autobiography, Worthy Fights: A Memoir of Leadership in War and Peace. He is presently creating a new magazine at UCLA scheduled to debut this spring.

Dr. Wendy Freedman is a University Professor at the University of Chicago. Until recently, she served as the Crawford H. Greenewalt Director of the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. She also chairs the Board of Directors for the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT), a 25-m optical telescope scheduled for construction in Chile in 2020. Her principal research interests are in observational cosmology; Dr. Freedman was a lead investigator for a team of astronomers who carried out the Hubble Key Project to measure the current expansion rate of the Universe. Her current research interests are directed at measuring both the current and past expansion rate of the universe and in characterizing the nature of dark energy, which is causing the universe to speed up its expansion.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology. His research focuses on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, and the origin of the universe. He is the author of The Particle at the End of the Universe and From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Recent awards include the Gemant Award from the American Institute of Physics and the Winton Prize from the Royal Society of London. He frequently consults for film and television and has been featured on shows such as The Colbert Report and Through the Wormhole with Morgan Freeman.

David Finkel is the award-winning author of The Good Soldiers. A staff writer for The Washington Post, he is also the leader of the Post’s national reporting team. Finkel received the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2006 and the MacArthur “Genius” Grant in 2012. He lives in Maryland with his wife and two daughters.

Albert "Skip" Rizzo is a clinical psychologist and Director of Medical Virtual Reality at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He is also a research professor with the USC Department of Psychiatry and at the USC Davis School of Gerontology. Rizzo conducts research on the design, development, and evaluation of Virtual Reality systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation across the domains of psychological, cognitive, and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations. This work has focused on PTSD, TBI, Autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke, and other clinical conditions. In his spare time, he listens to music, rides his motorcycle, and thinks about new ways that VR can have a positive impact on clinical care by dragging the field of psychology, kickin’, and screamin’, into the 21st Century.

Thomas Curwen is an award-winning staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, where he has worked as the editor of the Outdoors section, as a writer-at-large and editor for the features sections, and as the deputy editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has received an Academy of American Poets Prize, a Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for mental health journalism, and in 2008 he was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.

Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and a novelist. He is the author of The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three children.

Jesse Katz is the author of The Opposite Field, a memoir set in the immigrant suburb of Monterey Park. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, Jesse shared in two Pulitzer Prizes—for coverage of the 1994 Northridge earthquake and the 1992 L.A. riots. As a senior editor at Los Angeles magazine, he received the PEN Center USA’s award for literary journalism and the James Beard Foundation’s M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award. RatPac Entertainment is producing a movie based on Jesse’s most recent story, "Escape from Cuba: Yasiel Puig’s Untold Journey to the Dodgers."

Kim Bancroft is a longtime teacher turned editor and writer. Kim has edited several memoirs, including Ariel: A Memoir, by Ariel Parkinson; The Morning the Sun Went Down, by Darryl Babe Wilson; and Ruth’s Journey: A Survivor’s Memoir, by Ruth Glasberg Gold. Most recently, she edited Literary Industries, the 1890 memoir of her great-great-grandfather Hubert Howe Bancroft, historian, and founder of the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley (Heyday, 2013). She is also the author of The Heyday of Malcolm Margolin: The Damn Good Times of a Fiercely Independent Publisher.

Malcolm Margolin is executive director of Heyday, an independent nonprofit publisher and unique cultural institution, which he founded in 1974. Margolin is the author of several books, including The Ohlone Way: Indian Life in the San Francisco–Monterey Bay Area, named by the San Francisco Chronicle as one of the hundred most important books of the twentieth century by a western writer. He has received dozens of prestigious awards, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fred Cody Award Lifetime Achievement from the San Francisco Bay Area Book Reviewers Association, and a Cultural Freedom Award from the Lannan Foundation. He helped found the Bay Nature Institute and the Alliance for California Traditional Artists.

Vincent Medina, Jr, a member of the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area, works for Heyday Books, where he focuses on sharing the stories of the larger California Indian world. He authors the lively multimedia blog Being Ohlone in the 21st Century, and is active in the revitalization of the Chochenyo language, the indigenous language of the eastern shores of the San Francisco Bay that many linguists had long labeled "extinct." Using wax cylinder recordings and ethnographic notes, he has helped bring the language into modern times. Vincent is currently in college and lives in San Lorenzo, California, which is part of his Jalquin Ohlone ancestral homeland.

Diane Ackerman, poet, essayist, and naturalist, has been the finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction in addition to many other awards for her work, which includes the best-selling The Zookeeper’s Wife and A Natural History of the Senses. Her memoir One Hundred Words for Love was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has hosted the PBS series Mystery of the Senses and has the rare distinction of having a molecule named after her—dianeackerone— a pheromone in crocodilians.

Dr. Amy Parish is a biological anthropologist, primatologist, and Darwinian feminist, who has conducted ground-breaking research on patterns of female dominance and matriarchal social structure in one of our closest living relatives, the bonobo. Formerly a professor at the University of Southern California, she is now affiliated with faculty at Georgetown University and a research associate at University College London. Parish is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.

Laurel Braitman is a contributing writer for Pop Up Magazine, The New Inquiry, Orion, and other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in the history of science from MIT and is a Senior TED Fellow. Her newly published book is Animal Madness: How Anxious Dogs, Compulsive Parrots, and Elephants in Recovery Help Us Understand Ourselves.

Kathryn Bowers was a staff editor at The Atlantic and a writer and producer at CNN International. She has edited and written popular and academic books and teaches a course at UCLA on medical narrative. Bowers co-authored Zoobiquity with Barbara Natterson-Horowtiz.

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, M.D., earned her degrees at Harvard and the University of California, San Francisco. She is a cardiology professor at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and serves on the medical advisory board of the Los Angeles Zoo as a cardiovascular consultant. Her writing has appeared in many scientific and medical publications. Natterson-Horowitz co-authored Zoobiquity with Kathryn Bowers.

As KPCC's Science Reporter, Sanden Totten covers everything from space exploration and medical technology to endangered species and the latest earthquake research. Totten is the co-producer of Brains On!, a podcast for kids and curious adults about the scientific mysteries of the universe, and has won several honors, including the Radio and TV News Association’s Golden Mike for “Best Radio Medical and Science Reporting,” the National Entertainment Journalism's award for “Best Radio News Story,” and a 2011 Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT.