Temple Grandin is the author of several best-selling books, which have sold more than a million copies, and one of the world’s most accomplished and well-known adults with autism. The HBO movie based on her life, starring Claire Danes, received seven Emmy Awards. Grandin is a professor at Colorado State University. Her new book is The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum.

Frans de Waal is the author of Our Inner Ape, Chimpanzee Politics, The Age of Empathy, and most recently, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. He has been named among Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and is the C. H. Candler Professor in Emory University’s Psychology Department.

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 for 13 years, she has now affiliated with faculty at Georgetown University and is a research associate at University College London.  Parish is currently working on a book about love, marriage, and the experience of being a wife.

Cheryl Strayed is the author of the critically acclaimed novel Torch and Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, a collection of writings from her "Dear Sugar" column in The Rumpus. Her memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was chosen by Oprah Winfrey as the inaugural title for Oprah’s Book Club 2.0. Her stories and essays have been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post Magazine, Allure, The Rumpus, The Missouri Review, The Sun, The Best American Essays, and elsewhere.

Judith Lewis Mernit is a contributing editor at High Country News, where she writes about politics, the environment, and natural resources. Her work has also appeared in Mother Jones, The Atlantic, Sierra, Audubon, the LA Weekly and the Los Angeles Times.

Alexandra Katona-Carroll has been working in the specialty coffee industry for nearly seven years. She is the programs manager for the Coffee Quality Institute (CQI) and a member of the Specialty Coffee Association of America’s (SCAA) Sustainability Council, where she worked for two years. While in college, Katona-Carroll worked with a coffee cooperative in Chiapas and helped co-found a student-run coffee business. She has also lived and worked in Ecuador with a cacao cooperative and is involved in the Women in Coffee Leadership Program.

Jay Ruskey is the founder of Good Land Organics (GLO), an organic farm in Goleta, CA, that grows and markets organic and rare fruits locally and nationally, including coffee, cherimoya, passion fruit, avocado, lychee, longan, and micro-citrus. GLO has been collaborating on the coffee growing project with Mark Gaskell of the University of California Cooperative Extension. This trial evaluates all aspects of growing coffee in California with over a dozen named varieties. Ruskey also developed a crop risk model design and applied beta testing for evaluating crops over long periods of time with uncertain variables. He works and collaborates with several agricultural business boards.

Angel Orozco is the founder of Cafecito Orgánico, a locally based roaster and brick-and-mortar coffee shop with four locations in Southern California. Prior to opening Cafecito Orgánico, Orozco worked with community advocacy groups, such as Strategic Actions for a Just Economy, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, Mama’s Hot Tamales Café, and the Salvadoran American Leadership and Education Fund. He also helped lay the groundwork for the City of Los Angeles’ Plastic Bag Ban.  Orozco’s passion and commitment to working for economic and social justice translates perfectly to working in the coffee industry and in influencing working conditions in his native Guatemala.

Peter Giuliano has worked for a quarter century in specialty coffee as a coffee educator, taster, roaster, and buyer.  He was a founder and president of the Roasters’ Guild and served as president of the Specialty Coffee Association of America.  As co-owner and Director of Coffee for Counter Culture Coffee, he pioneered what has come to be known as Direct Trade Coffee, an approach that emphasizes quality, equity, and transparency in the supply chain.  Giuliano is currently the Director of the Specialty Coffee Symposium, a cutting-edge conference and community of thought leaders in coffee.

Dr. Bernie Krause is both a musician and a naturalist. During the 1950s and 60s, he devoted himself to music and replaced Pete Seeger as the guitarist for the Weavers. For more than forty years, Krause has traveled the world, recording and archiving the sounds of creatures and environments large and small. He has recorded more than fifteen thousand species and four thousand hours of wild soundscapes, over half of which no longer exist in nature, due to encroaching noise and human activity.

Eric Lax is the author of Faith, Interrupted; Conversations with Woody Allen; Life and Death on 10 West (A New York Times Notable Book of the Year); The Mold in Dr. Florey's Coat (A Los Angeles Times Best Book of 2004); and co-author, with A. M. Sperber, of Bogart (nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography). His biography Woody Allen was a New York Times and international bestseller and a Notable Book of the Year. His books have been translated into eighteen languages, and his writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He is an officer of PEN International.

Dr. Robert Peter Gale, M.D. is the author of more than twenty books, eight hundred scientific articles, and numerous pieces on medical topics and nuclear energy for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal. For twenty years, Gale was on the faculty of the UCLA School of Medicine and has served as chairman of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry. Dr. Gale was appointed by the Soviet Union government in 1986 to lead the medical relief efforts for victims of the Chernobyl nuclear power station accident, and in 2011, the Japanese government requested that Gale be in charge of treating radiation victims from the deadly Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Photo Credit: Jeremy Sutton Hibbert for Greenpeace. Image taken in Fukushima, Japan.

Paul Tough is the author of Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest To Change Harlem and America. He has written extensively about education, child development, and poverty in cover stories for the New York Times Magazine, and for The New Yorker, Slate, GQ, Esquire, and the op-ed page of the New York Times. Tough has worked as an editor at the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s Magazine, and as a reporter and producer for NPR’s This American Life. He is founding editor of Open Letters, an online magazine.

Patt Morrison is a writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Times and host of the daily Patt Morrison public affairs program on KPCC. She has won six Emmys and six Golden Mike awards as founding host and commentator on Life & Times Tonight, the nightly news and current affairs program on KCET. Her one-on-one television interview subjects include Salman Rushdie, Henry Kissinger, Frank Gehry, Ray Bradbury, Joan Didion, and many more.

Lisa Randall is the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She studies theoretical particle physics and cosmology and her research connects theoretical insights to puzzles in our current understanding of the properties and interactions of matter. Randall’s current research focuses in large part on the Large Hadron Collider and dark matter searches and models. Her book Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions was included in the New York Times' 100 notable books of 2005. Randall has also recently pursued art-science connections, writing a libretto for Hypermusic: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes that premiered in the Pompidou Center in 2009, and Measure for Measure, an art exhibit she co-curated, opened in Los Angeles in 2010.

Lynda Obst authored the best-selling book, Hello He Lied: And Other Truths from the Hollywood Trenches and blogs frequently about meta-business issues for The Atlantic.com culture channel as well as The Huffington Post. She is a prolific film & television producer who has made films at almost every major motion picture studio including such titles as: How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Contact, Sleepless in Seattle, The Siege, One Fine Day, Hope Floats and The Fisher King. Obst executive produced NBC's Emmy Nominated miniseries The 60's, is currently an Executive Producer on TVLAND's Hot In Cleveland, and is producing TV and movies out of her office at Sony. Lynda studied the Philosophy of Science at Columbia and is an abiding science geek.

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, a MacArthur prize-winning sociologist, is the Emily Hargroves Fisher Professor of Education at Harvard. As a sociologist, she examines the culture of schools, the patterns and structures of classroom life, socialization within families and communities, and the relationship between culture and learning styles. She is the author of ten books, including Balm in Gilead, The Third Chapter and her most recent work, Exit: The Endings that Set Us Free.

Robin Kramer has been an active leader in Los Angeles civic affairs for over three decades. She was the first woman to hold the position of Chief of Staff to both Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Richard Riordan, and was a senior executive at the California Community Foundation, Broad Foundation and Coro Southern California. She is currently working as Senior Advisor to The Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, chairs the Pitzer College Board of Trustees, and serves as one of five commissioners of the Port of Los Angeles, the economic engine for Southern California.

Kathleen Dean Moore is an essayist and activist who writes about cultural and spiritual connections to wet wild places. Her award-winning books include Riverwalking, Holdfast, The Pine Island Paradox, and Wild Comfort. Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, her newest book, gathers calls from the world's moral leaders to honor our obligations to future generations. Moore, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Oregon State University, publishes in both environmental ethics and popular journals such as Audubon, Discover, and Orion, where she serves on the Board of Directors.

Craig Childs is a writer who focuses on natural sciences, archaeology, and remarkable journeys into the wilderness. He has published more than a dozen critically acclaimed books on nature, science, and adventure. He is a commentator for NPR's Morning Edition, and his work has appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, Outside, and Orion. His subjects range from pre-Columbian archaeology to U.S. border issues to the last free-flowing rivers of Tibet and Patagonia. He has won several awards for his writing.

William Deverell is a professor of history at USC, where he specializes in the history of California and the American West and directs a scholarly institute that collaborates with the Huntington Library in Pasadena. He is the author of Whitewashed Adobe: The Rise of Los Angeles and the Remaking of Its Mexican Past and Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910. With Greg Hise, he is co-author of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region. William is a Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for Humanities at USC.