Jehoshua (Shuki) Bruck is the Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Computation and Neural Systems and Electrical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology.   He received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, in 1982 and 1985, respectively and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1989.

Dennis Callahan is a third year graduate student in Materials Science at the California Institute of Technology. His thesis is focused on exploring design limits for novel types of solar cells to achieve maximum efficiency with minimum cost and use of raw materials.  He has created many types of scientific art, and his images have twice consecutively won first place at Caltech’s “Art of Science” competition. In his spare time Dennis is an amateur photographer and singer-songwriter.

Adam Cochran is an attorney who joined the profession after a somewhat tortuous path.  After graduating from Hanover College (major in Chemistry and Business Administration, minor in Physics and Math), he spent twelve years touring as a musician before completing his MS at Purdue University and obtaining a Juris Doctor degree at Loyola University in Chicago.

S. George Djorgovski is a Professor of Astronomy and a Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Computing Research at Caltech, and the Director of the Meta-Institute for Computational Astrophsics, the first professional scientific organization based in virtual worlds.  He received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1985, was a Harvard Junior Fellow, and joined the Caltech faculty in 1987.

Michelle Feynman is the daughter of Richard Feynman. A graduate of Art Center College of Design, Michelle is a freelance photographer and spends most of her days taking pictures. She is perhaps best known as the editor of Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track: The Letters of Richard P. Feynman, a collection of letters to and from her father.

Eric Heller was born in Washington D.C. in 1946.  He received his BS from the University of Minnesota in 1968, and his PhD in Chemical Physics in 1973 from Harvard University.  After a postdoc at the University of Chicago, Rick joined the chemistry faculty at UCLA in 1975, becoming a Professor in 1981.

Sanjoy Mahajan obtained his PhD in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1998, after an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Oxford and in physics from Stanford. Due to his wonderful teachers, he became interested in improving science teaching, an interest he has followed at the University of Cambridge, as a faculty member in the physics department;

Kongar-Ol Ondar (Tuvan: Коңар-өл Ондар) is a master Tuvan throat singer and a member of the Great Khural of Tuva. Ondar was born in 1962 near the Khemchik River in western Tuva. Considered a living treasure by the Republic of Tuva, Ondar is granted a stipend and an apartment for the musical skills he possesses.

Rives is a poet by trade and a paper engineer by training.  He has appeared on multiple seasons of HBO's "Def Poetry Jam" and he was the host of Bravo TV's "Ironic Iconic America," which required him to drive around the United States with a supermodel in a red '67 Cadillac El Dorado.

Christopher Sykes is a TV documentary producer based in London.  He was born in 1945, and was educated at the Atlantic College and Merton College, Oxford where he read English.  In 1970 he joined the BBC as a television researcher.

Zvi Bern is currently Professor of Physics at UCLA.  He received undergraduate degrees in physics and mathematics from MIT and a PhD in theoretical particle physics from UC Berkeley.  He is widely known in theoretical physics for research into improved ways of calculating Feynman diagrams without using Feynman diagrams, offering new insights into quantum gravity and into experiments to be carried out at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

Jimmy Branly, born in Havana, grew up in a rich musical environment of Cuban flavors. He began his studies at the Havana’s Conservatory of Music.  At age 9, his father introduced him to rock, not a significant genre in Cuba.  Deep Purple’s 1972 album, “Made in Japan”, captivated Jimmy and drew him into the world of music.

Rich Breen has been working at the highest levels of professional audio for 25 years.  Awarded a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester, he studied music at the Eastman School of Music, and then became Technical Manager at Chicago’s famous Universal Recording Studio in 1981.  In 1989 he launched out as a freelance engineer.

Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology.  He received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University, and has previously worked at MIT, the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago.  His research ranges over a number of topics in theoretical physics, focusing on cosmology, particle physics, and general relativity, with special emphasis on dark matter, dark energy, and the origin of the universe.

Simon Fölling studies quantum many-body systems, such as the ones found in magnetic and semiconducting materials, by using ultracold atomic gases. He started to work in the field when graduating from the University of Heidelberg, and subsequently during his PhD in Mainz, Germany and a postdoc at Harvard University. He is still so fascinated by this field that he now started a new project in the field at the University of Munich.

Tony Hey is corporate vice president in Microsoft Research, and responsible for its multidisciplinary eScience Research Group and research collaborations between Microsoft and university researchers worldwide. Previously, he directed the U.K.'s e-Science Initiative, helping to build a new scientific infrastructure for collaborative, multidisciplinary, data-intensive research.

Jeff Marlow is a graduate student in Geological and Planetary Sciences at the California Institute of Technology where hestudies exotic microbial metabolisms in an attempt to understand the limits of life on Earth and beyond.  He has followed extreme life forms to acidic rivers, ice caves, deserts, the high Andes, and the deep ocean, and has worked on NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers and Phoenix Mars Lander.

Lyle Mays has been an integral part of the Pat Metheny Group since its inception in 1977, and has co-written much of the consistently engaging music for the multi-Grammy-winning group's albums. Lyle's sense of melody, crystal clear virtuosity and almost cinematic scope of orchestration has clearly distinguished the group's sound.

Andrew Pask, originally from New Zealand, plays clarinets and saxophones.  He studied and played in his hometown of Wellington before heading to Hong Kong where he worked as a studio musician, performed on albums for Cantopop stars, and played jazz all over Asia.  Since arriving in Los Angeles in 1999 he has become an integral part of its creative music scene.

John Preskill is the Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology, and Director of the Institute for Quantum Information at Caltech. Preskill received his A.B. in physics in 1975 from Princeton, and his Ph.D. in physics in 1980 from Harvard.

Bob Rice is a producer, guitarist, sound designer, and engineer, who has spent the past 30 years in LA and abroad, working in music, television, and film. Bob has worked as a synth programmer, sound designer, and audio engineer with Frank Zappa, Roger Waters, Michael Jackson, Bonnie Raitt, Lyle Mays, Chick Corea, Simon and Garfunkel, Bette Midler, Van Dyke Parks, Brian Wilson,

Leonard Susskind is the Felix Bloch Professor of Physics at Stanford University.  Lenny has been a Professor of Physics at Stanford University since 1979; his research interests include string theory, quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics, and quantum cosmology.

Nadine Dabby is a graduate student in Computation and Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology, where she works on DNA nanotechnology and molecular programming in the Winfree Lab.  Prior to attending Caltech, she completed a double major in Molecular and Cell Biology and English Literature at UC Berkeley.

Mark E. Davis is the Warren and Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology and a member of the Experimental Therapeutics Program of the Comprehensive Cancer Center at the City of Hope.  He has over 350 scientific publications, two textbooks, and over 50 patents.  He is the recipient of numerous awards, and was the first engineer to win the NSF Alan T. Waterman Award.

Don Eigler, an IBM Fellow, is a physicist at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, where he has been a leader of the Low-Temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscopy Project. His research is aimed at understanding the physics of nanometer-scale structures and exploring their applications to computation.

Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author and engineer, and is chairman and co-founder of Applied Minds.  Previously, he was Vice President and Disney Fellow at Walt Disney Imagineering and was a co-founder of Thinking Machines Corp. Danny pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, and RAID disk array technology used to store large databases while completing his PhD at MIT.

Charlie Marcus is Professor of Physics at Harvard.  He was an undergraduate at Stanford, earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, and continued there as an IBM postdoc.  In 1992 he joined the physics faculty at Stanford University, but returned to Harvard in 2000 to assume his current appointment.  From 2004-2009, he was Director of Harvard’s Center for Nanoscale Systems.

Stephen Quake studied physics (BS ‘91) and mathematics (MS ‘91) at Stanford University before earning his doctorate in physics from Oxford University as a Marshall scholar (‘94).  Thereafter, as a postdoc in Nobel Laureate Steven Chu's group at Stanford, he developed techniques to manipulate single DNA molecules with optical tweezers.

Michael Roukes, TEDxCaltech co-organizer, is the Robert M. Abbey Professor of Physics, Applied Physics, and Bioengineering at Caltech.  He was founding Director of Caltech’s Kavli Nanoscience Institute (KNI), and currently serves as its co-Director.  Michael co-founded and is co-Director of the Alliance for Nanosystems VLSI (very-large-scale integration), a vital collaboration between KNI researchers and counterparts at CEA/LETI in Grenoble, France – the site of a $B-scale semiconductor research foundry.

Jordan Theriot is a third-year undergraduate majoring in chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. Jordan is working in the lab of Professor Robert Grubbs designing and synthesizing new metathesis catalysts, which are important for the formation of new carbon-carbon bonds.