Participants: 2018

Avner Ash is Professor of Mathematics at Boston College.
His recent research is mostly in Number Theory, at an intersection of topology, group theory and Galois theory.

His Ph.D. was awarded at Harvard under the direction of David Mumford. He has held faculty positions at Columbia and The Ohio State University.… read more »

R. Luke DuBois is a composer, artist, and performer who explores the temporal, verbal, and visual structures of cultural and personal ephemera. He holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, and has lectured and taught worldwide on interactive sound and video performance.… read more »

John Eastwood, a registered Clinical Psychologist, holds an academic appointment at York University in Toronto Canada as an Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology where he trains future psychologists and conducts research on the intersection between cognition and emotion. He has examined how attention is allocated to affective and socially relevant information, the influence of mood and motivation on attention, as well as the affective consequences of attention failures.… read more »

Michael B. First M.D., is a Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Columbia University, a Research Psychiatrist in the Division of Behavioral Health Scienes and Policy Research, Diagnosis and Assessment Unit at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and maintains a schematherapy and psychopharmacology practice in Manhattan, Dr.… read more »

Enrico Fonda is a Postdoctoral Researcher from Italy in the Department of Physics at the New York University. He has a master in theoretical physics and a PhD in fluid dynamics from the University of Trieste, and he worked as researcher at the University of Maryland, College Park.… read more »

Jacqueline Gottlieb is Professor of Neuroscience in the Kavli Institute for Brain Science and the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Institute for Mind Brain and Behavior at Columbia University. She completed her education at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Yale University and the National Institute of Health, and she joined the Columbia Faculty in 2001.… read more »

William Grassie is an interdisciplinary scholar, academic entrepreneur, social activist, and author. Grassie received a B.A. in political science from Middlebury College and then worked for ten years on nuclear disarmament, citizen diplomacy, community organizing, and sustainability issues in Washington, D.C,… read more »

Garry Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has also held a Chair in the School of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Cornell 1994), Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (Cornell 1995), and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford 2008).… read more »

Michael Harris is Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University; before that he held positions at Brandeis University and Université Paris-Diderot. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1977 from Harvard University, under the direction of Barry Mazur. He has organized or co-organized more than 20 conferences, workshops, and special programs in his field of number theory.… read more »

Laura Hirshbein is professor of psychiatry at the University of Michigan. She completed her MD and psychiatry residency at the University of Michigan, and also completed a PhD in the history of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University. Her first book, American Melancholy: Constructions of Depression in the Twentieth Century was published by Rutgers University Press in 2009.… read more »

Gerald Hurowitz is Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry and on faculty for the past 30 years at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons. He has a full-time clinical practice in psychopharmacology and neuropsychiatry in New York City. Dr. Hurowitz is a founder and Chief Medical Officer at M3 Information, an information technology company that focuses on mental health integration into primary care.… read more »

Dana is a research-based artist working with digital imagery, sculpture, installation, and painting. Her research explores the human (and post-human) relationship to the environment by colliding speculative architecture with empirical observation. This is driven by her love of the ironic in architecture—including intentional and unintentional zoomorphic structures, her fear of storms and the ocean—and her fascination observing and being in a constant state of motion.… read more »

Dr. Krakauer is the John C. Malone Professor at the Malone Center for Engineering in Healthcare, Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience, Professor of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Director of the Brain, Learning, Animation, and Movement Lab, and co-founder of the Kata Project at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.… read more »

Jonathan Kramnick is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale University. His research and teaching is in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, philosophical approaches to literature, and cognitive science and the arts. He is the author of three books. His new book, Paper Minds: Literature and the Ecology of Consciousness (Chicago, 2018), asks what distinctive knowledge the literary disciplines and literary form can contribute to discussions of perceptual consciousness, created and natural environments, and skilled engagement with the world.… read more »

Francis Lee is the Mortimer D. Sackler Professor and Vice Chair for Research in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, and attending psychiatrist at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. He received his MD and PhD from the University of Michigan, and psychiatry training at Payne Whitney Clinic and completed postdoctoral training, at New York University and the University of California, San Francisco.… read more »

George Makari is the Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry and Professor of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is an Adjunct Professor at Rockefeller University and Columbia University’s Psychoanalytic Center. Dr. Makari writes and lectures widely on the mind sciences and the lessons to be learned from the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis.… read more »

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He received his B. A. in Physics and Philosophy from Yale and his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. His work centers on the interpretation of physical theory: how the mathematical structures used in physics may be understood as presenting a physical account of the world.… read more »

Barry Mazur is a mathematician at Harvard University who has often taught courses in History of Science and Philosophy. His books include: Imagining Numbers (particularly the squareroot of minus fifteen) (Farrar Straus and Giroux); Prime Numbers and the Riemann Hypothesis, written with William Stein (Cambridge University Press) and he has edited with Apostolos Doxiadis the book of essays Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative (Princeton University Press).… read more »

Robert Michels, M.D. is the Walsh McDermott University Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, where he previously served as Provost, Dean, and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry. He is former Joint Editor-in-Chief of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, and a former Training and Supervising Analyst at Columbia Psychoanalytic Center.… read more »

Kenneth Miller is the Peter Taylor Professor of Neuroscience, co-Director of the Center for Theoretical Neuroscience, and co-Director of the Neurobiology and Behavior Graduate Program at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Reed College, his M.S. and Ph.D. (with distinction) from Stanford University, and completed his postdoctoral work at UCSF and Caltech.… read more »

Barbara Gail Montero is Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York. She has been awarded research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Her work focuses on one or the other of two different notions of body: body as the physical or material basis of everything, and body as the moving, breathing, flesh and blood instrument that we use when we run, walk, or dance.… read more »

Priyamvada Natarajan’s research is focused on exotica in the Universe-dark matter, dark energy and black holes. She is noted for her key contributions to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology: mapping the distribution of dark matter and tracing the growth history of black holes.… read more »

Denis G. Pelli, Professor of Psychology and Neural Science, NYU, since 1995, studying object recognition and the experience of beauty. Training: BA applied math at Harvard University. PhD in Physiology at Cambridge University. Postdoc on psychophysics of reading with Gordon Legge at U Minnesota.… read more »

A writer, pianist, physicist, and educator, Peter Pesic is the director of the Science Institute and Musician-in-Residence at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, NM. His six books published by MIT Press concern the intersections of science, music, history, and ideas, including Abel’s Proof: A Search for the Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability, Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres, and Music and the Making of Modern Science.… read more »

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than fifty books from the French, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, and Raymond Roussel. A Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of a 2016 American Academy of Arts & Letters Award for Literature, he is the author of eleven books, including Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995; revised ed.,… read more »

Stephen G. Post, Ph.D. has taught at the University of Chicago Medical School, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine (1988-2008), and Stony Brook University School of Medicine (2008-), where he is Director of the Center for Medical Humanities, Compassionate Care, and Bioethics.… read more »

Dr. Josefa Ros Velasco is Associate in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University and Real Colegio Complutense at Harvard Postdoctoral Fellow. She is conducting a multidisciplinary research on the evolutionary role of boredom from a philosophical-anthropological point of view to argue against the spread understanding of boredom as a pathological personality trait whereby medicalization of such a common, daily annoyance is legitimized.… read more »

Francesca Rossi is an IBM Fellow and the IBM AI Ethics Global Leader. She is based at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab, New York, USA, where she leads AI research projects. She co-chairs the IBM AI Ethics board and she participates in many global multi-stakeholder initiatives on AI ethics, such as the Partnership on AI, the World Economic Forum, the United Nations ITU AI for Good Summit, and the Global Partnership on AI.… read more »

Carol Rovane is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, where she has served as Director of Graduate Studies and Chair of the Philosophy Department, and was recently awarded the Lenfest Distinguished Faculty Award.  She publishes widely in the areas of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of action and ethics, and has authored two books:  The Bounds of Agency:  An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, and The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism.  … read more »

Lee M. Silver is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton University and co-founder of GenePeek, a genetic research company which screens couples for possible prospective genetic disorders in their children. Silver is the author of the book Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family (1998) and Challenging Nature: The Clash of Science and Spirituality at the New Frontiers of Life (2006).… read more »

Katepalli Sreenivasan holds professorships in the Department of Physics as well as the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and is the Eugene Kleiner Professor for Innovation in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at NYU. He is also University Professor in NYU, a title conferred upon scholars whose work is interdisciplinary and reflects exceptional breadth.… read more »

Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D. Hebrew University, 1978) is Regents’ Professor, Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, Director of Jewish Studies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Her research focuses on Jewish intellectual history, religion and science, and religious environmentalism.… read more »

Miklos Toth is a neuroscientist, professor of Pharmacology at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. His laboratory has long been interested in the pathomechanism of neuropsychiatric diseases. The research group uses genetically modified mice to reproduce symptoms of these conditions, including anxiety, hyperactivity disorders, and cognitive and social behavioral abnormalities.… read more »