In a previous life, Luigi Anzivino earned a Ph.D. in neuroscience, researching the brain's reward and attentional mechanisms. Currently, he designs, builds and facilitates hands-on "playful and inventive explorations" at the Exploratorium, San Francisco's museum of art, science and human perception.

David Baron is health and science editor for The World, a daily international news program co-produced by the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH in Boston. He oversees the show’s science content on the radio and the Web, and he produces his own science stories from around the world (most recently from Sweden, Peru and Sudan).

Barry Brown is an associate professor at the University of Montana Mansfield Library in Missoula, Montana, where he has worked as the science librarian since 1990, and where he also holds a position as an affiliate faculty member in the Environmental Studies Department.

Mary Comerio is an internationally recognized expert on disaster recovery. She joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley in 1978 and served as chair of the department from 2006-2009.

Dr. Imke de Pater is a professor in the Department of Astronomy at University of California, Berkeley, and a world-renowned planetary scientist. She is an authority on modeling and mapping the planets of our solar system, and led a worldwide campaign to observe the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in 1994.

Moe Flannery is the collections manager for Ornithology & Mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences. Her department houses 142,000 catalogued specimens, including study skins, pelts, skulls, complete skeletons, tissues, mounted specimens, eggs and nests. Many of the department's collections are from geographic areas that are extremely difficult or impossible for American researchers to access today.

Dr. Dan Fletcher is an associate professor in the bioengineering department and biophysics program at the University of California, Berkeley, where his research focuses on the biophysics of cell movements and the cytoskeleton and development of biomedical devices.

Dr. Brent Iverson is the Warren J. and Viola Mae Raymer Professor and Distinguished Teaching Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, and member of the Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology, at the University of Texas at Austin.

Mary Beth Kirchner is a veteran independent producer who has worked for the past 20 years developing award-winning programming for public radio and network television. For more than a decade, her programs have focused on the brain.

Andrea Kissack was born in Los Angeles and discovered radio news through listening to her college radio station. With a curious mind and a love for telling stories, she set off for Tampa where she landed her first job as a reporter for Florida Public Radio.

Dr. Norma Kobzina is the head of Information Services at the Marian Koshland Bioscience and Natural Resources Library at UC Berkeley. She is responsible for the natural resources collections, which include environmental science, forestry, conservation resources, insect biology, nutrition and food science, agricultural economics, and plant and microbial biology.

Arnold Kriegstein, M.D., Ph.D., is a professor of neurology, the John Bowes Distinguished Professor in Stem Cell and Tissue Biology, and the director of the Eli and Edythe Broad Center of Regeneration Medicine and Stem Cell Research at the University of California, San Francisco.

Sally Lehrman is Santa Clara University’s Knight Ridder-San Jose Mercury News Endowed Chair in Journalism and the Public Interest. Also an independent journalist, she specializes in covering race relations, identity and gender within the context of medicine and science.

Margo Melnicove has been working in public broadcasting as a reporter, producer, editor, anchor, news manager and trainer for more than 30 years, and has been teaching journalism at the college level since 1994. She currently teaches a core course in the journalism program at Brandeis University, “Writing and Producing News for Broadcast and the Internet.”

Leilani Miller is an associate professor of biology at Santa Clara University. She teaches courses in genetics, molecular biology, biotech ethics, genetics and society, and difficult dialogues in genetics and medicine. Her research interests are cell signaling and cell fate determination.

Brent Mishler is the director of the University and Jepson Herbaria at University of California, Berkeley, as well as a professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, where he teaches phylogenetic systematics, plant diversity, evolution and island biology.

Jessica Neely, an Oakland native, joined KQED in 2004 for the R&D and pilot phases of QUEST. She is a graduate of University of California Davis with a bachelor’s degree in evolution and ecology, and she holds a single subject teaching credential in biology and general science from Mills College.

Formerly a television associate producer with QUEST, Jenny Oh has now joined the interactive team for seasons 4 and 5 and looks forward to continuing her cross-platform collaboration with the project.

Dr. Norm Penny is the senior collections manager in the Entomology Department at the California Academy of Sciences. He will give a tour of the department, which contains 14.5 million insects and arachnids, and explain how natural history collections such as this are extremely valuable to scientists studying the evolution and sustainability of life on Earth.

Award-winning science journalist Alison Richards is deputy supervising senior editor and a correspondent for NPR's Science Desk. She oversees the desk's daily output of science, environmental and technical stories and also edits Robert Krulwich.

Dr. Lee Riley is professor and head of the Division of Infectious Disease and Vaccinology and a member of the Division of Epidemiology at the School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley. He is a physician who has been trained in both epidemiology and molecular biology research.

Stuart Russell is the Smith-Zadeh Professor and the chair of electrical engineering and computer sciences at University of California, Berkeley, a fellow of AAAI and ACM, winner of the Computers and Thought Award and the ACM Outstanding Educator Award, and co-author of Artificial Intelligence:A Modern Approach, the standard text in AI. He is also an adjunct professor of neurosurgery at University of California, San Francisco, and a consultant to the United Nations on the detection of nuclear explosions.

Dr. Eugenie C. Scott is executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Inc., a not-for-profit membership organization of scientists, teachers and others who work to improve the teaching of evolution and of science as a way of knowing. It opposes the teaching of “scientific” creationism and other religiously-based views in science classes.

Dr. Brian Simison is the curator of comparative genomics at the California Academy of Sciences. He has consistently positioned himself at the forefront of DNA technology and currently oversees the Center for Comparative Genomics, which is the Academy's in-house laboratory for DNA sequencing and analyzing evolutionary relationships. He will give a tour of the laboratory and explain the importance of DNA sequencing in modern evolutionary biology.

As director of the Energy Biosciences Institute, Dr. Chris Somerville oversees all open activities at the institute, including research, communications, education and outreach. He also chairs the institute's executive committee and reports to the governance board.

Lauren Sommer is a Bay Area native who recently returned from a stint in the Big Apple. Her background is in environmental policy and she is a graduate of Cornell University with a degree in political science and policy. Most recently, she worked as a Web writer and outreach coordinator for the non-profit group Environmental Defense.

Dr. Michael Starbird is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers. He received his bachelor’s degree from Pomona College and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The assistant editor for WNYC's RadioLab, Soren Wheeler got his bachelor’s degree in literature, creative writing and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. After graduation, he was a project coordinator at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At AAAS, he evaluated science and math tests and textbooks, wrote several peer-reviewed articles on science education, and co-authored the book Atlas of Science Literacy.