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Ken Chien is the director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego, and a professor in the university's department of medicine and at the Salk Institute (adjunct). His hobbies include wine tasting, oriental art and losing to his daughters at tennis.
Joan Slonczewski is a microbiologist at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and is also an acclaimed writer of science fiction (see Nature 405, 1001; 2000). Her novels include Brain Plague and A Door into Ocean.
Kevin Padian is professor of integrative biology and curator in the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, and president of the National Center for Science Education. His research focuses on how major adaptive evolutionary changes get started.
Terry L. Root is a senior fellow in the Center for Environmental Science and Policy at the Stanford Institute for International Studies. She is an ecologist who specializes in conservation biology, biogeography and ornithology.
Vera Rubin, senior fellow in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, Carnegie Institution of Washington, is wife, parent and astronomer, in that order. She and husband Bob have four PhD offspring: two geologists, an astronomer and a mathematician.
Chris Miller is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and professor of biochemistry at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and works on ion-channel mechanisms.
Roberto Macchiarelli is a palaeoanthropologist. Until recently at the National Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography in Rome, he is currently professor of human palaeontology at the University of Poitiers, France.
Yvon Le Maho studies how animals adapt to the environment, and is especially fond of penguins. He is director of the CNRS Centre d'Ecologie et Physiologie Energétiques in Strasbourg, France.