2013-14 Series
Baba Brinkman is a Canadian rap artist, award-winning playwright, and former tree-planter who has personally planted more than one million trees. He has a Masters in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature from the University of Victoria.Baba has written or co-written four hip-hop theatre shows, which have toured the world and enjoyed successful runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and off-Broadway in New York. He has also released ten hip-hop albums on his independent label Lit Fuse Records.The Rap Guide to Evolution (“Astonishing and brilliant” NY Times) won a Scotsman Fringe First Award and a Drama Desk Award nomination, and was featured on US national TV on The Rachel Maddow Show and at the Seattle Science Festival opening for Stephen Hawking.
Baba is a recent recipient of the National Center for Science Education’s “Friend of Darwin Award” for his efforts to improve the public understanding of evolutionary biology. |
Gad Saad is Professor of Marketing at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada), and the holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption. He has held Visiting Associate Professorships at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and the University of California–Irvine. Dr. Saad received the Faculty of Commerce’s Distinguished Teaching Award in June 2000, and was listed as one of the ‘hot’ professors of Concordia University in both the 2001 and 2002 Maclean’s reports on Canadian universities. For more than 15 years now, his work has operated at the nexus of evolutionary psychology and consumer behavior. He is the author of The Consuming Instinct: What Juicy Burgers, Ferraris, Pornography, and Gift Giving Reveal About Human Nature (Prometheus Books, 2011), and The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007), and editor of Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences (Springer, 2011), as well as editor of a special issue on the futures of evolutionary psychology published inFutures (Elsevier, 2011). He has published 70+ scientific papers, many at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and a broad range of disciplines including consumer behavior, marketing, advertising, psychology, medicine, and economics. Professor Saad’s work has been covered in 300+ international media outlets leading him to be designated a Concordia University Newsmaker on three separate occasions. Dr. Saad is a highly popular blogger for Psychology Today. Since November 2008, his posts have amassed 2,132,000+ total views. He received a B.Sc. in mathematics and computer science (1988) and an M.B.A. (1990) both from McGill University, and his M.S. (1993) and Ph.D. (1994) from Cornell University.
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Gregory Retallack is Professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Oregon whose research focus is paleobotany and paleosols. He was educated in Australia to PhD from the University of New England in 1978. After a postdoc at Indiana University he joined the faculty of the University of Oregon in 1981, where he has been a full professor since 1992. He has published 10 books and 230 refereed papers largely on the fossil record of soils. Highlights include co-evolution of grassland ecosystems, Permian-Triassic extinctions, and Precambrian life on land. His work has been recognized by the Stillwell Award of the Geological Society of Australia, the Antarctic service medal of the US National Science Foundation, and Fellowship of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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Sarah Tishkoff is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor in Genetics and Biology at the University of Pennsylvania, holding appointments in the School of Medicine and the School of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Tishkoff studies genomic and phenotypic variation in ethnically diverse Africans. Her research combines field work, laboratory research, and computational methods to examine African population history and how genetic variation can affect a wide range of practical issues – for example, why humans have different susceptibility to disease, how they metabolize drugs, and how they adapt through evolution. Dr. Tishkoff is a recipient of an NIH Pioneer Award, a David and Lucile Packard Career Award, a Burroughs/Wellcome Fund Career Award and a Penn Integrates Knowledge (PIK) endowed chair. She is on the editorial boards at Genome Research; Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health; Molecular Biology and Evolution; G3 (Genes, Genomes, and Genetics), and The Quarterly Review of Biology. Her research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
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James Costa is Executive Director of the Highlands Biological Station and Professor of Biology at Western Carolina University. An entomologist with a special interest in group-living caterpillars and sawflies, he has studied insect social behavior from the southern Appalachians to Latin America and Europe. Through his insect work, Costa is also a long-time Research Associate in Entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and, in 2004-2005, was Jeanne Rosselet Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. He is the author of The Other Insect Societies (Harvard University Press 2006). Costa has taught genetics, biogeography, entomology, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and field courses in Hawaii and the desert southwest, and has lectured widely on insects, Darwin, and Enlightenment naturalists such as William Bartram in the US, Europe, and the Galápagos. His passion for Darwin and the history of evolutionary biology also takes him to the UK each summer, where he teaches Darwin’s Origin of Species in Harvard’s summer program at the University of Oxford. Costa’s latest book is The Annotated Origin (Harvard 2009) an annotated edition of On the Origin of Species designed to help readers better understand the historical context, structure, and content of Darwin’s masterwork. He is currently at work on books relating to Darwin’s experiments and the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the principle of natural selection.
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Lawrence M. Krauss is an internationally known theoretical physicist and cosmologist whose research covers science from the beginning of the universe to the end of the universe. He is Foundation Professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration and director of Arizona State University‘s Origins Project. His research interests include the interface between elementary particle physics and cosmology, the nature of dark matter, general relativity and neutrino astrophysics. He has investigated questions ranging from the nature of exploding stars to issues of the origin of all mass in the universe. He is an advocate of public understanding of science, public policy based on sound empirical data, scientific skepticism, and science education, and works to reduce the impact of superstition and religious dogma in pop culture. Krauss is the author of many scientific publications, as well as several acclaimed popular books, including The Fifth Essence (1995), Fear of Physics(1994), The Physics of Star Trek (HarperPerennial 1995), and his latest, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press 2012).
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