New Horizons in Science

Natalie Batalha thought she wanted to follow her parents into a business career until she got to college and encountered freshman physics. “What impressed me was how ordered the universe is,” she says. “When you internalize that fact, you begin to fully realize the beauty of it.” As part of her work on the Kepler mission, she was responsible for the selection of the more than 150,000 planets that Kepler monitors for evidence of planets.
 

David M. Buss is one of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. He is the author of several books, including The Evolution of Desire and The Dangerous Passion. His most recent book is Why Women Have Sex (co-written with Cindy Meston). In his research, Buss studies sexual attraction, mate guarding, sexual deception, sexual competition, relationship breakups and the effects of ovulation on women’s sexuality.

Ralph J. Cicerone's, Ph.D.,  studies of atmospheric energy dynamics, climate change, and ozone depletion have long put him at the intersection of science and government policy. He has directed atmospheric chemistry studies at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, is a former president of the American Geophysical Union, and was chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, from 1998 to 2005.

Jason De León is an Army brat who grew up in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas and in Long Beach, CA. His research interests focus on political economy, undocumented migration, deportation, violence, material culture and archaeology of the contemporary past. Since 2008 he has directed the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a long-term analysis of clandestine border crossing. In addition to his academic research, Jason has been a touring musician since the 1990s. He has released several independent records and toured the U.S. and Mexico multiple times.
 

Jeffrey Foster is a wildlife biologist specializing in infectious diseases. His studies of bats were preceded by work on work on brucellosis (it’s not bison that are infecting cattle; it’s elk) and on avian malaria in Hawaiian honeycreepers.
 

Andrea Gore serves on the faculty of the Division of Pharmacology & Toxicology at the University of Texas College of Pharmacy. She is one of a small group of researchers studying the links between the brain and reproduction. The work suggests that new therapies for infertility might depend on a better understanding of this link. (Among her collaborators is Michael Skinner of Washington State University, who spoke at New Horizons at Carnegie Mellon in 2005.)

As an undergraduate at the University of Alabama, Virgil Griffith was sued for demonstrating the security flaws in multi-use campus ID cards. He moved to Indiana University, where he was hired to teach computer security before being admitted as an undergraduate. He developed Wikiscanner, a tool for identifying organizations that have edited Wikipedia entries, and has worked on Polyworld, a computer-generated example of artificial evolution. He has been a guest at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and is a regular visitor to the Santa Fe Institute.

Jo Handelsman's work on organisms in the soil and in the guts of humans and even insects has led to findings that are proving important in human disease and in pest control. It’s a case, she says, of basic research once again surprising us with unexpected and important practical implications.

Hans Hofmann is a University of Texas biologist and a fellow at UT’s Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology. He was one of the first researchers to use cichlid fish to study how the social environment regulates brain and behavior. And he is a pioneer in the use of genomics and systems biology to analyze and understand these processes. He received his Ph.D. in biology from the University of Leipzig.

Neil Johnson heads a new interdisciplinary research group on complexity dealing with such seemingly unrelated phenomena as quantum entanglement in nanostructures and the evolution of human disease.

Dan M. Kahan has studied such issues as gun control, the risks of nanotechnology, gay parenting, “acquaintance rape,” criminal law and evidence, and white males. He served as a law clerk to Justice Thurgood Marshall of the U.S. Supreme Court 1990-1991.

Paul Keim has spent much of his career in close proximity to anthrax spores, and the rest of it meddling with E. coli, Salmonella and plague. He was heavily involved in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax letters, and he is a leader in the use of genomic analysis to identify and analyze bacterial pathogens.
 

Rob Knight got his Ph.D. 10 years ago in ecology and evolutionary biology and quickly became involved in the study of bacterial communities on and in the human body.  In addition to pursuing his basic research, he is working with Jeffrey I. Gordon at Washington University to set up a translational medicine pipeline in Malawi and Bangladesh—with the help of the Gates Foundation—to study microbiomes related to such diseases of malnutrition as kwashiorkor and marasmus. The goal is to treat these illnesses by restoring altered microbial communities.
 

Harlan M. Krumholz, M.D., M.Sc., is a distinguished expert on drug testing and clinical trials. He is an editor at several journals and an architect of the national-outcomes measures used by the government.

Haifan Lin's research deals with the mechanisms governing the behavior of stem cells.
 

Michael Mann received his Ph.D. at Yale University and is a co-founder of the website RealClimate.org. He shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize given to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, now husband and wife, were both postdoctoral fellows in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate David Hubel at Harvard, where they trained as visual neuroscientists. They are the founders of the exciting new discipline of NeuroMagic — and also members of the Magic Castle, Magic Circle, International Brotherhood of Magicians, and the Society of American Magicians. Martinez-Conde is examining the neural bases of visual experience. How, she asks, does the electrical activity of a neuron convey the color or brightness of an object?
 

Gary Paul Nabhan is the author of more than 20 books and co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH, which collects and saves seeds. He counts Thoreau among his influences.

Michael Ort is a volcanologist with a particular interest in interactions between humans and volcanoes.
 

Steven Pinker has won numerous prizes for research and teaching and for his eight books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate. He  is currently chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and writes frequently for The New York Times, Time, The New Republic and other publications. His is married to the novelist Rebecca Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction.
 

In addition to work on drug safety and genetic causis of illness, Psaty, who holds an M.D. and Ph.D., has published extensively on conflict of interest in medicine and the design and conduct of clinical trials.

Laurie Santos' current research concerns whether primates have precursors to a theory of mind, how they reason, and whether primates and humans share decision-making biases.

Tomas Sisk is Olajos-Goslow Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at NAU, where he applies scientific findings to immediate problems in land use and wildlife management.
 

Matthew State's research has focused on the use of the latest and fastest technology to analyze the genetics of Tourette syndrome, autism and other neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders of childhood.

Kristina Thayer’s office conducts evaluations of environmental chemicals and mixtures to determine whether they cause adverse health effects—and provides opinions on whether these substances are of concern, given what’s known about humans’ exposure to them. Before joining NIEHS, Thayer was a senior scientist at the World Wildlife Fund and then at the Environmental Working Group.
 

Miguel Vasquez is married to a Mayan woman from Guatemala who had to leave Guatemala because her political activism made it too difficult for her to stay. “For a long time, I’ve had a global perspective on things,” he says. He is a distant relative of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, a conquistador who led the major expedition of conquest in the Southwest.
 

Heidi Wayment is a social psychologist interested in self and identity, and how individuals react to threat and loss. Before receiving her Ph.D. in social psychology at UCLA in 1992, she played professional basketball for several top European teams, was on the U.S. and German national teams and played in the first professional women’s league in the U.S.—for the WBL New Orleans’ Pride. She is the editor, along with Jack S. Bauer, of Transcending Self-Interest: Psychological Explorations of the Quiet Ego.

Garen Wintemute’s interest in preventing gun violence grew out of his work as an emergency-room doctor. "Most people who die from gunshot wounds are pronounced dead at the scene; we never see them in the ED. If we want to decrease the number of people dying from gun violence, we need to prevent them from being shot."

Julie Zimmerman is acting director of the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University. In addition to green chemistry, her research interests include the development of public policies to encourage sustainability, water-treatment technology for developing countries, and programs to encourage corporate environmental responsibility.