Roger Benson is the Macaulay Curator and the Curator-in-Charge of Fossil Amphibians, Reptiles, and Birds and Fossil Plants in the Division of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum in New York. His research spans from field discovery and detailed anatomy of fossils, up to quantitative analysis of the large-scale patterns of evolution that have shaped biodiversity. It incorporates 3D morphometric and comparative study of both living and fossil species, phylogenetic palaeobiology, quantitative studies of form-function relationships, and classic elements of palaeontology/systematics. His expertise is focused on Mesozoic and Late Palaeozoic groups including dinosaurs and other reptiles. His research group has addressed fundamental questions on the deep time evolutionary history of tetrapods more widely, including mammals, birds, crocodylians, turtles, lizards and their ancestors. It also finds links between the past and the present, using large datasets of extant species anatomy to test hypotheses of the ecology of extinct species such as dinosaurs.

Lori Gruen is the William Griffin Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Science in Society at Wesleyan University where she coordinates Wesleyan Animal Studies. She works primarily in ethics and social and poitical philosophy and is a prolific scholar. She is the author and editor of over a dozen books, including Ethics and Animals: An Introduction (Cambridge, 2011, second edition 2021), Entangled Empathy (Lantern, 2015), Animal Crisis (Polity, 2022) co-authored with Alice Crary, Carceral Logics (Cambridge, 2022) co-edited with Justin Marceau, Critical Terms for Animal Studies (Chicago, 2018), Ecofeminism: Feminist Intersections with Other Animals and the Earth (Bloomsbury 2014, second edition 2022, co-edited with Carol J. Adams), Ethics of Captivity (Oxford, 2014), and others. Gruen’s work focuses on ethical and political issues that impact those often overlooked in traditional philosophical investigations, e.g. women and other marginalized genders, people of color, incarcerated people, and non-human animals. She is a Fellow of the Hastings Center for Bioethics, was a Faculty Fellow at Tufts’ Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, is a fellow of the Brooks Animal Studies Academic Network and was the first and founding chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee of the Center for Prison Education at Wesleyan. Gruen has documented the history of The First 100 chimpanzees in research in the US and has an evolving website that documents the journey to sanctuary of the remaining chimpanzees in research labs, The Last 1000. Gruen has written on a range of topics in practical ethics, feminist philosophy and political philosophy. Her current projects include exploring captivity and the ethical and political questions raised by carceral logics.

Born in 1978 in Paris, France, Camille Henrot now lives and works in New York City. The practice of French artist Camille Henrot moves seamlessly between film, painting, drawing, bronze, sculpture, and installation. Henrot draws upon references from literature, psychoanalysis, social media, cultural anthropology, self-help, and the banality of everyday life in order to question what it means to be both a private individual and a global subject. A 2013 fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute resulted in her film ‘Grosse Fatigue,’ for which she was awarded the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale. She elaborated ideas from ‘Grosse Fatigue’ to conceive her acclaimed 2014 installation ‘The Pale Fox’ at Chisenhale Gallery in London. The exhibit, which displayed the breadth of her diverse output, went on to travel to institutions including Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen; Bétonsalon – Centre for art and research, Paris; Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, Germany; and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan. In 2017, Henrot was given carte blanche at Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where she presented the major exhibition ‘Days Are Dogs,’ She is the recipient of the 2014 Nam June Paik Award and the 2015 Edvard Munch Award, and has participated in the Lyon, Berlin, Sydney and Liverpool Biennials, among others. Henrot has had numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, including the New Museum, New York; Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin; New Orleans Museum of Art; Fondazione Memmo, Rome; Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Japan, among others.

Camari Mick is the executive pastry chef at both The Musket Room, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Manhattan’s Nolita neighborhood, and Raf’s, a nearby French and Italian bakery and restaurant from the same ownership (of which she is also a partner). In 2022, she became a James Beard Award semi-finalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef. This year, she became a James Beard Award semi-finalist for Outstanding Pastry Chef for the second consecutive year. Mick, who Michelin refers to as “NYC’s Dessert Doyenne,” proudly incorporates her Jamaican heritage into her dishes. Prior to The Musket Room, Mick honed her pastry experience in some of New York’s finest kitchens, including Thomas Keller’s TAK Room, Eric Ripert’s Le Bernardin and Daniel Boulud’s db Bistro Moderne.

Tim Birkhead is a zoologist whose research focuses on populations of birds and their reproduction. Tim has made important contributions to the field of behavioural ecology—the study of how animal behaviour evolves under the influence of environmental pressures. He also studies the competitive actions of male birds’ sperm.He showed that extrapair paternity—where the offspring raised by a pair are the result of the female mating with an outsider male — is common amongst birds. Tim also demonstrated the existence of ‘guarding techniques’, which are carried out by the male bird in a pair. In studies of the zebra finch, he revealed that the sperm of the last male to mate with a female took precedence for fertilising her eggs. Tim is the author of Bird Sense: What it’s Like to be a Bird (2012), a popular science book that discusses life as a bird and was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s Winton Prize for Science Books in 2013. His TED talk, The Early Birdwatchers, has received over 100,000 views.

The crux of Chow and Lin’s practice lies in their methodology of statistical, mathematical, and computational techniques to address global issues since 2010. Chow and Lin’s projects are driven by the discursive backgrounds in economics, public policy, media, and these are further augmented by enduring exchanges with specialists from those fields. Their projects have been exhibited at Arles Les Rencontres De La Photographie, Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art, Venice Arte Laguna, Houston FotoFest Biennial, National University of Singapore Museum and were invited to present at the United Nations Conference Centre in Bangkok. Their works are in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and China Central Academy of Fine Arts Museum. They are authors of The Poverty Line (published by Actes Sud and Lars Müller Publishers, 2021) which is in the collections of the MoMA library and Centre Pompidou Bibliothèque publique d'information. Stefen Chow and Huiyi Lin currently reside in Beijing, China.

Amander Clark PhD is a stem cell scientist, geneticist and developmental biologist who is internationally recognized for her work on the germline and in vitro gametogenesis. Professor Clark has authored over one hundred research articles, and is regularly invited to speak on the use of stem cells to understand fertility and infertility. Professor Clark’s work has been recognized by Awards from the International Society for Stem Cell Research, STOP Cancer, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, and the Concern Foundation. More recently, she was awarded the prestigious Founders Medal from the Australian and New Zealand Society for Reproductive Biology, and was selected to serve on the National Academies of Science Engineering and Medicine Board of Health Sciences Policy. Professor Clark was recruited to UCLA in 2006, awarded tenure in 2012 and advanced to Full Professor in 2015. From 2017, Professor Clark served as Department Chair of the UCLA Department of Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology and is currently the inaugural Director of the UCLA Center for Reproductive Science, Health and Education. As of July 2023, Professor Clark advances to President of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, a global non-profit that promotes excellence in stem cell science and applications to human health.

Teman Evans is global head of design at General Mills and a faculty member of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, where he teaches courses in design thinking, branding, and strategic innovation. Prior to this, he was the global director of brand design and customer experience design at PepsiCo. Previously, Evans was vice president of branding and strategy at Foote, Cone, and Belding and worked with architects David Rockwell in New York and Rem Koolhaas in Europe and Asia, where he created innovation strategies for global brands from Prada to the Beijing Olympics. Teman also co-founded DIOSCURI design and brand consulting agency, where he was chief creative officer.

Dr. Ashanté M. Reese earned a PhD in Anthropology from American University. Broadly speaking, Dr. Reese works at the intersection of critical food studies and Black geographies, examining the ways Black people produce and navigate food-related spaces. Animated by the question, who and what survives?, Dr. Reese’s work has focused on the everyday strategies Black people employ while navigating inequity. Her first book, Black Food Geographies: Race, Self-Reliance, and Food Access in Washington, D.C., takes up these themes through an ethnographic exploration of antiblackness and food access. Black Food Geographies won the 2020 Best Monograph Award from the Association for the Study of Food and Society and 2020 Margaret Mead Award jointly awarded by the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology. Her second book, Black Food Matters: Racial Justice in the Wake of Food Justice, is a collection co-edited with Hanna Garth that explores the geographic, social, and cultural dimensions of food in Black life across the U.S. Currently, Dr. Reese is working on a cultural history of sugar and Sugar Land, Texas in which she explores the spatial, economic, and carceral implications of sugar and the sometimes contradictory and deadly sweetness that marks Black life. A committed teacher, Dr. Reese was the recipient of the 2020-21 Friar Centennial Teaching Fellowship.

Emelyn Rude’s work sits at the intersection of economic, environmental, and culinary history and is broadly focused on the development of the food system in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is particularly interested in the history of eating animals and previously studied the factors driving the growth of American chicken consumption and the impact of marine species declines on the production and consumption of food. Her current research project aims to understand how species declines and extinctions events changed American eating habits more broadly, with the ultimate goal of retelling the story of the American food system through the lens of this type of environmental degradation. She received her PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2022, her MPhil in Economic and Social History from Cambridge in 2018, and her Bachelor’s in Social Studies from Harvard University in 2012. Her interest in food is not purely academic, however. Prior to going to graduate school she helped run high-end restaurants in New York, worked as a pastry cook and recipe tester, and helped to write and edit various cookbooks. These days she publishes an independent magazine focused on food history called EATEN and is also a trained and certified sommelier.

Mary Caswell Stoddard is an Associate Professor in the Princeton Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. She joined the department in 2016. She is an Associated Faculty member in the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Princeton Bioengineering Initiative and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics. Cassie received her undergraduate degree from Yale University, where she researched avian vision and plumage color evolution at the Peabody Museum of Natural History. She received a Marshall Scholarship and an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to study at the University of Cambridge, where she completed her PhD research. Cassie joined the Harvard Society of Fellows in 2012 as a Junior Fellow and was named a 2013 L’Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellow. She received a 2018 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a 2018 Packard Fellowship and a 2022 Schmidt Science Polymath Award.

Nicola Twilley is co-host of the award-winning podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lens of history and science, and an award-winning contributor to The New Yorker. She lives in Los Angeles. GEOFF MANAUGH is the author of the New York Times-bestseller A Burglar’s Guide to the City, as well as the architecture and technology website BLDGBLOG. He regularly writes for The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Wired, and many other publications. He lives in Los Angeles.