Dr. Ariel Ekblaw is the founder and CEO of Aurelia Institute, where she strives to bring humanity’s space exploration future to life. Through architecture R&D, education and outreach, and policy thought leadership, she is building a remarkable team and a novel FRO (Focused Research Organization) to expand humanity’s horizons and scale life in space. Aurelia Institute is spun out of the MIT Space Exploration Initiative (SEI)—a team of over 50 graduate students, staff, and faculty actively prototyping the artifacts of our sci-fi space future—of which Ariel is also the founder and former Director. Ariel drives SEI’s space-related research across science, engineering, art, and design, and leads an annually recurring cadence of parabolic flights, sub-orbital launches, and missions to the International Space Station.

Sonam Kachru is an Assistant Professor specializing in the history of premodern South Asian philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on Buddhist philosophy. One day soon, he believes, the histories of philosophy and literature in premodern South Asia will more widely be seen as an integral part of the humanities. As they should be. His first book, Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism, tracks ways in which one premodern Buddhist philosopher, Vasubandhu of Peshawar, used descriptions of experiences in dreams and non-human forms of life in thought experiments to rethink the relationship between mind and world. For more about Other Lives, which was written with a commitment to global philosophical outlook, with particular attention to a possibly connected ancient world, see this précis and this review.

Shannon Mattern is the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Media Studies and the History of Art at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dad owned a hardware store and makes beautiful furniture, and her mom was a special education teacher. Before coming to Penn, between 2004 and 2022, she worked in the School of Media Studies and the Department of Anthropology at The New School and collaborated regularly with the Parsons School of Design. She won The New School’s Distinguished University Teaching Award. Her writing and teaching focus on archives, libraries, and other media spaces; media infrastructures; sites where data intersect with art and design; and media that shape our sensory experiences. She is the author of The New Downtown Library: Designing with Communities; Deep Mapping the Media City; Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: 5000 Years of Urban Media, all published by University of Minnesota Press; and A City Is Not a Computer, published by Princeton University Press. She also contributes a regular long-form column about urban data and mediated infrastructures to Places Journal. In addition, she serves as president of the board of the Metropolitan New York Library Council and regularly collaborates on public design and interactive projects and exhibitions.

Sarah Oppenheimer is an architectural manipulator. Oppenheimer creates circulatory pathways that establish unexpected kinesthetic and visual relays between bodies and buildings. Rhythms and timescales of living systems flow from body to building and back again. The viewer is transformed into an agent of spatial change.

Glaucio H. Paulino is the Margareta Engman Augustine Professor of Engineering, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Professor of the Princeton Materials Institute at Princeton University. His research group’s contributions in the area of computational mechanics spans development of methodologies to characterize deformation and fracture behavior of existing and emerging materials and structural systems, topology optimization for large-scale and multiscale/multiphysics problems, and origami.

Insoo Suh is the director of minimally invasive endocrine surgery at NYU Langone with a focus on innovative surgical techniques and alternative treatment technologies. His major research interests focus on innovative surgical techniques and alternative treatment technologies. As director of minimally invasive endocrine surgery, he leads an active clinical and research program in scarless endoscopic thyroidectomy—he was among the pioneers of this procedure in the United States—as well as in minimally invasive parathyroidectomy and adrenalectomy. He also lead the Department of Surgery program that supports the development of surgical innovations.

Professor Daniel A. Barber is Head of School, Architecture at University of Technology Sydney. He is a historian and theorist focused on environmental dimensions of architecture’s past, present, and future. He is especially interested in how the pedagogy and practice of architecture are adapting to climate instability. He is the recipient of a 2022-2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, and is part of the British Academy Global Convening Grant on the Just Transitions. He has recently held teaching positions and fellowships in the US, Portugal, and Germany.

Trained as an industrial designer Ed van Hinte is mainly interested in exploring ways to reduce material flows and energy consumption, while still maintaining the convenience, magic and style that humans desire. He has a good international reputation as a critical advocate of sustainability. He covers all aspects of design, technical, ephemeral, large and small. He has been awarded for his writings several times.

Pamela Ayo Yetunde is a Community Dharma Leader in the Insight Meditation tradition. She teaches pastoral care and counseling and has taught at University of the West, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, and Upaya Institute and Zen Center. Ayo has written for Buddhadharma, Lion’s Roar, religions, and Buddhist-Christian Studies. She is the author of Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom, Object Relations, Buddhism and Relationality in Womanist Practical Theology and Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, U.S. Law, and Womanist Theology for Transgender Spiritual Care.

Since 1990 Brandon Linton has been professionally constructing composite boats, structures, and components equating to 30 years of boat building experience in all facets of composite race yacht construction, from facility set up, test models to the realization of the finished product. Amongst many other projects Brandon has also been involved in the construction of over a dozen grand prix racing yachts. He is currently working as New York Yacht Club American Magic’s boat construction manager.

Born in 1978 in Ibiza, Spain, Nuria Garcia Masip grew up between Spain and the USA. In 1999, after completing her university studies, she traveled to Morocco where she developed an interest in Islamic art. In 2000, she returned to Washington D.C. where she started studying the rik’a, sülüs, and nesih scripts with calligrapher (hattat) Mohamed Zakariya. In 2004, she moved to Istanbul where she continued to study the sülüs, and nesih scripts with hattat Hasan Çelebi, and with hattat Davut Bektaş. In 2007, she received her diploma (ijazah) in these two scripts, signed by her three teachers. She holds a Masters in Art History from the Sorbonne University, has won prestigious prizes in international calligraphy competitions and her work forms part of various private and museum collections. She has also organized numerous workshops and conferences on this art to promote the art of calligraphy internationally. Her work is firmly rooted in the classical school of calligraphy and she enjoys preserving the techniques and materials of the tradition. Nuria is currently living in Paris where she teaches, researches, and works on calligraphy.

Nathan F. Sayre is professor and chair of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies the ways people use, govern, study and value landscapes: how environments are managed and mismanaged, exploited and conserved, enlisted to produce power, profit and knowledge, sometimes successfully and other times not. Working with and across multiple disciplines,I can be described using almost any non-redundant combination of historical, political, environmental, or ecological + anthropologist, geographer, ecologist, economist, or historian.

Jonathan Sterne is James McGill Professor, Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, and author of MP3: The Meaning of a Format and The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction, both also published by Duke University Press, and is editor of The Sound Studies Reader. He also makes music and other audio works.

Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. is Professor and North Hall Chair of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She was a recipient of the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellowship with a joint appointment in the School of Public Health and Department of Sociology. A certified yoga teacher, her work on yoga has been featured in The Feminist Wire, Yoga International, and LA Yoga. Sabrina is also an award-winning author with publications in diverse venues including, Ethnic and Racial Studies; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society and Feminist Media Studies. Her most recent book is Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (NYU Press 2019).