Kipp is an entrepreneur, technology consultant, and educator with a passion for making things. He is the founder or cofounder of start-ups in the fields of transportation, consumer products, HVAC, and medical devices—including Revolution By Design, Inc, a non-profit education and research organization dedicated to empowerment through technology, as well as the Bionica Corporation, where he led the research, development, and intellectual property work for a novel hearing-aid system as CTO. He holds numerous patents for his inventions, and some of his more interesting projects have turned into kippkitts.

David Gissen is a historian of architecture and an author of works of architecture theory and criticism. His research examines physiological and environmental concepts embedded within modern and late-modern architecture and design. In particular, he studies the manner in which works of architecture shape experiences of health, stability, capacity, and normalcy within built space. He traces these processes in historical research and responds with alternative, critical formulations of use to scholars and designers.

Shintaro Okamoto is the creative force behind OKAMOTO STUDIO, a NYC-based artist collective best known to produce artful installations and performances out of crystal clear ice since founded in 2003. A second generation ice sculptor whose father Takeo is long recognized for his early contribution to the art form in America, Shintaro embraces the craft and its business as his calling to introduce ice that is most unique and relevant to today’s audience. From designing the runway for Zac Posen to collaborating on the display window with Barneys New York to competing alongside Chef Morimoto in Iron Chef America, Shintaro thrives on offering new ways to play the ephemeral quality of ice as the perfect metaphor for the ‘here and the now.’

Joanna Radin received her PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the social and technical conditions of possibility for the systems of biomedicine and biotechnology that we live with today. She has particular interests in global histories of biology, ecology, medicine, technology, and anthropology since 1945; history and anthropology of life and death; biomedical technology and computing; feminist, indigenous, and queer STS; and science fiction. She is the author of Life on Ice: A History of New Uses for Cold Blood (Chicago 2017), the first history of the low-temperature biobank and co-editor, with Emma Kowal of Cyropolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World (MIT 2017), which considers the technics and ethics of freezing across the life and environmental sciences.

Nicola Twilley is the author of Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves. She is also the coauthor of Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine, named one of the best books of 2021 by Time, NPR, The Guardian, and the Financial Times. She is cohost of Gastropod, the award-winning and popular podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history, produced as part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater. She is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.

Dr. Mia Bennett is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Washington. As a political geographer with geospatial skills, Bennett researches the geopolitics of infrastructure development in two areas commonly thought of as frontiers: the Arctic and orbital space. She traces, maps, and critiques the politics, practices, and cultures of frontier-making from above earth to the depths of Indigenous lands. She does so with respect to three global transformations: Indigenous empowerment, the rise of Asia, and the dawn of satellite observations. To understand discursive and material processes of frontier-making at a range of scales, she employs experimental methods including ethnographic fieldwork, critical remote sensing, visual and discourse analysis, archival research, and geovisualization.

Wolfgang Ketterle has been the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT since 1998. He received a diploma (equivalent to master’s degree) from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and the Ph.D. in physics from the University of Munich (1986). He did postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and at the University of Heidelberg in molecular spectroscopy and combustion diagnostics. In 1990, he came to MIT as a postdoc and joined the physics faculty in 1993. Since 2006, he is the director of the Center of Ultracold Atoms, an NSF funded research center, and Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. His research group studies properties of ultracold atomic matter.

Marwa Koheji is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Humanities, in the Division of Arts and Humanities at New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD). Her research combines historical and ethnographic methods to explore energy infrastructures in Bahrain and the broader Gulf region and their socio-political implications. She was trained in cultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Thermal (Dis)Comfort in Bahrain: How Air-Conditioning Changed Everything. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Geographic, the Energy Poverty Program in Southern Africa (EPPSA), and NYUAD.

Philippe Rahm is a swiss architect, principal in the office of “Philippe Rahm architectes”, based in Paris, France. His work, which extends the field of architecture from the physiological to the meteorological, has received an international audience in the context of sustainability. His recent work includes the first prize for the Farini competition (60 ha) in Milan in 2019, the 70 hectares Central Park in Taichung, Taiwan, completed in December 2020, a 2700 m2 Exhibition architecture for Luma Foundation in Arles, France. He has held professorships at GSD Harvard University, Cornell, Princeton or Columbia University where Mr Rahm is currently Dean’s Visiting Associate Professor. He is a tenured associate professor at the National Superior School of Architecture in Versailles, France (ENSA-V). In 2020, he is the curator of the exhibition “Natural History of Architecture” at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. “Climatic architecture”, a monographic book is published at Fall 2023.

Philip Maughan is a writer and researcher working on creative and commercial projects based between London and Berlin. His essays on food technology and extreme agriculture, cutting edge science and speculative interfaces have appeared in Noema, The Guardian, BBC Future and elsewhere. He runs the food philosophy platform Black Almanac and regularly works with institutions and research groups including Antikythera, Modem, Trust, Strelka Institute, UaL and others.

Michael Wang uses systems that operate at both regional and planetary scales as media for art: climate change, species distribution, resource allocation and the global economy. His works include Extinct in the Wild, a project that engages species that no longer exist in nature but persist under human care; 10000 li, 100 billion kilowatt-hours, a work that harnessed Shanghai’s hydropower-fueled electric grid to create a frozen facsimile of the glaciers at the origin of the Yangtze river; First Forest, a living replica of a Carboniferous forest installed in a disused coal-gas plant; and Carbon Copies, an exhibition linking the production of artworks to the release of greenhouse gases–envisioning all artists as “air artists.”

Floris Winckel is a PhD student in the History of Science, based at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich. My doctoral project explores the science of snowflakes from the early-17th to mid-20th century. I shed light on the value of studying snowflakes to scientists, and what this tells us about the history of modern natural science. The project is being carried out as part of the international doctoral programme ‘Rethinking Environment: The Environmental Humanities and the Ecological Transformation of Society‘, run jointly by the Environmental Science Center WZU (Augsburg) and the Rachel Carson Center.