Scientific Sense ®

Intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and learning: animals, humans and education systems, neuroscience basis of curiosity and learning, reward uncertainty and information transmission in the brain. Prof. Jacqueline Gottlieb is Professor of Neuroscience and the founder and director of the Research Cluster on Curiosity at Columbia University. Dr. Gottlieb studies the neural mechanisms of attention and their relationship with information processing, including learning, decision making, and curiosity.

Direct Measurement of the Cosmic Acceleration, The Hubble expansion is isotropic in the epoch of dark energy, How to Detect Inclined Water Maser Disks and Measure Black Hole Masses, Extragalactic Proper Motions: Gravitational Waves and Cosmology, and New Limits on Axionic Dark Matter from the Magnetar. Prof. Jeremy Darling is a Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He studies black holes, galaxy evolution, and cosmology. Mostly using telescopes, but sometimes just by thinking.

Predator community composition is linked to soil carbon retention across a human land use gradient, and Animals and the zoogeochemistry of the carbon cycle Prof. Oswald Schmitz, Professor of Population and Community Ecology in the Yale University School of Environment. His research aims to make sense of nature’s complexity that comes from interdependencies among the variety of carnivore, herbivore, and plant species that coexist within ecosystems. These insights help to inform environmental stewardship to enhance the conservation of wildlife species and ensure the sustainability of ecosystems, their functions, and the services that they provide to humankind. He teaches courses on the role of humans in nature and how humans can develop the means to coexist harmoniously with nature. His book “The New Ecology: Rethinking a Science for the Anthropocene” encapsulates much of his thinking about humans and nature, making ecological science accessible to a broader readership.

Artemis - A whole new program to travel to the moon and to establish a habitat there including an observatory, gateway that orbits with self propulsion and designing a launch pad for future exploration of the solar system including Mars. Prof. Jack Burns is a Professor in the Department of Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He is also Vice President Emeritus for Academic Affairs and Research for the CU System. Prof. Burns has 345 publications in refereed journals, books, and in conference proceedings and abstracts (as listed in NASA’s Astrophysics Data System). His research has been featured in articles and on the covers of Scientific American, Nature, and Science. His teaching and research focus on extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, supercomputer numerical simulations, astrophysics from the Moon, and public policy issues in higher education and science. Burns is director of the Lunar University Network for Astrophysics Research (LUNAR), a $6.5 million center recently awarded by the NASA Lunar Science Institute. Burns is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Linking Social and Personal Preferences, and Asset Markets with Asymmetric Reasoning. Prof. William Zame is Professor of Economics and Mathematics at UCLA. His recent research includes work on the impact of culture on economic outcomes in diverse societies, informational asymmetries in macroeconomics, experimental financial markets, and a number of topics in machine learning. He is currently Co-Editor of Economic Theory and Associate Editor of Theoretical Economics.

The cosmological legacy of Planck, design, data, results and insights, Calibration of ALMA Using Planck Observations, and Can CMB Surveys Help the AGN Community? Prof. Bruce Partridge is an emeritus professor of Astronomy at Haverford college. He has served as Education Officer of the American Astronomical Society; president of Commission on Cosmology, International Astronomical Union; and President, Astronomical Society of the Pacific. His research interests include cosmology, galaxy formation, the cosmic microwave background and radio astronomy.

Vitamin A: its many roles—from vision and synaptic plasticity to infant mortality Prof. John Dowling is Research Professor of Neurosciences at Harvard. His interests include the wiring, physiology, pharmacology and genetics of the retina, as well as the effects of vitamin A and photoreceptors on vision.

Extended halo of metal-poor stars in Andromeda, Dwarf galaxies, Star migration, Surface brightness fluctuations and understanding dark matter by studying satellite galaxies. Prof. Raja GuhaThakurta is a Professor and Department Chair of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. His research focuses on galaxies: their dark matter content, cannibalism history, and chemical enrichment as revealed by spectroscopy of their resolved stellar populations. He uses the Hubble Space Telescope and Keck telescope for his research.

Exoplanets: the history, exploration techniques and demographics. Habitable and free floating planets, and is there anybody out there? Prof. Scott Gaudi is a Professor of Astronomy at Ohio State University. His research focuses on developing and applying ways of searching for planets around other stars, and he has been involved with the discovery of nearly two dozen extrasolar planets to date.

Making lasting memories: Remembering the significant, Consolidating Memories, and Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory Prof. James McGaugh is Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at University of California, Irvine. He is also fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning & Memory