Revolutionary Minds Think Tank

Revolutionary Minds

Bringing together emerging thought leaders of our scientific culture—people who are influencing the way we see our world, our selves, our minds, and our universe – the Revolutionary Minds Think Tank Blog is a place for lively, dynamic discussion of the most pressing issues in science today. Topics will include: the specific issues that would most benefit from being brought under the scientific lens; the problems most ripe for cross-disciplinary research; and the cross-disciplinary approaches that have succeeded. Over the next three months we will share the opinions of these thought leaders and allow them to connect with the tens of thousands of people who read ScienceBlogs daily.

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Moderator Greg J. Smith is a Toronto-based designer with an active interest in the intersection of space and media. He authors Serial Consign, a blog dedicated to digital culture and information design and is a regular contributor to Rhizome. Greg co-edits the art and technology journal Vague Terrain and is currently working on several writing and design projects focused on the representation of urban space.

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Saleem Ali

A professor at the University of Vermont who uses ecology as a vehicle for peace, Ali is lobbying the Indian and Pakistani governments to designate the highly fortified Siachen Glacier in the Kashmir region into a peace park.

Carl Bergstrom

A University of Washington biologist, Bergstrom is behind the Eigenfactor Project, which traces the citations of scientific papers to determine the overall importance of a variety of journals, essentially charting a map of scientific progress—one that might drastically improve our understanding of scientific disciplines.

Drew Berry

Cell biologist by training, animator by vocation, Drew Berry is a biomedical animator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. Known for his animations of apoptosis, the Central Dogma, and the malaria lifecycle, Berry is also the animator of the Emmy-winning documentary DNA.

Michelle Borkin

Borkin utilizes technological advances in medical science to better understand the composition of distant constellations and galaxies. She found that much of the raw data she collects about star formation using radio telescopes is very similar the raw data from MRI machines. This insight has allowed her to take a new approach to examining the properties and dimensional qualities of far-off star systems.

Dalton Conley

Director of NYU’s Center for Advance Social Science Research, Conley explores novel ways in which biological, political, and social conditions affect health and socioeconomic status. Conley was also the first sociologist to earn the NSF’s prestigious Alan T. Waterman award in 2005 and was the senior advisor of the UN Millennium project under Jeffrey Sachs.

Anthony Dunne

Anthony Dunne is the head of the Royal College of Arts Design Interactions Program, where students are encouraged to imagine products that might result from advances in fields ranging from biotechnology to nanotechnology, creating objects that are not final products but instead launching points for further investigation. Dunne’s approach encourages designers not to take a passive approach to technology, but to instead engage with science in a more speculative way.

Edward Einhorn

Einhorn is a founder of NEUROfset, the world’s first theater festival inspired by neurological conditions, as well as the director of the Untitled Theater Company #61 based in New York City.

Fernando Esponda

Esponda, a researcher at the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology in Mexico City, is intrigued by the way the body responds to negative information and the implications for how data is generated. Esponda seeks to replicate a model of the human immune system—essentially a catalogue of data that stores everything that is not in it—in the form of a computer database.

Gladys Kalema-Zikusoka

After discovering that a common human disease had jumped and caused a large outbreak in mountain gorillas, Kalema-Zikusoka, a veterinarian for Uganda’s national wildlife service, founded a grassroots nonprofit organization in 2002 to save Africa's wildlife. Conservation through Public Health comprehensively monitors data collected by rangers and shares it with clinics and doctors that monitor nearby human populations.

Lambros Malafouris

A post-doctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, Malafouris has put forward the hypothesis of the extended mind that posits that material culture is not a reflection of the human mind but an actual part of it. Malafouris views material culture as an extension of the human cognition, which has revolutionary implications for the evolution of human intelligence.

Nick Matzke

Matzke is a spokesperson for the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit advocacy group for evolution education. As such, he was involved in the Dover trial, the landmark case in which parents successfully sued the school board for required biology teachers to formally expose students to intelligent design.

Neri Oxman

Working toward her PhD in Design and Computation at MIT, Oxman is exploring the limits between architectural materials and their environments, and how materials' interaction with light, wind, and inhabitant behavior can shape space beyond conventional dimensional or spatial requirements. She calls this topic "materials think," and it holds radical implications for how we conceive and interact with manufactured products and the built environment.

Moshe Pritsker

Moshe Pritsker co-founded the first online peer-reviewed video journal, JoVE, after he was astounded during his work as a graduate student at Princeton and a post-doc at Harvard Medical School by the amount of time wasted trying to follow published procedures, especially when techniques involved delicate manipulation. JoVE is currently gaining momentum toward Pritsker's goal of a video for "every possible biological procedure."

Josh Ruxin

Ruxin is a co-founder of Access Project, a company whose mission is putting sound management practices in place, such as accounting systems and patient record management in health clinics in Africa.

Skylar Tibbits

A Philadelphia-based generative architect, Tibbits experiments with new ways of creating space inspired by mathematical logic, developing algorithms that generate three-dimensional structures based on principles like fractals, recursion, and tessellation, stretching the usual conventions about space and structure.

Margaret Turnbull

Inspired by the film Contact, Turnbull, an astronomer, and Jill Tarter (the real-life inspiration for the movie) created "HabCat," a catalog of stars that could potentially support other forms of life.

John Wilbanks

Wilbanks is the creator and head of the nonprofit Science Commons—an offshoot of its parent, Creative Commons. As a platform, Science Commons was created as an open and interactive culture where scientists read and discuss each other’s work. Under the system, Wilbanks hopes scientists can click on supplies used in a particular paper and order them—like an "Amazon.com of science."

All questions or comments are welcome. If you'd like to ask general questions about the Revolutionary Minds Think Tank Blog, please write to editorial@scienceblogs.com.