ISEPP - Key Persons

David Pearce Snyder is an internationally recognized futurist and Life-styles Editor of The Futurist magazine. He is a sought after speaker, and has served as a management consultant to hundreds of corporations, trade organizations and public agencies. Mr. Snyder is author of Future Forces (1986).

Dr. Drexler served as Chief Technical Consultant to the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems, a project of the Battelle Memorial Institute, Oak Ridge, Pacific Northwest, and Brookhaven National Laboratories, and as Chief Technical Advisor to Nanorex, in developing open-source design software for structural DNA nanotechnologies. He has worked in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund to explore nanotechnology-based solutions to global problems such as energy and climate change. Drexler is currently an Academic Visitor at Oxford University.

Michael Russell's research into the emergence of life and early evolution will help determine whether earth alone supports life in our universe. He theorizes that oxygenic photosynthesis, acting upon iron sulfide deposits in volcanic, oceanic vents, allowed the precursors of protein and RNA to form. Dr. Russell's study of 360-million-year-old mineral deposits in Ireland led to the insight that iron sulphite cells may have provided three-dimensional molds for the first cell walls. His groundbreaking research led to a tour of North America as the Society of Economic Geologists' distinguished lecturer in 1984. In June 2009, Dr. Russell was awarded the William Smith Medal from the Geological Society of London for his lifetime contribution to applied geology. Since 2006, Dr. Russell has tested his theory as a NASA Senior Research Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. In addition, a number of ongoing international collaborations have bolstered his original narrative of the hydrothermal origin of life as a result of geological, geochemical and tectonic forces. Russell has been featured on two BBC programs, including "Origin of Life" and "Life on Mars." Russell did his undergraduate work at the University of London in Geology and Chemistry, took his PhD at University of Durham on Mineral Deposit Geochemistry, taught at the University of Glascow, and was a visiting Professor at the University of Grenoble.

Professor Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor at Chapman University. Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University (1991). He teaches a transdisciplinary course for Ph.D. students at Claremont Graduate University entitled "Evolution, Economics, and the Brain," and an honors course for undergraduates at Chapman University. He has been a college professor since 1979, also teaching psychology, evolution, and the history of science at Occidental College (1989-1998), California State University Los Angeles, and Glendale College. As a public intellectual he regularly contributes Opinion Editorials, book reviews, and essays to the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, Science, Nature, and other publications. He has appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless science and history documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. Dr. Shermer was the co-host and co-producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown. Dr. Shermer's latest book is The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom. His previous book is The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies-How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them as Truths. His book, The Mind of the Market, is on evolutionary economics, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. He also authored Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design, and Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin's Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. Dr. Shermer's most famous book is Why People Believe Weird Things, on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time. According to the late Stephen Jay Gould (from his Foreword to Why People Believe Weird Things): "Michael Shermer, as head of one of America's leading skeptic organizations, and as a powerful activist and essayist in the service of this operational form of reason, is an important figure in American public life." Bestselling author Michael Shermer's exploration of science and morality that demonstrates how the scientific way of thinking has made people, and society as a whole, more moral.

Job Titles:

• Canada Research Chair
• Professor

Ray Jayawardhana is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Observational Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, where he also serves as Senior Advisor to the President on Science Engagement. A graduate of Yale and Harvard and a recent winner of Canada's Top 40 Under 40, he uses many of the world's largest telescopes to explore planetary origins and diversity. He is the co-author of over eighty papers in scientific journals. His discoveries have made headlines worldwide, including in Newsweek, Washington Post, New York Times, Globe and Mail, Sydney Morning Herald, BBC, NPR and CBC, and have led to numerous accolades such as the Steacie Prize, the Steacie Fellowship, the Early Researcher Award, and the Vainu Bappu Gold Medal. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Economist, Scientific American, Astronomy, Muse, and more. He is the author of Strange New Worlds, a finalist for the Lane Anderson Award, one of Library Journal's best science books of 2011 and the basis of the CBC television documentary "The Planet Hunters". He lives in Toronto.

Job Titles:

• Computer Scientist and Author

Ramez spent 13 years at Microsoft, where he led teams working on e-mail,

Stephen Hawking held the Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University (the professorship once held by Sir Isaac Newton). For the past 45 years he has been a world leader in research on black holes, the birth of the universe, and the nature of space, time and gravity.

Job Titles:

• Chairman

Stig Annestrand, Chairman, is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1987 he retired from Bonneville Power Administration after twenty years with the agency. He was most recently Manager of Research and Development at BPA. Annestrand spent 1986 in Washington, D.C. as IEEE Congressional Fellow to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Job Titles:

• Executive Director
• President

Terry Bristol, the President and Executive Director of ISEPP, taught at the university level for more than nine years. Mr. Bristol was born and raised in Portland, received his undergraduate degree from the University of California at Berkeley and has completed four years of graduate study in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of London in England.

Wolfgang Pauli first proposed the existence of neutrinos in 1930. He believed that they were necessary to explain some problems that scientists had noticed with beta decay. During beta decay, an atom's nucleus sheds excess energy by converting a neutron into a proton and an electron and, as scientists now know, an antineutrino. Scientists noticed that when atoms of a particular isotope underwent beta decay, they always lost the same amount of energy, but the electrons were ejected with a range of energies. It appeared as if energy was being destroyed in the reaction, violating a concept known as the conservation of energy. They also noticed that the ejected electron and the recoiling nucleus didn't always move apart on a straight line, but sometimes did so at an angle. This violated another concept known as the conservation of momentum. Believing that the two conservation laws were valid, Pauli stated than an undetected particle must be produced during beta decay, one that would carry away the missing energy and momentum. Neutrinos were detected experimentally by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines at the Savannah River reactor in South Carolina in 1956.