Art of the Question

Charlotte Martial is a neuroscientist at the Coma Science Group within the GIGA-Consciousness research unit at the University of Liege in Belgium, where she leads the group's projects on near-death experiences. She studies states of disconnected consciousness, conditions like cardiac arrest and general anesthesia where a person appears unresponsive yet later reports a vivid inner experience, using...

Ian Crawford is Professor of Planetary Science and Astrobiology in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Birkbeck, University of London, and a self-described child of Apollo who was seven years old when Neil Armstrong stepped onto the Moon in July 1969. An astronomer turned planetary scientist, he came to the field from earlier research on the interstellar medium and now focuses on lun...

Caroline Goyder is a leading voice and gravitas coach based in the UK and the bestselling author who has trained news anchors, CEOs, actors, and even royalty to speak with confidence. She studied English Literature at Oxford and fell in love with voice and movement at drama school, then spent over a decade as a voice coach at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama before launching her own pr...

Wade Allison is an Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Keble College, where he taught physics and medical physics for over 40 years. He was inspired at the age of 13 in 1954 after stumbling upon the Atoms for Peace exhibition in Geneva, and went on to study at Cambridge and earn his doctorate in particle physics at Oxford and CERN. His research spanned experim...

Erik Persson is a Swedish philosopher, an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Lund University and co-director of its Space Humanities Lab, where his work focuses on the ethics of space exploration. He wrote his doctoral dissertation in environmental ethics and has also studied astrobiology and astronomy, which led him to ask whether the principles we apply to the environment her...

Justin Brierley is a British writer, broadcaster and public speaker who has spent over two decades hosting dialogue between Christians, atheists and sceptics. After university he joined Premier Christian Radio in London, where he spent more than twenty years and became known for Unbelievable, a weekly faith debate show that brought believers and non-believers together to argue the big questions. G...

Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. She earned her PhD from the University of London in 1983 with a dissertation on syntactic change in medieval Dutch. Burridge has authored or co-authored more than 25 books on language, including Bloomi...

Randal Koene is a Dutch neuroscientist, neuroengineer, and co-founder of the Carboncopies Foundation, a nonprofit advancing research into substrate-independent minds. He holds a Ph. D. in Computational Neuroscience from McGill University and an M.Sc . in Electrical Engineering from Delft University of Technology. Koene coined the term "whole brain emulation" in 2000 and has spent decades building...

Gerd Gigerenzer is a German psychologist, director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy at the University of Potsdam, and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, where he led the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition for over two decades. He is the author of numerous books including Risk Savvy, Gut Feelings, and The Intelligence of Intuition, and has...

Carel le Roux is a Professor of Experimental Pathology at University College Dublin, Director of the Metabolic Medicine Group, and one of the world's leading researchers on how the gut communicates with the brain. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London, where he conducted foundational research on gut hormones and appetite, and later co-founded My Best Weight, Ireland's leading obesity car...

Gloria Simoncini is a neuropsychologist, psychotherapist, and PhD student at eCampus University, Department of Theoretical and Applied Sciences, researching the emotion of awe. She trained clinically in cognitive rehabilitation with patients who had acquired brain injuries, an experience that drew her toward the scientific study of emotions and their role in human transformation. Her doctoral proj...

Hanna Tuomisto is a professor of sustainable food systems at the University of Helsinki, based in Finland, and one of the world's leading researchers on the environmental impacts of cultivated meat. She earned her PhD in agroecology and sustainable agriculture from the University of Oxford and has been researching cell-culturing technologies for food production since 2008, when she carried out one...

Matthew Cobb is a professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Manchester and one of Britain's most prominent science communicators and historians of biology. He holds a PhD in psychology and genetics from the University of Sheffield and spent his research career studying olfaction, insect behaviour, and the effects of genes on behaviour. He has written eight books, including a major biograp...

Maria Violaris is a quantum physicist and science communicator based in Oxford, UK, and a researcher at Oxford Quantum Circuits, an Oxford University spin-out. She holds a PhD in the foundations of quantum information from the University of Oxford, where her research examined the quantum arrow of time, measurement paradoxes, and locality in entanglement. Alongside her doctorate she built outreach...

Frederik Herre is a German men's coach and facilitator based in Bali, Indonesia, formerly Berlin, who specialises in helping men overcome people-pleasing and nice-guy patterns. After spending his twenties isolated, conflict-avoidant, and single for nine years, he discovered the concept of people pleasing through a friend's observation and began a two-year personal transformation. He now runs men's...

Julius Moorman is a Dutch journalist, documentary creator, and podcast host based in Amsterdam, currently living in Bali, Indonesia. He trained as a tax lawyer at Leiden University and began his career as an international tax advisor at Deloitte before pivoting to journalism, writing for major Dutch outlets including Quote magazine and NOS. He subsequently launched the YouTube channel nowweknow, p...

Sander Wuyts is a bioscience engineer and CEO of ImmuneWatch, a Belgian biotech startup using machine learning to decode the immune system's DNA for pharma and cancer drug development. He holds a PhD in computational microbiology from the University of Antwerp and Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he studied the bacteria in fermented foods using DNA sequencing before completing a postdoc at EMBL H...

Dr. Ewelina Kurtys is a neuroscientist and strategic advisor at FinalSpark, a Swiss biocomputing startup building computers from living human neurons. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from the University of Groningen and completed postdoctoral research in brain imaging in London before moving into AI commercialization and deep-tech strategy. At FinalSpark, she works on the commercial side of the Ne...

Niki Harre is a professor of psychology and head of the School of Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, known for applying psychological research to questions of sustainability, community, and how people live well together. She has published over 200 scholarly articles and is the author of Psychology for a Better World: Working with People to Save the Planet and The Infinite Game:...

Anders Sandberg is a Swedish researcher, futurist, and transhumanist at the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, holding a PhD in computational neuroscience from Stockholm University. His research covers the ethics and societal implications of human enhancement, whole brain emulation, existential and global catastrophic risk, and the very long-range future of intelligent life....

Elodie Floriane Mandel-Briefer is an Associate Professor of Biology at the University of Copenhagen and one of the world's leading researchers in animal acoustic communication and emotion. She completed her PhD on skylark song at the University of Paris, then held postdoctoral fellowships at Queen Mary University of London and ETH Zurich before joining Copenhagen, where she leads the Behavioural E...

Christian Gonzalez-Capizzi is a philosopher, podcaster, and content creator based in New York, known online as the philosophical architect connecting analytic and esoteric philosophy. He double-majored in philosophy and physics before spending four years living across Spain, where his interest in convergence between moral traditions deepened. His Substack, Instagram, and YouTube channel explore ho...

Henry Shevlin is a philosopher of mind and AI ethicist, formerly Associate Director at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and newly appointed Philosopher at Google DeepMind. He studied Classics and Philosophy at Oxford before completing a PhD in Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center in 2016, with research focused on consciousness, perception and m...

Sheri Wells-Jensen is a professor of linguistics at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, a board member of METI International, and one of the few working scientists dedicated to the question of how humanity might communicate with extraterrestrial life. She is blind, and her work sits at a rare intersection of linguistics, astrobiology, and disability studies. She has flown on parabolic research...

Nathan Copeland is the world's longest-running intracortical brain implant user — over 10 years, beating the previous record by nearly four years. In 2004, at age 18, a car accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. In 2015, he volunteered to have four Utah Array electrodes implanted in his motor and sensory cortex at the University of Pittsburgh — becoming the first human in history to rece...