Professor Ronald Hanson has been an international leader in the development of laser-based diagnostic methods for combustion and propulsion, and in the development of modern shock tube methods for accurate determination of chemical reaction rate parameters needed for modeling combustion and propulsion systems. He and his students have made several pioneering contributions that have impacted the pace of propulsion research and development worldwide.

Dr. Alison Hoyt is an Assistant Professor of Earth System Science at Stanford. Her work focuses on understanding how biogeochemical cycles respond to human impacts, with a particular focus on the most vulnerable and least understood carbon stocks in the tropics and the Arctic.

Dr. Debbie G. Senesky is an Associate Professor at Stanford University in the Aeronautics and Astronautics Department and the Electrical Engineering Department. In addition, she is the Principal Investigator of the EXtreme Environment Microsystems Laboratory (XLab). Her research interests include the development of nanomaterials for extreme harsh environments, high-temperature electronics for Venus exploration, and microgravity synthesis of nanomaterials. In the past, she has held positions at GE Sensing (formerly known as NovaSensor), GE Global Research Center, and Hewlett Packard.

Dr. Yair Blumenfeld is a Professor in the Division of Maternal-Fetal Medicine & Obstetrics, Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His clinical focus is management of high-risk pregnancies in the outpatient and inpatient settings, including comprehensive prenatal, intrapartum, and postpartum care. He serves as the fetal therapy domain lead for the Dunlevie Maternal-Fetal Medicine Center for Discovery, Innovation and Clinical Impact, as well as the Director of Fetal Therapy at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford.

Dr. Charles Gawad's lab works at the interface of biotechnology, computational biology, cellular biology, and clinical medicine to develop and apply new tools for characterizing genetic variation across single cells within a tissue with unparalleled sensitivity and accuracy. They are focused on applying these technologies to study cancer clonal evolution while patients are undergoing treatment with the aim of identifying cancer clonotypes that are associated with resistance to specific drugs so as to better understand and predict treatment response.

Professor Hema Karunadasa works with colleagues in materials science, earth science, and applied physics to drive the discovery of new materials with applications in clean energy. Using the tools of synthetic chemistry, her group designs materials that couple the structural tunability of organic molecules with the diverse electronic and optical properties of extended inorganic solids. This research targets materials such as sorbents for capturing environmental pollutants, phosphors for solid-state lighting, and absorbers for solar cells.

Dr. Sarah Bowling is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Developmental Biology at Stanford University School of Medicine, and is an Affiliate Member of the BASE Initiative. Sarah carried out her PhD at Imperial College London, where her work focused on understanding the mechanisms and roles of cell competition during early mammalian development. For her postdoctoral research, Sarah moved to Boston Children's Hospital and the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.

Dr. Tobias Lanz is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation, and Infection and the Division of Immunology and Rheumatology at Stanford. His research focuses on B cell biology in neuroimmunological diseases and rheumatic diseases with neurological manifestations. He uses high-throughput screening technologies, and methods from structural and cell biology to identify new autoantigens and to understand how certain self-reactive B cells escape tolerance mechanisms.

Dr. Valerie Chock's research interests include:

• Neurological monitoring in critically ill infants
• Altered hemodynamics in neonates, especially in relation to prematurity, congenital heart disease, and central nervous system injury
• Determination of the hemodynamic significance and effects of a patent ductus arteriosus in the preterm infant
• Utilizing NIRS (near-infrared spectroscopy) and other technologies for improved monitoring in the NICU

Dr. Andrea Montanari is a Professor in Statistics and Mathematics at Stanford University. He received a Laurea degree in Physics in 1997, and a Ph.D. in Physics in 2001 (both from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy). He has been post-doctoral fellow at Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure (LPTENS), Paris, France, and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley, USA. From 2002 to 2010 he was Chargé de Recherche (with Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, CNRS) at LPTENS.