The minds behind the conversations.

A Toronto academic neurosurgeon of more than forty years, he has studied surgical error across his own 2000–2019 caseload, practised awake craniotomy, and helped build neurosurgical capacity in more than fifteen lower-income countries. His three A's for surgeons who err: acknowledge, acquire knowledge, ask forgiveness.

Cascade Institute researchers who built the Polycrisis Core Model — eleven interlocking global subsystems, more than 1,800 expert causal judgments, and three probable outcomes for humanity by 2040. The model finds a self-reinforcing "Hope Attractor"; getting there is the hard part.

University of British Columbia Department of Biochemistry. Her team followed the communication between the microbial communities living in the gut and the brain — one of the fastest-moving frontiers in biology.

A thirty-year career with the European Union — postings in India, China, Pakistan, Costa Rica and Brussels, then EU Ambassador in Bolivia, Israel and Mexico. A seasoned diplomat with frontline experience of how the international order holds, and fractures, under pressure.

University of Southern Queensland School of Sciences. A planetary scientist whose work on Mars Express radar data pointed to bodies of liquid water beneath the Martian surface — and to what that might mean for life.

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics; Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics, 2011–14. She leads a team at Perimeter working on loop quantum gravity — one attempt at the deepest unsolved problem in science, unifying general relativity with quantum mechanics.

Institute for Theoretical Physics, Leibniz University Hannover, and previously at the University of British Columbia and Perimeter Institute. A quantum computing theorist who gave one of the series' earliest science talks in 2014 and returned eleven years later to explain what quantum machines will do to cryptography.

UBC Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. A volcanologist whose research spans planetary science, geophysics, and the surprising connections between deep Earth processes and surface climate.

Founding Director, Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy, University of Toronto. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a member of the Order of Canada, and one of the country's most-heard voices on international negotiation and war.

New York University. Will is an AI researcher working on the theoretical foundations of large language models — what they can do, what they can't, what they must not do, and why the distinctions matter for how we integrate them into society.

Advisor for Sustainable Economic Development at the Bezos Earth Fund, after fourteen years at the United Nations — most recently with the Climate Action Team in the Executive Office of the Secretary-General. He leads the Fund's work on forest-protecting economies in the Brazilian Amazon and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Professor of International Relations, University of Toronto. An expert on the history of the war in Ukraine and on what it is doing to the wider geopolitical order.

Founding editor-in-chief of Quanta Magazine from 2012 to 2024, and before that digital editor of science and national news at the New York Times. The Nobel laureate David Gross called Quanta "the greatest thing to happen to science journalism in many years."

New Yorker cartoonist and author of Flying Couch and Artificial: A Love Story, a hand-drawn memoir about her father Ray Kurzweil building a chatbot in the voice of his own late father. "Love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life."

New York University. Philosopher of physics, founder and director of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics, and a Guggenheim Fellow — asking the questions physicists sometimes find it easier to set aside.

Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto, and until 2024 director of the Fields Institute. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Kumar's session describing why so many people fear mathematics and how mentoring unlocks what people are capable of was deliberately non-technical.

Professor of neurosciences at UC San Diego and director of the Alzheimer's Disease Cooperative Study; previously Executive Associate Dean for Research in UBC's Faculty of Medicine. He contributed to the discovery of the progranulin and C9ORF72 mutations behind frontotemporal dementia. This was Howard's second presentation at Science Plus.

Professor of Environmental Studies, New York University. David's expertise is in nitrogen — the fertilizer that feeds the world and is also the pollutant that runs into its water and air, and the difficulty of having one without the other.

A geopolitical analyst who walked Science Plus through the return of a multipolar world — how power is redistributing among rival states, and what that leaves for everyone caught in between.

University of Hong Kong and winner of the 2023 Hong Kong Young Scientist Award. His cover story in Nature showcases how Amruth used gravitational lensing to support that dark matter is not made of ultramassive particles at all, but of particles so light they travel through space like waves.

Associate Chair for Nuclear Physics at Brookhaven National Laboratory, where he runs the experiments at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider — a machine that recreates the quark-gluon plasma at 250 million degrees, the state of the universe trillionths of a second after the Big Bang.

Viktor posts frequently on Quora, answering profound questions on quantum mechanics and cosmology. This session was an open evening rather than a lecture: the room asked, and he answered, on Hawking radiation, singularities and the cosmological constant.

Associate Professor, Department of Microbiology & Immunology, McGill University. Jesse's lab uses genomics to trace the ecology and evolution of microbes — including how SARS-CoV-2 moved between animals and humans such as mink and deer, and back again.

A postdoctoral researcher in Kelley Harris's lab at University of Washington Genome Sciences, using genomics to read mutations and demographic history in sea otters, bears and whales — species whose genomes still carry the imprint of the fur trade and of whaling. Daughter of 2022 presenter Charles Beichman.

Assistant Professor in the UBC Department of Physics and Astronomy, formerly at MIT, working on NASA's TESS mission — the survey that watches for the faint dimming of a star as an unseen planet crosses in front of it. She has identified many thousands of exoplanets.

Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor of Anatomy at the University of Chicago. Paleontologist, co-discoverer of Tiktaalik — the "fish with hands" — and author of the national bestseller that gives the session its name.

University of British Columbia, Centre for Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics. A world authority on the genetics of Huntington's disease and on turning that genetic understanding into therapy; his early work looked at the outliers — people with extreme or highly unusual conditions — to learn what causes disease.

New York Times journalist and author of The Economists' Hour, on how economists came to hold such sway over public policy — and what that has meant for inflation, markets and ordinary life.

Physicist and founder of General Fusion, Burnaby, BC, now a public company with a major facility in Britain. The session traced the company from concept and described the wider global race for commercial fusion power — a field where, as one participant put it, "fusion power is always 40 years in the future no matter when you ask the question."

Philosopher and author, who spoke to Science Plus on her highly acclaimed book Plato at the Googleplex and on the drive that propels us — why human beings want to matter.

Professor at New York University. His research studies the use of psilocybin for the care of people facing the end of life — among the most closely watched work in clinical psychedelics.

Caltech, and executive director of the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. He walked Science Plus through JWST weeks after its launch — including its deployment, the data it would gather, and how many ways its mirror segments could have failed. Father of 2023 presenter Annabel Beichman.

A session on Shakespeare's library — what the playwright read, and what those sources tell us about how the plays came to be made.

A historian of physics who has studied and written about the life of George Gamow — the physicist behind Big Bang cosmology, and the author of the Mr Tompkins books that taught relativity and quantum theory to a generation of general readers.

Director, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. A cosmologist and theoretical physicist whose Science Plus session ranged from his personal history to his theoretical work on the Big Bang, the shape of the universe, and his major contributions to science and mathematics in Africa.

A physician who is a Canadian authority and author on the Canadian medicare system — where the system came from, what it does well, and what it keeps failing to fix.

Professor, University of British Columbia Department of Physics and Astronomy. Ludo presented his work on dark matter — the invisible mass that outweighs everything we can actually see. One guest wrote afterwards that "it has opened our eyes to cosmology."

Markus created Omega Tau, hosting more than 400 comprehensive podcasts entitled “Science and Engineering in Your Headphones,” with scientists and engineers conversing on how things actually work — and on what it takes to make technical subjects accessible.

Professor of Geophysics, University of British Columbia. A planetary scientist who worked with the NASA team on the OSIRIS-REx mission, which flew to an asteroid and brought a piece of it home. One guest wrote that his seven-year-old daughter "now has a new hero."

Founder of the Cascade Institute and author of Commanding Hope. A scholar of how environmental stress, social complexity and geopolitical instability interact to produce cascading crises — and of what hope can honestly be built on.

Director of the BC Cancer Agency Genome Sciences Centre and UBC Canada Research Chair in Genome Science; his team sequenced the SARS coronavirus genome in 2003. His 2017 session covered the Personalized OncoGenomics Program — by then 776 patients consented across 50 tumour types, with the analysis informative for treatment decisions in 80% of the first 300 pilot patients.

Felix Bloch Professor of Theoretical Physics, Stanford University. One of the founding fathers of string theory and the holographic principle, and one of the most gifted physics communicators of his generation.

Director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam. Philosopher and author of Learning from the Germans, exploring how societies confront — or fail to confront — their moral failures and historical crimes.

Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations, University of Texas at Austin. Economist and author, son of John Kenneth Galbraith, with a career devoted to understanding inequality, political economy, and global financial systems.

Chief Scientist and President, MindScope Program, Allen Institute for Brain Science. One of the world's leading researchers on the neural correlates of consciousness — and its profound philosophical implications.

Professor and Distinguished University Scholar, UBC Brain Research Centre. A leading researcher in neuroplasticity and brain-behaviour relationships, whose TED Talk on learning and the brain has reached millions worldwide.

A session on drug-resistant bacteria and fungi — and, delivered in late February 2020, on COVID-19, which was then only beginning to spread.

A session on megafires and the paradox at the heart of fire management, in his own blunt words: "the more we suppress fires, the worse they will eventually become."

UBC Department of Forest and Conservation Sciences. The ecologist whose research revealed how trees communicate and share resources through underground fungal networks — changing how we understand forests forever. Author of Finding the Mother Tree.

A Vancouver neurosurgeon specializing in spine surgery. His presentation covered modern developments in back surgery, and his slide deck is preserved in the Science Plus archive.

Associate Professor of Finance, University of Calgary. A session making the case for income-share agreements as a way to pay for education, drawing on the Lumni Foundation's record of roughly $70 million placed with about 10,000 students — and closing with a direct question: "who is ready to sign up?"

Longtime follower of Science Plus and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, UBC. Fred presented to Science Plus on two occasions: “Mathematicians are Different” on April 26, 2017, and a second presentation in May 2019, whose slide deck is preserved.

B.Sc. in physics from Bedford College, University of London, 1973, and Ph.D. from Queen Mary College, University of London, 1977. He rose to become head of engineering at the TRIUMF Laboratory in Vancouver, then moved to Geneva to work at CERN. The highlight of his career was being responsible for building two large detectors, one at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the second at CERN. After designing and building the second detector for the ATLAS experiment, he was elected chairman of the ATLAS collaboration board at CERN from 2004 to 2008. Chris and his wife bicycled from Bangkok to Paris over the Himalayas, a distance of 17,000 kilometres, and his talk was a wonderful slide presentation of that experience. More about Chris Oram →

Professor of Psychology, UBC, and author. Kiley's session focused on the beginnings of moral judgment in infancy — what very young children appear to grasp long before they can explain it.

Professor, Peter A. Allard School of Law, UBC, and author of The Corporation and other books on corporate power. There is no written or PowerPoint record of this session.

Professor of Physics at the University of British Columbia and a specialist in numerical relativity — using supercomputer simulation to study Einstein's equations and gravitational collapse. His slide deck is preserved in the Science Plus archive.

Founder and executive director of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute, an independent research organization dedicated to innovative solutions to transportation problems. His slide deck is preserved in the Science Plus archive.

Professor, Department of Physics, UBC. Mark's presentation on string theory and fundamental particles is preserved in the archive as a PowerPoint.

A session on family medicine — the general-practice end of the health system, described from inside it.

Steve is a professional engineer who worked on the rehabilitation of major naval vessels. His session was on megaprojects — the vast, expensive undertakings that so reliably run late and over budget, and what separates the ones that work from the ones that don't.

Professor of Pediatrics, UBC, and a prominent critical care doctor and investigator at BC Children's Hospital, Vancouver. Three years before COVID-19, this session focused on how medical resources actually get deployed when a pandemic arrives — the planning problem behind the clinical one.

Professor of Physics, Simon Fraser University. This session was on superconductivity — the materials that lose all electrical resistance, and why they still have not stopped surprising physicists.

Professor of Physics, UBC, and discoverer of the “Unruh effect.” His theoretical work sits behind the detection of gravitational waves by LIGO — ripples in spacetime that Einstein predicted a century before anyone could measure one. He described the planning and construction of this remarkable project.

Co-founder of Critical Systems Labs, with a Cambridge PhD and patents in vehicle autonomy. His question for the room: should a self-driving car obey the law exactly, or drive the way an expert human actually drives?

Beedie School of Business, Simon Fraser University. His October 2016 session survives in the archive as a slide deck.

UBC Computer Science. Holger talked about artificial intelligence — a full decade before the current wave arrived.

Pietro is a professional engineer and project manager with a career in aerospace. He gave us a tour of more than fifty years of solar system exploration, from Pioneer 5 to New Horizons — delivered with a scale model in which the Earth is a peppercorn.

Peter is a professional engineer who presented on transportation — how people and goods actually move, and what that costs.

Professor of Economics and Dean of the Executive MBA Program, SFU. Danny's session worked through Piketty's argument that returns on capital outrun economic growth — with a nod to Larry Summers's line that "Piketty's tome seems to be drawn on a dozen times for every time it is read."

Doug is a lawyer by profession with a science background and a special interest in climate. He took Science Plus through the IPCC's assessment of climate change in 2014 — one of the series' first encounters with the subject that keeps returning.

Peter is a Vancouver anesthesiologist. His session was on the bispectral index monitor (BIS) and the unsettling problem it exists to solve: patients who remain aware while under anesthesia.

Norman is a mathematician. He gave one of the founding sessions of the salon: an evening on quantum entanglement — the correlation between distant particles that Einstein could not accept, and is still not fully understood after 100 years.

Nigel is a professional engineer and soil specialist. One of the earliest Science Plus evenings: a photographic tour of dams and the engineering that holds them up.

Professor of Statistics and Data Science, Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University. A session on Bayesian statistics — reasoning about an uncertain world by updating what you believe as the evidence arrives.

President of Emily Carr University, and author. An Officer of the Order of Canada and a member of the Order of British Columbia. A session on Thomas Kuhn — paradigms, scientific revolutions, and the awkward business of a whole field changing its mind.

Professor of Economics, Simon Fraser University. An account of the subprime mortgage crisis, five years on from the collapse.

Professor Emeritus, UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems. A former member of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies and right-hand person to Allende. This session was on Alejandro's experience in the Chilean experiment in social change and the subsequent coup by Pinochet, followed by his escape and years in exile, ending up in Canada. There is no formal record of this session.