Christie Aschwanden is an independent journalist, essayist and science nerd. She blogs about science at LastWordOnNothing.com and has written for more than 50 publications, including Smithsonian, the New York Times, Slate, Men's Journal, Mother Jones, NPR.org, and O, the Oprah magazine. She was a National Magazine Award finalist in 2011 and a Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting fellow in 2007. She lives on a small farm in rural western Colorado with her winemaker husband and raises heritage poultry in her spare time.

After Ralph Baric attended N.C. State University on a swimming scholarship, he stuck around to complete a PhD in microbiology in 1983, the year the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was isolated. He is known for his research on the replication and pathogenesis of coronaviruses, which include SARS, and more recently of noroviruses such as the Norwalk virus. His work has crossed the boundaries of microbiology, virology, immunology and epidemiology, looking especially at the population genetics of viruses to find the molecular building blocks for more effective vaccines.

Deborah Blum is a Pulitzer-Prize winning science writer and the author of five books, most recently “The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York,” a New York Times paperback best seller. She writes for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Scientific American and Time magazine. She blogs about chemistry, culture (and the occasional murder) for Wired Science Blogs at Elemental.

Ken Bost grew up near Concord, N.C., and received his undergraduate degree from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1979. He left the state to pursue a doctoral degree in immunology from Ole Miss Medical School. After rising through the academic ranks at UTMB-Galveston, then UAB Medical Center, and finally Tulane Medical Center, where he was a professor of microbiology and immunology, he returned to N.C. in 1998 as the Belk Distinguished Professor of Biology at UNC-Charlotte. In 2005 Ken Bost and Kenneth Piller co-founded SoyMeds, Inc. as a UNC-Charlotte startup company.