Hughes attended Cornell University as an undergraduate, earning a BA in physics in 1993. He received his PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology, working with Kip Thorne. After spending one year working in computational relativity at the University of Illinois, he returned to Caltech as a postdoc and instructor in the physics department. Hughes then spent two and half years as a postdoc in the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, before moving to MIT in January 2003.

Erich Ippen is known for pioneering the field of femtosecond optics. He worked at Bell Laboratories for 12 years before joining the faculty of MIT, has received major awards for his work from IEEE, the OSA, the APS and the SPIE, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 

His current research interests include femtosecond optical clock and arbitrary waveform technologies, ultrafast studies of materials and devices, nanophotonics, and ultrashort-pulse fiber devices.

Roman Jackiw was born in Lublinec, Poland, on Nov. 8, 1939. After graduating from Swarthmore College in 1961, he pursued doctoral studies with professors Hans Bethe and Kenneth Wilson at Cornell University. He received his PhD from Cornell in 1966.

Jackiw currently occupies the Jerrold Zacharias chair in the Department of Physics at MIT, where he has been since 1969. From 1966 to 1969, he was a junior fellow with the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He has held visiting professorships at Rockefeller University from 1977 to 1978, at the University of California, Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, in 1980, and at Columbia University from 1989 to 1990.

In addition to having an extensive list of scientific publications in theoretical and mathematical physics, focused on particle, condensed matter and gravitational physics, Jackiw is the author of seven books.

Pablo Jarillo-Herrero joined MIT as an assistant professor of physics in January 2008. He received his MSc in physics from the University of Valencia, Spain, in 1999. Then he spent two years at the University of California in San Diego, where he received a second MSc degree before going to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he earned his PhD in 2005. After a one-year postdoc in Delft, he moved to Columbia University, where he most recently worked as a NanoResearch Initiative Fellow.

Ruben Juanes is the ARCO Assistant Professor in Energy Studies in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. Prior to joining the MIT faculty in 2006, he was acting assistant professor at Stanford University (2003-2005), and assistant professor at the University of Texas-Austin (2006).

He leads a research group in the area of soft-matter physics, with application to energy-driven problems: oil and gas recovery, methane hydrates and geological carbon sequestration. He is the author of more than 40 peer-reviewed journal publications and 50-plus conference papers. In addition to his graduate and undergraduate teaching at MIT, he is the director of the MIT short course "Carbon Capture and Storage: Science, Technology and Policy." He has been a plenary speaker at several conferences, including the 2006 Gordon Research Conference on Flow and Transport in Permeable Media.

David Kaiser is an associate professor at MIT, where he teaches in both the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, and the Department of Physics. He completed PhDs in theoretical physics and in the history of science at Harvard.

Kaiser is author or editor of several books on the history of modern physics, including the award-winning book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (2005), which traces how Richard Feynman’s idiosyncratic approach to quantum physics entered the mainstream. His most recent book, How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival, will be published in June 2011 by W.W. Norton.

In addition to his scholarly publishing in physics and history, Kaiser has written for such magazines as the London Review of Books, Scientific American, American Scientist, and Physics World. His research has been featured in Harper's, Science, and Science News, on several NOVA television programs, and on National Public Radio’s Science Friday. Honors include the Leroy Apker award from the American Physical Society for best undergraduate physics student in the country; the Pfizer Prize from the History of Science Society for best book in the field (awarded for Drawing Theories Apart); and the Harold E. Edgerton Award for best tenure-track faculty member at MIT. He has also received several teaching awards from Harvard and MIT.

Wolfgang Ketterle has been the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT since 1998. He received a diploma (equivalent to master’s degree) from the Technical University of Munich (1982), and a PhD in physics from the University of Munich (1986). He did postdoctoral work at the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching and at the University of Heidelberg in molecular spectroscopy and combustion diagnostics.

In 1990, he came to MIT as a postdoc and joined the physics faculty in 1993. For his observation of Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas in 1995, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001. Other honors include the Rabi Prize of the American Physical Society (1997), the Fritz London Prize in Low Temperature Physics (1999) and the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics (2000).

John McGreevy is from Staten Island, N.Y. A graduate of Stuyvesant High School and Brown University, he did his thesis work at the University of California, Berkeley, and Stanford. Before joining the MIT physics department in July 2006, he was a Dicke Fellow at Princeton and a research scientist at Stanford.

Jocelyn Monroe is an assistant professor of physics in MIT’s Laboratory for Nuclear Science who works on experimental searches for new particles.

Her current research focus is on directly detecting dark matter particle interactions with the MiniCLEAN and DMTPC experiments. Monroe was a Pappalardo post-doctoral fellow at MIT until 2009, working on directional dark matter detection with DMTPC, and on seeking exotic particle participants in solar neurtino oscillations with the SNO experiment.

Monroe earned her PhD from Columbia University in 2006; her dissertation research was on the MiniBooNE neutrino oscillation experiment with advisor Professor Michael Shaevitz. In 1999-2000, Jocelyn held the position of engineering physicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, where she studied the physics of muon beam cooling. Jocelyn earned her BA in astrophysics at Columbia University in 1999.