Steve Nahn was born on Oct. 24, 1968, in Trier, Germany, and grew up as the seventh of eight children in Madison, Wisc. He received a BS from the University of Wisconsin in physics with honors and math. From there, he attended graduate school at MIT, working with professors Becker, Fisher and Ting on the L3 experiment at CERN, eventually receiving his PhD for the analysis of W Boson Pair Production.

For several years prior to returning to MIT, he oversaw the data acquisition and operation of the world's largest operating silicon detector while studying the properties of the bottom quark as a member of the CDF Collaboration as a Research Scientist at Yale University.

Nahn is married and has two children.

Sebastian Seung is professor of computational neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Physics; investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and external member of the Max Planck Society.

He received his PhD in theoretical physics from Harvard University. Before joining the MIT faculty, he was a member of the Theoretical Physics Department at Bell Laboratories. He has been a Sloan Research Fellow, a Packard Fellow in Science and Engineering, and a McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience Scholar.

He serves on the Advisory Committee of the Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the Advisory Board and Steering Committee of the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His laboratory is inventing technologies for finding the connectome — the neural equivalent of the genome, comprising all the connections between the brain’s neurons. In 2007, he introduced connectomics to thousands of neuroscientists in his presidential lecture at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. To introduce this emerging field to the general public, he is writing a book that will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in the fall of 2011.

Simcoe specializes in developing optical/infrared instruments for large telescopes, and using these instruments to study the most distant galaxies and quasars in the early universe.

Marin Soljacic has been an assistant professor of physics at MIT since September 2005, and an associate professor of physics at MIT since July 2010.

He received a BsE degree in physics and electrical engineering from MIT in 1996, and earned his PhD in physics at Princeton University in 2000. In September 2000, he was named an MIT Pappalardo Fellow in Physics, and in 2003 was appointed a principal research scientist in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT.

His main research interests are in electromagnetic phenomena, focusing on nanophotonics, nonlinear optics, and wireless power transfer. He is a co-author of 97 scientific articles and 18 patents, and has given more than 70 invited talks at conferences and universities around the world. He is the recipient of the Adolph Lomb medal from the Optical Society of America (2005), and the TR35 award from Technology Review (2006). The work on wireless power transfer that he spearheaded has been singled out as one of the most important technological developments of 2007 by The New York Times, BBC News, Scientific American, Technology Review, and Discover magazine. In 2008, he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship grant.

Jesse Thaler is a theoretical particle physicist whose current research focus is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN. The LHC will explore physics beyond the standard model, addressing a number of outstanding questions in fundamental physics, including the origin of mass, the nature of dark matter, the apparent weakness of gravity and the symmetry structure of our universe. In his research, Thaler aims to maximize the discovery potential of the LHC by proposing new theoretical frameworks and studying their LHC implications.

Thaler joined the MIT Department of Physics in 2010 and is currently a member of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. From 2006 to 2009, he was a fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He received his PhD in physics from Harvard University in 2006, and his ScB in math/physics from Brown University in 2002.

Alexander van Oudenaarden is a professor of physics and biology at MIT. van Oudenaarden’s research focuses on how single cells use gene and protein networks to accurately process intra- and extracellular signals. His laboratory made pioneering contributions to understanding stochastic gene expression and systems biology at the single-cell level.

The current efforts in the van Oudenaarden group are focused on an integrated theoretical and experimental approach to understanding the role of stochastic gene expression during development and differentiation. His PhD research in the field of experimental solid-state physics was performed at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in 1998 (with highest honors) and received the Andries Miedema Award for best PhD research in the field of condensed-matter physics in the Netherlands.

From 1998 to 1999, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, collaborating with Dr. Steven Boxer and Dr. Julie Theriot. He joined the MIT faculty in January 2000. In 2001, he was named an Alfred Sloan Research Fellow and a Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering, and he received the NSF CAREER award. van Oudenaarden was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2004.

Since 2001, he has been teaching a graduate-level course in systems biology at MIT, for which he received the MIT School of Science Prize for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2007. In 2008, van Oudenaarden was promoted to full professor and received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. He is the director of the NIH/NCI-funded Physical Sciences–Oncology center at MIT.

Vladan Vuletic is Lester Wolfe Associate Professor of Physics at MIT. He earned the physics diploma from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and, in 1997, a PhD in physics from the same institution.

A Lynen Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University from 1997 to 2000, he was appointed an assistant professor in the Department of Physics at Stanford in 2000 and in 2003 accepted an assistant professorship in physics at MIT. He was promoted to associate professor in 2004 and tenured in 2007. His research focuses on atom-light interaction for the generation of nonclassical states of atoms and light fields.

Topics currently studied in his research group are quantum information processing with cold atoms and ions, spin squeezing for improving atomic clocks beyond the standard quantum limit, and nonlinear optics at the few-photon level.