Stefan Helmreich received his BA from University of California, Los Angeles (anthropology, 1989) and his MA and PhD from Stanford University (anthropology, 1995). He has worked as a postdoctoral associate in science and technology studies at Cornell University, an external faculty fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University, and as assistant professor of science and society at New York University.

Helmreich's anthropological research centers on contemporary biologists puzzling through the conceptual and technical boundaries of the category of life itself. He has written extensively on Artificial Life, a field dedicated to the computer simulation of living systems, notably in Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (University of California Press, 1998), which in 2001 won the Diana Forsythe Book Prize from the American Anthropological Association.

He recently finished work on a book about how scientific portraits of the oceans are transforming as marine biologists reimagine the sea through the language and techniques of genomics, bioinformatics, biotechnology, biodiversity mapping and systems modeling. Titled Alien Ocean: An Anthropology of Marine Biology and the Limits of Life, the monograph zeroes in on recent work in marine microbiology, reporting on fieldwork undertaken with scientists at deep-sea hydrothermal vents and in areas of the open ocean outside national sovereignty.

Heather Paxson received her BA from Haverford College (1990), majoring in anthropology at Bryn Mawr College, and her MA (1992) and PhD (1998) in anthropology from Stanford University. Before coming to MIT, she taught at Stanford University, Princeton University, New York University and Pitzer College.

Her work explores how people grapple with changing socioeconomic conditions and new bioscientific knowledge through everyday ethical practices, especially those having to do with reproduction and food. In the 1990s, she conducted two years of doctoral fieldwork in Athens, Greece, on changing ideas about motherhood and fertility control. Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece was published in 2004 by University of California Press. She is now at work on an ethnographic study of American artisanal cheesemakers funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research.

Christine Walley is an associate professor in the Anthropology Program and also teaches classes in Women's Studies and Comparative Media Studies.

Her research and teaching interests include: the environment, development, gender, documentary/ethnographic film, and theories of globalization and capitalism.

She received a BA in anthropology from Pomona College in 1987 and a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from New York University in 1999. Her book, Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004), is based on 19 months of fieldwork in East Africa. She has published on the controversial topic of female genital surgeries in Africa as well as the relationship between science and "indigenous knowledge." She has also recently begun work on a new book about social class and identity in the United States and is co-directing and producing a documentary video, Exit Zero, that explores changing community life in a former Midwestern steeltown.