The New York Academy of Sciences is one of the oldest scientific organizations in the United States, founded in 1817. A nonprofit professional society with more than 20,000 members across 100 countries, it convenes scientists, students, policymakers and the public to advance research, education and expertise. Its work spans flagship recognition programs like the Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists and the Tata Transformation Prize, global STEM education through the Junior Academy and Global STEM Alliance, crisis-response coordination via the International Science Reserve, and the long-running peer-reviewed journal Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
Dagogo Altraide is the creator and narrator behind ColdFusion, a YouTube channel with over 5 million subscribers known for deep-dive documentaries on technology, science, and business history. Born in Mumbai to Nigerian parents and raised across multiple countries before settling in Perth, Australia, Altraide built ColdFusion from a 2007 smartphone review channel into one of the internet's most respected educational documentary platforms - all while remaining largely faceless on screen. He is also a published author, music producer (under the alias Burn Water), and co-host of the Through The Web Podcast.
Brilliant.org is an interactive STEM learning platform that teaches math, science, data, and computer science through hands-on problems instead of passive video. Founded in 2012 by Sue Khim, the San Francisco-based company has grown to roughly 10 million learners and operates on a freemium subscription model with 90+ guided courses.
Philipp Dettmer is the founder, CEO, and head writer of Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell, the Munich-based animation studio and YouTube channel with over 25 million subscribers and 3.6 billion views. Starting as a university passion project in 2013, Kurzgesagt has grown into a 70-person studio that transforms dense scientific, philosophical, and technological ideas into visually stunning, widely-shared short films. Dettmer is also the author of 'Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive' (2021) and co-creator of the video game Star Birds, launched in early access in September 2025.
Mark Rober is a former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer who spent seven years working on the Curiosity rover before becoming one of YouTube's most-watched science communicators with 77+ million subscribers. He founded CrunchLabs in 2022, an edtech company delivering hands-on STEM subscription boxes for children, and has helped raise over $94 million across three viral philanthropic campaigns (Team Trees, Team Seas, Team Water). In 2026 he invested $60 million to build Class CrunchLabs, a free STEM curriculum for teachers.
Derek Muller is a Canadian-Australian physicist turned YouTuber who runs Veritasium, a channel of 20+ million subscribers built on the idea that learning science starts with admitting you got it wrong. His PhD thesis argued that confusion is a feature, not a bug, and he has spent fifteen years engineering that confusion on camera.
Prisms (legally Prisms of Reality) is a San Francisco-based education-technology company building the first spatial learning platform for K-12 math and science. Students don VR headsets and walk through problems - tsunamis, viral outbreaks, exponential growth - before ever picking up a pencil. Founded in 2020 by MIT-trained educator Anurupa Ganguly, the company now reaches hundreds of thousands of students across most US states.
Chris Emerson, PhD, is the Founder, Chief Scientist, and CEO of LEVEL, California's #1 cannabis tablet brand. A US Navy veteran and Chinese interpreter turned small-molecule chemist, he abandoned a Stanford postdoc in 2012 to spend four months living in a tent on a Mendocino cannabis farm - and emerged with a founding thesis that would reshape how the industry thinks about getting high. Instead of chasing THC percentages, he built LEVEL around effects-driven cannabinoid formulations using precise ratios of acidic, neutral, and degradative compounds the plant alone can't deliver. Two US patents, multiple peer-reviewed publications, and an IRB-approved clinical trial later, LEVEL is the top-selling cannabis tablet brand in California, now operating in seven states.
Jayant Kulkarni is the CEO and co-founder of Quartzy, the world's leading lab management platform serving over 400,000 researchers across 25,000+ organizations. A PhD-trained control systems engineer from Cornell University and alumnus of IIT Madras, Kulkarni co-founded Quartzy in 2011 after completing a Swartz Fellowship at Columbia University's Center for Theoretical Neuroscience. The company - named after the highest-scoring word in Scrabble - went through Y Combinator's Summer 2011 batch and has grown into a vertically integrated procurement and inventory platform for life sciences, raising $23 million in April 2026 from Avenue Capital Group and BroadOak Capital Partners.
Ashlee Vance is a South Africa-born, Texas-raised journalist, author, and documentary producer who spent 14 years at Bloomberg Businessweek before launching Core Memory in January 2025 - an independent sci-tech media company. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling books including the definitive pre-Isaacson biography of Elon Musk, producer of HBO's Wild Wild Space and Netflix's Don't Die, and creator of Bloomberg's most-watched video series Hello World. In 2025 he is writing a forthcoming book on OpenAI and Sam Altman with exclusive access, and already sold the film rights.