Emily Wilson is a Professor in the Department of Classical Studies and Chair of the Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania and is the College for Women Class of 1963 term professor in the Humanities. Her books include Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins 2005), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard 2007), and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca” (Oxford 2014). She is the Classics editor of the revised Norton Anthology of World Literature. Her verse translations include Six Tragedies of Seneca (Oxford), four translations of plays by Euripides in the Modern Library The Greek Plays (2016), Oedipus Tyrannos (2020 Norton), and the Odyssey (2017, with a Norton Critical Edition published in 2020). She is working on a new translation of the Iliad, which is due to appear in 2023. She edited a volume on Ancient Tragedy for Bloomsbury Cultural Histories (2019). She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2019, and won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2020.

Ubaldo Vitali was born in Rome 1944 into a fourth generation family of silversmiths. He studied at Liceo Artistico, Rome; L’Accademia di Belle Arti, Faculty of Sculpture, Rome; L’Universitá di Roma, Faculty of Architecture, Rome. He has conserved and restored works of art for the Soprintendenza alle Belle Arti (the institution overseeing Italian museums), as well for various European museums and galleries. He has also designed and executed silver objects for the Italian government as gifts to foreign dignitaries, as well as three popes, the Queen of England, and the Shah of Iran. He moved to the United States in 1967. He has since worked for leading American museums, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Detroit Institute of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Yale Art Gallery, North Carolina Museum, The Newark Museum, The Dallas Museum, and many others. He has been commissioned by the US State Department to design and execute silver objects to be given to foreign dignitaries by the President of the United States as presidential gifts. His objects are in the permanent collections of The Newark Museum, the Houston Museum, the Yale Art Gallery, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum Renwick Gallery. His works have been exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, as well as a solo exhibition in the Newark Museum, Oct -Dec 1990.

Beth Shapiro is an evolutionary biologist who specializes in the genetics of ice age animals and plants. As Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UC Santa Cruz and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Beth uses DNA recovered from bones and other remains to study how species evolved through time and how human activities have affected and continue to affect this dynamic process. Her work focuses on organisms ranging from influenza to mammoths, asking questions about domestication, admixture, speciation, and pathogen evolution. Her current work also develops techniques to recover increasingly trace amounts of DNA such as from environmental and water samples and use these data to discover how biological communities and ecosystems might be made more resilient. A 2009 MacArthur Fellow, Beth is an award-winning popular science author and communicator who uses her research as a platform to explore the potential of genomic technologies for conservation and medicine. Her newest book, Life As We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature was published in 2021.

David N. Spergel is the President of the Simons Foundation. He is the Charles Young Professor of Astronomy Emeritus at Princeton University and was the Founding Director of the Center of Computational Astrophysics at the Flatiron Institute in NY. After two years as a long-term member at the Institute for Advanced Study, he joined the Princeton astrophysics faculty in 1987, where he was also Associate Faculty in the Departments of Physics and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He served as Department Chair from 2006 to 2016. In 2016, he became the Founding Director of the Center for Computational Astrophysics. In 2021, he assumed leadership of the Simons Foundation. Spergel is a fellow of the American Physical Society, a Legacy Fellow of the American Astronomical Society, a member of the American Philosophical Society, National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, the Breakthrough Prize, the Gruber Prize, the Shaw Prize, Sloan Fellowship, and the Presidential Young Investigator award. For his contributions to NASA, he was twice awarded the NASA Exceptional Public Service Award. Spergel was one of the leaders of the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Prove (WMAP), which measured the age, shape, and composition of the universe.