WORLDING DESIGN LEAD, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR AND RESEARCH SCIENTIST OF CO-CREATION STUDIO AT MIT ODL

Katerina Cizek is a Peabody and two-time Emmy-winning documentary director, creator and leader in the emergent tech and media space. She is the Artistic Director of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab where she authored (with Uricchio et al.) the MIT Press book Collective Wisdom: Co-Creating Media for Equity and Justice, forthcoming November 2022. For over a decade at the National Film Board of Canada, she helped redefine the organization as one of the world’s leading digital story hubs with two major projects HIGHRISE, and the NFB Filmmaker-in-Residence. Cizek‘s earlier independent films include the Hampton-Prize winner Seeing is Believing: Handicams, Human Rights and the News (with Peter Wintonick). She has served  as an advisor to Sundance Institute Labs and is a member of the  Peabody Inaugural Board of Jurors for Interactive.

Lafayette Cruise is an urban planner and futurist. He holds an immense sense of awe and wonder for people, nature and the imaginative possibilities of how we can exist together that continues to inform his diverse academic and professional career. Cruise’s practice engages projects at the intersection of urban planning and speculative fiction. He leverages the radical imagination and world-building capabilities of speculative fiction and the multidisciplinary, strategic implementation tools of urban planning in order to imagine, plan and build a more just, liberating and sustainable future.

Marina Psaros is a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Arsht-Rock Resilience Center and the author of The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis. She has developed and led sustainability and climate change action programs across the public, private, and non-profit sectors, most recently as the Head of Sustainability for Unity Technologies. Psaros holds a Master’s in Environmental Policy and Urban Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is a recipient of the C40 Cities Award. Her mission is to unite science, technology, and creativity to solve our most pressing environmental issues.

Ryan Wyatt assumed his role as Senior Director of Morrison Planetarium and Science Visualization at the California Academy of Sciences in April 2007. He has written and directed the Academy’s eight award-winning fulldome video planetarium programs, all of which are science documentaries that rely on visualization to tell their stories, but topics range from astronomy to geology, ecosystem science, and conservation. He has the pleasure of heading up the Academy’s Morrison Planetarium and Visualization Studio, collaborating with a remarkable team of content producers and educators.

Trained as an astronomer, Wyatt has worked in the planetarium field since 1991; prior to arriving in San Francisco, he worked for six years as Science Visualizer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Wyatt is cofounder and vice president of Immersive Media Entertainment, Research, Science, and Art (IMERSA), a professional organization dedicated to advancing the art and technology of immersive digital experiences. He served as co-chair of the 2017 and 2019 Gordon Research Conferences on Visualization in Science and Education (GRC/VSE).

Rachel Connolly is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, where she works with NASA's Science Activation Program as the Systems Integration and Analysis Lead. Her work focuses on designing media-integrated educational experiences that leverage emerging formats of scientific data for innovative instruction.

Trained in physics and astronomy, Connolly started her career as a high school science teacher in New York City. She worked for a decade in the planetarium field as the Astrophysics Education Manager at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and as the planetarium director and a faculty member in science education at the University of Louisville's Gheens Science Hall and Rauch Planetarium. Her work with the Hayden Planetarium sparked a love of data visualization that led to graduate work at Teachers College, Columbia University, where she completed her PhD in Science Education in 2019.  Over the last decade,  Connolly was the director of STEM education for WGBH and PBS LearningMedia™, where she served as the principal investigator for NASA’s Bringing the Universe to America’s Classrooms project. 

She is serving as a discussant at the 2023 Gordon Research Conferences on Visualization in Science and Education (GRC/VSE).

Juan Pablo Hurtado was born in La Paz, Bolivia. He obtained his BS in Industrial Engineering from Universidad Mayor de San Simon and worked as a field engineer in the oil and gas industry. After moving to the US, he obtained his Master's degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Maryland, College Park, and began working as an electron microscope trainer and operator. As a microscopy educator at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, he discovered his passion for education and science communication. Currently, he manages the Science On a Sphere facility at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Headquarters in Silver Spring, MD. His work revolves around using data to develop science educational products, facilitate outreach efforts, and improve accessibility for underserved audiences.

Dr. Kinzler is Senior Director of Science Education, and Co-Director of the MAT Earth Science Residency Program at the American Museum of Natural History.

Before joining the Museum’s Education Division, Dr. Kinzler’s research career involved investigating planetary differentiation through melting at Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory and in the Museum’s Earth and Planetary Sciences Department.

In 1999, Dr. Kinzler co-curated the Museum's Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth, and then joined the Museum’s National Center for Science Literacy, Education and Technology. With a mission to take the Museum’s unparalleled resources beyond its walls, the National Center creates a full spectrum of science education products that integrate authentic science with standards-based curriculum design and innovative use of technology. In 2010 Dr. Kinzler assumed senior management of the Gottesman Center for Science Teaching and Learning.

Mark SubbaRao leads NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, a group tasked with visualizing NASA science results for public audiences. Before joining NASA, Mark spent 18 years at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, where he produced planetarium shows and designed museum exhibits featuring data-driven scientific visualizations. During 2019-2020 Mark served as President of the International Planetarium Society (IPS), where he spearheaded the ‘Data to Dome’’ initiative - an effort to prepare the planetarium community for the big data era. Before that he worked at the University of Chicago where he was part of a team that created the largest 3D map of the Universe, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Vivian Trakinski is the Director of Science Visualization at the American Museum of Natural History. Vivian joined the Museum in 1999 as a documentary filmmaker, spending more than a decade traveling the globe to create short films about how we study the natural world.  More recently, Vivian has been collaborating with scientists, artists, and programmers to produce scientifically accurate and visually compelling data driven experiences for visitors to AMNH’s theaters and exhibition halls.