Ivan Amato is a science and technology writer, editor and communicator based in Silver Spring, MD. Currently the journalist-in-residence at UCSB’s Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, he is the author of three books—Super Vision: A New View of Nature (2003), Pushing the Horizon: Seventy-five years of high stakes science and technology at the Naval Research Laboratory (1998), and Stuff: the materials the world is made of (1997). A former managing editor at Chemical and Engineering News, Amato recently has been organizing and running science cafés in Washington, D.C., and now here in Santa Barbara. 

Patrick McCray is a CNS PI and professor in the UCSB Department of History where he researches and teaches about post-1945 and contemporary science and technology. Before coming to UCSB, McCray worked at the Center for History of Physics at the American Institute of Physics and George Washington University. He is the author of numerous publications and books on the history of science and technology including Giant Telescopes: Astronomical Ambition and the Promise of Technology (Harvard, 2004). His most recent book is titled The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Space Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Future (Princeton, 2012).