Unpacking Wonder: From Curiosity to Comprehension

Marcelo Gleiser, PhD is a world-renowned theoretical physicist and award-winning author, and is currently the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He obtained his PhD from King's College London in 1986 and received the 1994 Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House. He is a Fellow and General Councilor of the American... Read More

Jennifer Stellar is an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto. She received her PhD in Social-Personality Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the impact of prosocial emotions—including awe, compassion, and gratitude—on health and well-being. She explores how these emotions work in.... Read More

Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist. He was educated at Westminster School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. His work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Guardian, the Independent, New Scientist, the New York Review of Books, as well as other publications. He is a past recipient of an IUCN-Reuters award for best environmental reporting in Western Europe, and has worked as a.... Read More

Michelle "Lani" Shiota is an associate professor of social psychology at Arizona State University. Her studies of positive emotions, emotion regulation, and emotional mechanisms of close relationships use multiple methods including cardiovascular, electrodermal, and EEG measures, behavioral coding, cognitive tasks, and narrative analysis as well as self-reports. Shiota's research has.... Read More

Gavin Francis is a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of the Royal College of General Practitioners. He lives and practices medicine in Edinburgh. Dr. Francis studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh. After qualifying as a physician, Francis spent ten years traveling, during which time he visited all seven continents. His first book, True North: Travels in Arctic Europe.... Read More

Alex Filippenko is he Richard & Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the Physical Sciences, and a Miller Senior Fellow in the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California, Berkeley. Filippenko developed and runs the Katzman Automatic Imaging Telescope (KAIT), a fully robotic telescope which conducts the Lick Observatory Supernova Search (LOSS). His accomplishments.... Read More

Piercarlo Valdesolo is an associate professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College and the director of CMC’s Moral Emotions and Trust Lab (MEATLab). His research studies the mechanisms underlying moral judgment and behavior with a particular focus on the role of emotions in our moral lives. His work asks questions like: What drives moral hypocrisy? How does awe influence our belief in God? For whom do we.... Read More

Lisa Sideris is Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University-Bloomington. Previously, she taught both at Pace University in New York City and at McGill University in Montreal. She received her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2000. Her areas of research include environmental ethics and the environmental humanities and the science-religion interface. Much of her early research focused on conflict and compatibility.... Read More

Tania Lombrozo s a Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, as well as an Associate of the Department of Philosophy. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University in 2006 after receiving a B.S. in Symbolic Systems and a B.A. in Philosophy from Stanford University. Dr. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive... Read More