Clifford (Kip) Cranna is Director of Musical Administration at San Francisco Opera, where he has been on the staff since 1979. He has served as vocal adjudicator for numerous groups including the Metropolitan Opera National Council. He holds a BA in choral conducting from the University of North Dakota and a PhD in musicology from Stanford University. For many years he was Program Editor and Lecturer for the Carmel Bach Festival. He lectures and writes frequently on music and teaches at the SF Conservatory of Music. He hosts the Opera Guild’s “Insight” panels and intermission features for the SF Opera radio broadcasts, and has been a Music Study Leader for Smithsonian Tours. He was named 2006 “Man of the Year” by Il Cenacolo, a SF men’s Italian cultural organization. In 2008 he was awarded the SF Opera Medal, the company’s highest honor.  

Alex Filippenko received his PhD in Astronomy from Caltech in 1984 and joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1986, where he is a leading authority on exploding stars, active galaxies, black holes, gamma-ray bursts, and cosmology. He has coauthored nearly 600 scientific publications, is one of the world's most highly cited astronomers, and has won numerous prizes for his research, most recently the 2007 Gruber Cosmology Prize. He was the only person to be a member of both teams that discovered the accelerating expansion of the Universe, which was selected as the “Top Science Breakthrough of 1998” by the editors of Science. He has won the highest teaching awards at UC Berkeley, where students have voted him the "Best Professor" on campus six times. In 2006, he was named the Carnegie/CASE National Professor of the Year among doctoral institutions. The recipient of the 2004 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization, he has appeared in numerous television documentaries, produced four astronomy video courses, and coauthored an award-winning textbook.

Paula Findlen is Professor and Chair of History; Co-Director of the Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies; Co-Director of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program; all at Stanford University. Her interest lies in understanding the world of the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Italy. She is “fascinated by a society that made politics, economics and culture so important to its self-definition, and that obviously succeeded in all these endeavors for some time, as the legacy of such figures as Machiavelli and Leonardo suggests. Renaissance Italy, in short, is a historical laboratory for understanding the possibilities and the problems of an innovative society.” Some publications include “Historical Thought in the Renaissance," in Companion to Historical Thought, ed. Lloyd Kramer and Sarah Maza (Blackwell, 2002); "Building the House of Knowledge: The Structures of Thought in Late Renaissance Europe," in Tore Frangsmyr, ed., The Structure of Knowledge: Classifications of Science and Learning since the Renaissance (Berkeley, 2001); (ed.) The Italian Renaissance: Essential Readings (Blackwell, 2002). "Men, Moments and Machines" special on the History Channel: "Galileo and the Sinful Spyglass.”

Roger Hahn is an emeritus professor of Graduate Studies in the History Department at UC Berkeley, where he has taught history of science to hundreds of students for over 45 years. At Berkeley he was Director of the Office for History of Science and Technology and has published widely on related cultural and scientific issues. He is the author of a biography of the mathematician and astronomer Laplace.Currently he is Vice-President of the Académie Internationale d’Histoire des Sciences. He was educated at Harvard University (AB and MAT), Cornell University (PhD), and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. Roger and his wife have been long time supporters of Humanities West, and he has been Moderator as well as presenter for a number of Humanities West programs.

George Hammond is known to Humanities West audiences for his previous presentations on Mark Twain in 2005, Plato in 2006 as part of the Sicily seminar, and Pythagoras in 2008. George is a San Francisco corporate attorney who specializes in international mergers and acquisitions. He is also the author of four novels, a collection of short stories and six philosophical books on issues in rational idealism, theoretical physics, Plato’s theory, early Christianity, the Soviet Union, psychology and constitutional law. His indebtedness to Pythagorean thought is pithily expressed in the name of his website: pythpress.com.

Geoffrey W. Marcy is a professor of astronomy at UC Berkeley and an adjunct professor of physics and astronomy at San Francisco State University. He is also the director of Berkeley's "Center for Integrative Planetary Science," a research unit that studies the formation, geophysics, chemistry and evolution of planets. Marcy's research focuses on the detection of extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs. His team discovered the majority of the 350 known planets around other stars, including the first multiple-planet system, the first Saturn-mass planets, and the first Neptune-mass planet. His goal is to discover the first earth-like planets and to find other planetary systems like our own solar system. Marcy is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Shaw Prize in 2005, Discovery Magazine's Space Scientist of the Year in 2003, the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, the Carl Sagan Award, the Beatrice Tinsley Prize, and the Henry Draper Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Kathryn Roszak is Artistic Director, Danse Lumiere. She previously created choreography to music based on star maps at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Danse Lumiere (formerly Anima Mundi) was founded in 1995 and creates dance theater linking the arts, environment, and humanity. The company has collaborated with visual artists, composers, scientists, and writers. Recent productions have included writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder. The company has won many grants and awards, including from Laurance S. Rockefeller, Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, Fleischhacker Foundation, Guzik Foundation, and Zellerbach Family Foundation. Danse Lumiere has been presented locally at Theater Artaud, Grace Cathedral, Cowell Theater, University of San Francisco, Yoshi's Jazz House, Asian Art Museum, and in New York by La MaMa Theater. The company's collaboration with mathematicians was presented by Copenhagen Cultural Festival in Denmark. The company was also invited to perform at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West and at Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.

Kathryn Roszak trained on Ford Foundation Scholarships at Balanchine's School of American Ballet in New York and at the SF Ballet School. She received her theater training with the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art and with American Conservatory Theater's MFA Program. She danced with the SF Opera Ballet and has choreographed and taught for the SF Opera Center and ACT. Her original choreography has won awards from the Carlisle Choreography Project and from the Djerassi Resident Artists' Program. She writes on dance for Theater Bay Area Magazine and teaches for the Lines Ballet/Dominican University BFA in Dance Program and for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UC Berkeley.