Danny believes. Period.

Danny Spitzberg is (happily!) enrolled as a graduate student in sociology of science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on prizes and the coming rumbling in philanthropy and science funding.

In 2009, he was a fellow at The Breakthrough Institute. His ongoing project, ‘Smart Deployment Policy’, is drawing lessons from past cases of technological progress to accelerate innovation and make clean energy cheap.

Danny works (travels) as a freelance journalist, writing about science and technology to emphasize the often obscured value to society of breakthrough science research(ers). He also co-edits and publishes Ox Family.

On land, Danny bikes. On water, he rows on the Charles River.

Right: Daniel Spitzberg, on assignment

Emrys asks: Why accept traditional hierarchies?

Szczensa asks: How can I experience Hurricane Katrina physically in New York? Displacement threats produce backyard lifestyles in urban tent-dwellings. How can I make tangible the rights of bikers in Critical Mass? A double tall, siamese-twin bike occupies the space of a car.

Gary Belkin is a doctor and historian interested in the value of historical scholarship to inform medical practice, with a particular focus on using history to think about the political and ethical dimensions of medicine and public health. He serves as Deputy Director of Psychiatry at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York City, where he is also Associate Professor in the New York University (NYU) School of Medicine. He holds a BS and MD (Brown), and a PhD in history and an MPH (Harvard). His published historical works covers a wide range, including ethics in medicine, mind-brain constructions in medicine and society, and social psychiatry. Professor Belkin directs the Program in Global Public Mental Health at Bellevue and NYU, is co-chairman of the Working Group on Human Rights and Mental Health at the United Nations, and is a member of the International Society for the History of the Neurosciences (ISHN). He is involved in several projects aimed to extend the uses of community-based mental health strategies in New York City and internationally, exploring the degree they can be used for public health purposes. This also covers social development-relevant mental health care and mental health policy as part of the UN Millennium Village Project. In recent efforts, Professor Belkin has focused on effective uses of mental health and psychological infrastructures and expertise for conflict prevention and post-conflict management and recovery. He is completing a book study on the Harvard Brain Death Committee and evolving care for hopelessly ill individuals as a way to gain historical understandings of the bioethics movement, the uses of medicine as a source of ethical discourse, and attitudes about medical progress, ethics, and technology.

Professor Belkin’s advisory role at the xClinic is guiding the EnvironMENTAL Health Project, addressing the role and place of civic participation in suicide prevention.

Marty Hoffert is a leading advocate of advanced clean energy technologies. He was the lead author of the landmark 2002 article in Science that concluded global warming was a clean energy problem, not a regulation problem. As Professor Emeritus of Physics and former Chair of the Department of Applied Science at New York University, Professor Hoffert’s research interests include global environmental change, geophysical fluid dynamics, oceanography, biogeochemical cycles and alternate energy technology. He holds a BS in aeronautical engineering (Michigan), an MS and PhD in astronautics (Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn), and an MA in Liberal Studies with graduate work in sociology and economics (New School). He has published broadly in fluid mechanics, plasma physics, oceanography, planetary atmospheres, climatic change, solar and wind energy and space solar power. His geophysical research includes the ocean/climate model first employed by the IPCC to assess global warming for different scenarios of fossil fuel use. His energy research includes laboratory and full-scale experiments on wind turbines, photovoltaic hydrogen production and wireless power transmission for solar power satellites. His present efforts focus on sustainable, carbon-neutral technologies to power high-tech civilization. Professor Hoffert is a member of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) and was elected Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He has participated in numerous panels, has been interviewed on PBS and NPR, and has published in a wide number of journals including Climatic Change, Nature, Journal of Geophysical Research, Icarus, and Space Power.

Harvey Molotch is renowned for studies that have reconceptualized power relations in interaction, the mass media, and the city. He is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, and has helped create the field of environmental sociology and, in recent years, that of the sociology of objects. His research interests span urban development and political economy; the sociology of architecture, design, and consumption; racial segregation and ‘white flight’; environmental degradation, especially the Santa Barbara Oil Spill; the mass media and frameworks of social construction. He received a BA in philosophy (Michigan) and an MA and PhD in Sociology (Chicago). Among several other awards, he received the Lifetime Career Achievement in Urban and Community Scholarship issued by the American Sociological Association (ASA)’s Urban and Community Studies Section (2003). Professor Molotch has published extensively on urban settings and their influences on people, including the book “Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place” (1987) with John Logan, which won sociology’s most prestigious prize for scholarship, the ASA’s Distinguished Scholarly Contribution to Sociology Award. This book draws on a seminal article, “The City as a Growth Machine: Toward a Political Economy of Place,” published in The American Journal of Sociology in 1976, which argues that the shape of cities and the distribution of their peoples is not due to interpersonal market of geographic necessities, but to social actions, including opportunistic dealing. In his recent book “Where Stuff Comes From: How Toasters, Toilets, Cars, Computers and Many Other Things Come to Be as They Are” (2003), Professor Molotch builds on the work of Howard S. Becker and Bruno Latour to view objects as the product of the joint work of many people, especially designers. Professor Molotch has been awarded several teaching and research fellowships, his publications have been highly acclaimed, and he has been interviewed in the New Yorker.

Michelle Murphy is a professor of women and gender studies at the University of Toronto. Her research interests include the history of technoscience, sex, gender, race, environmental politics and capitalism in the United States and in transnational and postcolonial theoretical perspectives. She earned a BA and PhD (Harvard), and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute, Berlin. Her doctoral dissertation on Sick Building Syndrome culminated in the book “Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience and Women Workers (Duke University Press, 2006), which examines the production of uncertainty in environmental politics in the context of the emergence of new racialized and gendered workplaces and new epistemological and political contestations over the existence of pervasive chemical exposures in twentieth century United States. She is presently finishing a book called “Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Technology, Feminist Health, and Biopolitics in the Age of American Empire”. Other publications include the “Landscapes of Exposure: Knowledge and Illness in Modern Environments (2004)”, which she co-edited, as well as articles in such journals as Configurations, Labor History, Feminist Studies, Osiris, and edited collections. As well, Professor Murphy is the editor of RaceSci, a website dedicated to the critical study of the concept of race in the history science, medicine, and technology (www.racesci.org). and she co-organized a meeting series at The Women and Gender Studies Institute titled “Biopolitics + Technoscience” in 2006. Her newest project, The Economization of Life, concerns the history of cold-war American imperial projects linking fertility, capitalist development, and environment, with a particular focus on Bangladesh. Through 2008, Professor Murphy is a Senior Research Fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University.