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Arik (he/him/his) is a huge herp-nerd and graduate student in Zoology at the University of Florida, where he researches amphibian disease ecology. He is currently trying to understand the impact and presence of the amphibian killing fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), throughout amphibian communities in Florida, and researching how coinfections of pathogens might affect the future of North American salamander species. Arik has previously worked with the USGS and NPS to identify possible pathogen spillover from invasive Burmese pythons to native snake assemblages in the Everglades.

A Board Member and President of BioCurious, a community lab space, a leader on two iGEM teams in 2014 and 2015 and a member of multiple community lab science projects including Open Insulin, Real Vegan Cheese, CuttleWranglin, DIY Bioprinter, and Kombucha Genomics. I push for open source science and for the creation of more community lab spaces.

Bret Grasse is the manager of cephalopod operations at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He has advanced the field of cephalopod husbandry (aka raising and taking care of cephalopods in an aquarium), and has figured out how to keep many cephalopod species happy and healthy in captivity that humans were previously unable to culture!

​Dr. Carly Anne York is an Assistant Professor of Biology at Lenoir-Rhyne University in Hickory, North Carolina. Her interests lay in the field of animal physiology, and she earned her doctorate studying how squid use their sensory systems to evade predators.

​Laura is a Program Coordinator at the Center for Disaster Risk Policy and an instructor in the Emergency Management and Homeland Security Program at Florida State University. She conducts research in UAS integration and applications, operates as a public, unmanned pilot and member of the CDRP UAS Team, and occasionally serves as a UAS Coordinator in the Air Operations Branch at the Florida State Emergency Operations Center during disasters. She also maintains the CDRP UAS equipment cache.

Hagfish Slime with Sarah Schorno

Riley Black is the critically-acclaimed author of natural history books such as Skeleton Keys, My Beloved Brontosaurus, and Prehistoric Predators. Her bylines have appeared in publications from Slate to Nature, and she’s a frequent volunteer with paleontology field programs around the west. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.

I am a Chilean astronomer searching for optical counterparts of short gamma-ray bursts and gravitational waves. Currently, I am a third year Astronomy PhD student at the University of Maryland (UMD). I am working with Dr. Leo Singer from NASA using the Zwicky Transient Facility to cover large portions of the sky and maximize the probability to find transients in the northern nightsky. I obtained my undergraduate degree from the P. Universidad Católica de Chile where I majored in Astronomy. While there, I worked using machine learning algorithms to find quasars in the ATLAS survey. During my senior year summer, I was part of the Cerro Tololo (CTIO) Reaserch Experience for Undergraduates and worked on identifying globular clusters an a shell-elliptical galaxy. After my graduation I interned at the Gemini Observatory and further analyzed the morphology of the galaxy.

Paleontology with Triceratops with Sophie Cajune

Designing Missions to the Moon and Mars with Sydney Dolan