Carl Zimmer writes books, articles, essays, and blog posts in which he reports from the frontiers of biology, where scientists are expanding our understanding of life.

Since 2013 he has been a columnist at the New York Times, where his column "Matter" appears each week. He is a popular speaker at universities, medical schools, museums, and festivals, and he is also a frequent on radio programs such as Radiolab and This American Life. In 2016, Zimmer won the Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded annually by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize individuals whose sustained efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science.

Disotell received his BA from Cornell University from an interdisciplinary major combining mathematics, computer science, and biological anthropology and went on to receive his MA and PhD from Harvard University in Biological Anthropology. While originally there to study ape evolution through an anatomical and paleontological research perspective he shifted to molecular systematics. He took a position at New York University in 1992 where he remains to this day. His research centers around the evolution of Old World monkeys and apes, though he is also involved in studies involving New World monkeys, lemurids and lorisids, human population history, ape and monkey conservation and behavioral genetics, forensic applications, cryptozoology, and molecular evolutionary studies of diseases such as AIDS and malaria. He and his research group have recently embarked on several new projects using Second Generation Sequencing technologies in a variety of applications from sequencing whole genomes, exomes, and environmental DNA.

Paul Bieniasz is a molecular biologist who studies HIV and other retroviruses. His research interests include the discovery of genes and proteins that protect hosts from virus infection, as well as the mechanisms by which virus components are synthesized and assembled into infectious particles. He is a pioneer of the field of 'paleovirology' – that is the study of viruses that infected our ancestors millions of years ago. Bieniasz is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and an elected member of the American Academy of Microbiology.The biology and evolution of retroviruses and eukaryotes are closely linked. Bieniasz seeks to define how host genes influence the replication of retroviruses, with an emphasis on human and primate immunodeficiency viruses. His lab seeks to characterize the host functions that retroviruses mimic, manipulate, and otherwise exploit, as well as the defenses cells have evolved against retrovirus infection.