The current list of speakers for this session, subject to change, is:
Aubrey de Grey: Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senesence: A Response to the Previous Speakers
Aubrey de Grey is an English author and theoretician in the field of gerontology, and the Chief Science Officer of the SENS Foundation (SENS = Strategies for Engineering Negligible Senescence). He is editor-in-chief of the academic journal Rejuvenation Research, author of The Mitochondrial Free Radical Theory of Aging (1999) and co-author of Ending Aging (2007).
Gregory Benford: Longevity for the Long Term
Gregory Benford, Founder and Executive Vice President of Genescient Corporation, is a Professor Emeritus of Physics at University of California Irvine. He has written several hundred scientific papers in several fields. He is a fellow in several scientific societies, and has won the Lord Prize for achievement in science, and several literary awards.
Stephen Coles: Is There a Maximum Human Lifespan?
Dr. L Stephen Coles is a Co-Founder and Director of the Los Angeles Gerontology Research Group (GRG) and Director of the Supercentenarian Research Foundation (SRF). He is a Director of the Los Angeles Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR). He served as an Assistant Researcher in the Department of Surgery at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine, a Visiting Scholar in the UCLA Department of Computer Science, and is currently a Lecturer in the UCLA Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry (Molecular Biology Institute) as well as a Visiting Scholar in the Stanford University Department of Developmental Biology. Dr. Coles is the author or co-author of over 156 scientific papers and holds two patents.
He received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, his Master’s in Mathematics from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and his Ph.D. in Systems and Communication Sciences from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. After attending Stanford University Medical School, Dr. Coles completed his Clinical Internship in OB/GYN at the Jackson Memorial Hospital of the University of Miami School of Medicine. After teaching at Stanford and UC Berkeley, Dr. Coles served as a Lecturer at UCLA, USC, and the California Institute of Technology.
Michael Rose: Building Methuselahs
Michael Rose went to the University of Sussex in 1976 for his doctoral studies on aging in Drosophila melanogaster. There he began his work on the evolution of aging and created Drosophila stocks with postponed aging. In 1991, his Evolutionary Biology of Aging appeared, offering a view of aging that was a complete departure from the views that had dominated the aging field since 1960. In 1997, Rose was awarded the Busse Research Prize by the World Congress of Gerontology. In 2004, he published a technical summary of his work on the postponement of aging, Methuselah Flies, followed in 2005 by a popular book on the topic, The Long Tomorrow. Michael Rose has published general books on evolution: the wide-ranging Darwin’s Spectre, Evolutionary biology in the modern world, and the copiously illustrated Evolution and Ecology of the Organism (with L.D. Mueller). His two most recent books are Experimental Evolution (2009; with T. Garland) and Does Aging Stop? (2011; with L.D. Mueller & C.L. Rauser).
Parijata Mackey is co-founder and CSO of Acron Cell, a biotechnology company aimed at bringing longevity therapies to market.
Ben Goertzel: Introduction to AI, intelligence enhancement, and mind uploading
Ben Goertzel is founder and CEO of two computer science firms Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC, and of the non-profit AGIRI (Artificial General Intelligence Research Institute). He has served as a university faculty in several departments of mathematics, computer science and cognitive science, in the US, Australia and New Zealand. He is author of two books focused on the future of technology and society Creating Internet Intelligence (Plenum, 2001) and The Path to Posthumanity (Academica, 2006). He serves as Director of Research for the Singularity Institute for AI.