Joyce McDougall (New Zealand) received her DEd from Otago University (New Zealand). She was trained in psychoanalysis in London and Paris. Since 1954, she has lived and practiced in Paris, where she is now the supervising and training analyst to the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Dr. McDougall is a frequent contributor to a number of psychoanalytic books and journals in European languages, and the author of several books including Plea for a Measure of Abnormality (I.U.P., New York, 1980), Theaters of the Mind (Basic Books, 1985), and Theaters of the Body: A Psychoanalytic View of Psychosomatic Phenomena (W. Norton, 1989), all translated into many languages. 

Jayne Gackenbach (USA, 1946) received her PhD in Experimental Psychology from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1978. She spent over a decade as an Assistant and Associate Professor, primarily at the Department of Psychology, University of Northern Iowa. Dr. Gackenbach currently works independently in Edmonton, Alberta and is the managing director of the Lucidity Association. Dr. Gackenbach has edited several books including Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain: Perspectives on Lucid Dreaming (Plenum Press, 1988), and the forthcoming Higher States of Consciousness (Plenum Press), and is the author of the popular Control Your Dreams (Harper-Collins). She is the author of several dozen articles in professional journals such as Journal of Social Psychology, Lucidity Letter, Journal of Mental Imagery, and Sleep Research.

Jerome Engel Jr. (USA, 1938) received his MD in 1965 and his PhD in Physiology in 1966, both from Stanford University. He is Professor of Neurology, Anatomy and Cell Biology at the UCLA Medical School and a member of the UCLA Brain Research Institute. He has been active in a number of professional societies, including President of the American Epilepsy Society and the American EEG Society, as well as the editor of several professional journals such as Advances in the Neurobiology of Epilepsy, and Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology. He is editor of several volumes on epilepsy and clinical neuroscience, and recently authored Seizures and Epilepsy (Davis, 1989). Dr. Engel has contributed over 125 papers in professional journals such as Epilepsy Research, Journal of Neurosurgery, Neurology, Electroencephalography and Clinical Neurophysiology, and Annals of Neurology.

Ervin Staub is Professor of Psychology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He received his PhD at Stanford University and taught at Harvard University. His work has focused on caring, helping, altruism and passivity in the face of others’ needs. His books on this topic are Positive social behavior and morality: Vol. 1. Social and personal influences, 1978; Vol. 2. Socialization and development, 1979 and two coedited volumes (Development and Maintenance of Prosocial Behavior: International Perspectives on Positive Morality, 1984; and Social and Moral Values: Individual and Societal Perspectives, 1989). He also edited Personality: Current Issues and Basic Research, 1980. Since the late 70’s he has also studied human destructiveness like genocide and ethnic violence (The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, and Patriotism in the Life of Individuals and Nations, in press.) and youth violence. His article, “The Psychology of Bystanders, Perpetrators and Heroic Helpers,” won the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Prize of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. He has applied his work to public issues and concerns (e.g., police violence, racism, the war in Iraq, child rearing) in articles, lectures, workshops, teacher training, interviews with journalists, and radio and T.V. appearances.

Elliott Sober received his PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 1974. Since then he has been an Assistant/Associate/Full Professor and is currently Vilas Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His main area of research is the philosophy of science, focusing especially on philosophical questions raised by evolutionary biology. His publications include: The Nature of Selection, Reconstructing the Past, Core Questions in Philosophy; The Philosophy of Biology, and From a Biological Point of View. 

Robert H. Frank received his PhD in economics in 1972 from U.C. Berkeley. He holds a joint appointment as Professor of Economics in Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management and as Goldwin Smith Professor of Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, where he has taught since 1972. His books include: Choosing the Right Pond: Human Behavior and the Quest for Status (Oxford University Press, 1985); Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions (W. W. Norton, 1988); Microeconomics and Behavior (McGraw-Hill, 1991); and The Winner-Take-All Society (with Philip Cook, The Free Press, 1995). Besides teaching at Cornell, he taught math and science as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal from 1966 to 1968; he served as chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board from 1978 to 1980; and during the 1992-93 academic year, he was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Piet Hut is a Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He is a Dutch-American astrophysicist, who divides his time between research in computer simulations of dense stellar systems and broadly interdisciplinary collaborations, ranging from other fields in natural science to computer science, cognitive psychology and philosophy. His research interests relate to the origins of life and multidisciplinary approaches to cognition.