Ed Buckner received his B.A. from Rice University in 1967 and his M. Ed. and Ph.D. from Georgia State University.

He has edited Freethought Press books by Massimo Pigliucci, Keith Parsons, Carol Faulkenberry, and Edwin Kagin. With his wife Diane, he co-edited freethinker and retired FBI agent Oliver G. Halle’s Taking the Harder Right. With his son, Michael Edward Buckner, he co-edited Quotations That Support the Separation of Church and State (1995). He has written chapters in a number of books, as well as many reviews, essays, blog contributions, and letters to the editor, in the US, India, the UK, and elsewhere.

Now retired, Buckner has served as executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism (2001-2003) and as president of American Atheists (2008-2010).

In addition to writing, Buckner has debated and spoken all over the United States and in the United Kingdom about freethought and secular humanism, often about the Treaty of Tripoli and about secularism. Buckner and his son, Michael, wrote In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to Religious Liberty, published by Prometheus Books in December 2012.

David Niose is the president of the Secular Coalition for America, an advocacy group for non-theistic viewpoints in the United States. From 2009 to 2012 he also served as president of the American Humanist Association.

Niose advocates for an identity-oriented approach to secular activism to raise awareness of the secular demographic in American society.
David, an attorney, developed and implemented a legal strategy that emphasizes the concept of equal rights and nondiscrimination rather than the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause in cases protecting religious minorities.

He has appeared on national and local media outlets speaking on behalf of the American Humanist Association and humanism, among other topics. His TV appearances include MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, and The Daily Buzz and he has written for numerous media outlets, including Psychology Today, Newsday, The Huffington Post, Lawyer’s Weekly publications, Humanist magazine, and Progressive Populist.

Niose is the author of Nonbeliever Nation: The Rise of Secular Americans, published by Palgrave Macmillan in July 2012.

Ayanna Watson is the founder of Black Atheists of America, Inc. (BAAm). BAAm is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to bridging the gap between atheism and the black community.

The organization has been successful in bringing together black atheists and combating the common misconception of solidarity among black atheists. With BAAm, Watson has also brought light to some of the issues that discourage black atheists from being active in both the atheist and black communities.
Ultimately with BAAm, Watson seeks to build a stronger and more diverse atheist community. She hopes that her efforts will provide for a society where one can embrace the label
“atheist,” without the fear of being ostracized by family, friends and members of their community. She envisions a world where individuals embrace critical thinking in lieu of faith

J. Anderson Thomson, Jr., MD (Andy), is a Trustee of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science and a staff psychiatrist for Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Virginia Student Health Center, as well as the University of Virginia’s Institute for Law, Psychiatry and Public Policy. Thomson also has his own private practice, and is a forensic psychiatrist for Region Ten Community Services. Thomson acquired his B.A. from Duke University in 1970, he acquired his M.D. from the University of Virginia in 1974, and he did his adult psychiatry training at the University of Virginia from 1974 to 1977.

Thomson has published papers on a variety of issues, including racism, narcissistic personality disorder, forensic psychiatry, depression and PTSD, and has written psychobiographical essays on Lee Harvey Oswald and Robert E. Lee. He is most noted for his work on evolutionary psychology, as well as for his exploration of the cognitive and evolutionary basis of religious belief, as presented in his latest book entitled Why We Believe in God(s): A Concise Guide to the Science of Faith. Dr. Thomson has been a featured speaker at several atheist conferences including American Atheists 2009 and Atheist Alliance International 2009 for which he spoke about his theories on the cognitive origins of religious belief. In an interview with the Austin American-Statesman, Thomson stated, “There is a massive, irreconcilable conflict between science and religion. Religion was humanity’s original cosmology, biology and anthropology. It provided explanations for the origin of the world, life and humans. Science now gives us increasingly complete explanations for those big three.”

Paula Apsell is arguably the most influential person in the area of science education when it comes to the country’s general public. In addition to overseeing the production of NOVA documentaries and miniseries for television, she has directed the series’ diversification into other media-most notably online, where NOVA is the most-visited site on PBS.org. NOVA can also be found in classrooms nationwide, where it is the most widely used video resource among high school science teachers.

In January 2005, Apsell introduced a NOVA spinoff in NOVA scienceNOW, a critically acclaimed science newsmagazine hosted formerly by Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson and now by New York Times technology columnist David Pogue. Other recent signature NOVA and Science Unit productions include “The Elegant Universe,” “Origins,” “Einstein’s Big Idea,” “Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial,” “Making Stuff,” and the large-format feature “Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure.”

Today, NOVA is the most popular science series on American television and online. Under Apsell’s leadership, NOVA has won every major broadcasting award, some many times over, including the Emmy, the Peabody, the AAAS Science Journalism Award, and the Gold Baton duPont-Columbia, as well as an Academy Award® nomination for “Special Effects.” In 1998, the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation awarded NOVA its first-ever Public Service Award.

Presentation of the Richard Dawkins Award.

Dr. Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature. Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association. He has also received seven honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic. He has been named Humanist of the Year, Prospect magazine’s “The World’s Top 100 Public Intellectuals,” Foreign Policy’s “100 Global Thinkers,” and Time magazine’s “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.”