Ann Merchant is the Deputy Executive Director for Communications at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Washington, DC where she leads the institution’s portfolio of creative engagement activities, focusing on innovative outreach programs that contribute to an increased public understanding of science.  Her three decades at the Academies have been characterized by unconventional challenges in service to mission-driven goals and objectives.  

With a special interest in promoting science, engineering, and medicine through non-traditional channels, she was instrumental in launching and now overseeing The Science & Entertainment Exchange, a program of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) that seeks to connect entertainment industry professionals with top scientists and engineers. Based on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles at the California NanoSystems Institute, The Exchange connects entertainment industry professionals with scientists and engineers to create a synergy between accurate science and engaging storylines in both film and TV programming. Part of the reason that NAS launched The Exchange stemmed from cultivation theory research that demonstrates the ways in which people learn from what they see in film and television. Many scientists and engineers cite film and television as some of the earliest influence on their career choice and onscreen inventions prompted their search for real-life solutions. Since its founding, The Exchange has facilitated thousands of technical consultations and hosted hundreds of events and special tours to help bring the reality of engaging science to the creative arts.

She also has responsibility for LabX, another flagship outreach program of the NAS.  She led the NAS initiative called The Science Behind It, a creative campaign consisting of video and web assets aimed at millennial audiences around a variety of science topics.  She also has responsibility for the institution’s large-scale outreach events such as TED @ NAS, the USA Science & Engineering Festival, and Family Science Day at the NAS.  In the now-distant past, Merchant served as marketing director for the Academies’ publishing division where she and her staff promoted and marketed more than 175 new titles every year.  

She has presented talks, facilitated panels and produced sessions for the Rosalind Franklin Society, NASA, American Chemical Society, World Building Institute, Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and Conservation Summit, Temple University, Daniel Felix Ritchie School of Engineering and Computer Science, and many others. She served as adjunct professor of marketing at George Washington University in the College of Professional Studies and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University. 

Paula S. Apsell is Senior Executive Producer Emerita of PBS’ NOVA and NOVA scienceNOW, an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, and CEO of Leading Edge Productions. She is the first science journalist to receive the Lifetime Achievement Emmy Award from the National Association of Television Arts and Sciences.  

As an undergraduate majoring in psychology at Brandeis University, Apsell worked in the high-energy physics labs of Sandy Wolf and Lawrence Kirsch. Her work study job was to scan bubble chamber photographs of the short-lived, charged particles that emerge from high energy accelerator experiments as trails of bubbles through unstable liquid. Upon graduation, she began her multimedia journalism and producing career.

At WGBH Radio she developed the award-winning children’s drama series, The Spider’s Web and became a radio news producer before joining WBGH-TV’s NOVA during its second season as a production assistant. One of her first NOVA productions “Death of a Disease” was the first long form documentary on the worldwide eradication of smallpox. In the late 1970s she produced documentaries for the series on artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

At Boston’s ABC affiliate WCVB, she served as senior producer for medical programming working with Dr. Timothy Johnson. She produced “Someone I Once Knew,” the award-winning documentary on Alzheimer’s disease that revealed dementia as a pathology, not an inevitable product of old age. She returned to WGBH in 1984 and served as NOVA’s Executive Producer and Director of the Science Unit for 35 years.

Under her leadership, NOVA became the most popular science series on American television and online. In 2004, Apsell brought Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson to television in Origins, and in 2005, Apsell introduced a NOVA spinoff in NOVA scienceNOW, a critically acclaimed science newsmagazine hosted by Tyson. Other signature NOVA productions produced under Apsell’s leadership include The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos with Brian Greene, Einstein’s Big Idea, Judgment Day: Intelligent Design on Trial, Making Stuff, the large format feature Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, Black Hole Apocalypse with Janna Levin, and Making North America with Kirk Johnson of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History; and Holocaust Escape Tunnel with archeologist Richard Freund. 

In addition to the regular television schedule, she produced WGBH Science Unit specials and mini-series as well as large format films, winning every major broadcasting award including the Emmy, the Peabody, the AAAS Science Journalism award, the Gold Baton duPont-Columbia, and an Academy Award nomination for the IMAX film Special Effects. In 1998, the National Science Board of the National Science Foundation awarded NOVA its first-ever Public Service Award.

Her numerous individual awards include the Bradford Washburn Award from the Museum of Science, Boston; the Carl Sagan Award given by the Council of Scientific Society Presidents; the American Institute of Physics Andrew Gemant Award; the Planetary Society’s Cosmos Award; the International Documentary Association’s Pioneer Award; the National Space Club of Huntsville Media Award; and the New York Hall of Science Distinguished Service Award for Public Understanding of Science. She received MIT’s Vannevar Bush Fellowship in the Public Understanding of Science, now named the Knight Science Journalism Fellowship, and was Science Journalist in Residence at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, UC Santa Barbara.

She has served on the board of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History; the Brandeis University Sciences Advisory Committee; and the International Documentary Association. Apsell holds honorary doctorates from Southern Methodist University and Dickinson College. 

Apsell retired from NOVA in 2019 and is now an independent producer and CEO of Leading Edge Productions, working on a feature documentary on Jewish resistance to the Holocaust. She lives in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts with her husband Sheldon, an inventor. The Apsells have two daughters, one a physician, the other a television news producer.

Dr. Nutan Maurya is an environmental anthropologist with more than ten years of experience conducting and supervising field research in the area of water pollution and related socio-economic issues. Her areas of interest are pollution-related challenges to public health and livelihoods, political ecology of emerging pollutants, and the anthropology of development. Recently, she served as consultant and social research collaborator for the Water-to-Cloud (W2C) project to study the impact of river water pollution on the health and livelihoods of India's riverine communities.

Dr. Maurya has worked on projects at the intersection of environment and socio-economy at Auburn University in Alabama, South Asian Institute at Harvard University, and Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bengaluru. She has taught courses on Gender and Society, Political Sociology and Environmental Anthropology at South Asian University (Delhi), University of Delhi, ATREE, and University of Allahabad. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Indian Politics and Policy, Economic & Political Weekly (EPW), and Down to Earth.

Her doctoral study focused on the role of religion in conservation and protection of the River Ganga. She received her PhD in Anthropology, with a specialization in Environmental Anthropology, from the University of Delhi after studying Biology and Anthropology at the University of Allahabad.

Dr. Sukanya Randhawa is an independent research scientist focused on creating integrated technology solutions and interventions that cut across several industries and finds numerous applications for agriculture, water, and energy, along with tackling climate change.

Currently working on projects with non-profit organizations Auroville Consulting (India) and WaterRising Institute (USA), Sukanya develops novel, hybrid and innovative digital planning tools that utilize satellite imagery (ESA and NASA) along with public and digital datasets. Integrated with machine-learning based approaches and designed for creating powerful data based insights, her research addresses existing issues and gaps for physical (and business) ecosystems. Previously, Sukanya worked as an AI researcher with IBM Research in many niche technology areas such as satellite imagery-based analytics, artificial intelligence, internet of things, etc. and holds several technology innovation patents. She is the developer of a global product launched on IBM's global platform that has been a key part of the Agri Services business for IBM. Also, she has been the creator of the Bluewater EYE technology that enables water pollution monitoring for rivers and lakes by using satellite-based predictive sensing for water quality.

She is an experimental physicist by background and served as a postdoctoral research scientist at the University of Chicago after receiving her PhD from the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Barcelona, Spain. She holds an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, and completed her undergraduate studies in Electronics and Communications Engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

Surajit Sarkar is an Associate Professor at the Centre for Community Knowledge (CCK) at Ambedkar University Delhi where he conceptualizes the Centre’s projects and creates processes for implementing research, documentation and dissemination. As a filmmaker working in Delhi, India, since 1991, his television shows, documentary and educational films have been recognized, screened and received awards, nationally and internationally. Suro has been a video artist for multimedia stage and off-stage performances with performance artists like Maya K Rao, Anamika Haksar, Aditi Mangaldas, Ella Fiskum and  groups like Jan Natya Manch (People’s Theatre Forum) and performed at various fora including the National Drama Festival, Delhi; House of World Cultures, Berlin; the Prithvi Festival, Mumbai, and the Other Festival, Chennai.

In 2004, Suro co-founded the travelling video+arts initiative, Catapult Arts Caravan, – a socio-political performance group of artists and community workers to catalyze public participation in civic debate in rural areas and small towns in Central and Northeast India. Partnering with community organizations and local artist networks, the Caravan performances use digital media to introduce participants to a new kind of storytelling. Public discussion is designed to be part of the performance and exhibition, which combines digital audio-video technologies with local arts like storytelling, song, music, theatre, pottery and painting. By integrating these, the Caravan "re-presents" the local in the networked age by "re-assembling" elements of arts practice with widespread socio-cultural and technological change. Suro also co-founded the ‘Museum of Memory' project – working with a network of individuals and organizations in Central India to record personal histories and individual understandings in communities in danger of losing their spoken language and associated knowledge and cultures.

Suro has participated in electronic arts residencies in Canada (Montreal) and India, and worked as a visiting professor of video in India and the USA. In 2010, he served as an Institute of Advanced Study Fellow at Trevelyan College, Durham University in the United Kingdom. He has been on a Communications Advisory Panel for Civil Society, on the Public Advisory Board of Cultural Anthropology, and Consultant for an Oral Knowledge Archive (NASSCOM Digital India).

In a previous incarnation, Suro was a photocopier salesman, bank officer, primary school teacher, wrote a set of mathematics teaching textbooks for the Indira Gandhi National Open University, New Delhi. His other writings include short stories, writings on education, technology and culture for a number of magazines and journals.