The Washburn Award

Scott Joseph Kelly (born February 21, 1964) is an American engineer, retired astronaut, and naval aviator. A veteran of four space flights, Kelly commanded the International Space Station (ISS) on Expeditions 26, 45, and 46.

Kelly's first spaceflight was as pilot of Space Shuttle Discovery during STS-103 in December 1999. This was the third servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope, and lasted for just under eight days. Kelly's second spaceflight was as mission commander of STS-118, a 12-day Space Shuttle mission to the ISS in August 2007. Kelly's third spaceflight was as a crewmember on Expedition 25/26 on the ISS. He arrived at the ISS aboard Soyuz TMA-01M on 9 October 2010, and served as a flight engineer until he took over command of the station on 25 November 2010 at the start of Expedition 26. Expedition 26 ended on 16 March 2011 with the departure of Soyuz TMA-01M.

In November 2012, Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko were selected for a year-long mission to the ISS. Their year in space began with the launch of Soyuz TMA-16M on March 27, 2015, and they remained on the station for Expeditions 43, 44, 45, and 46. The mission ended on March 1, 2016, with the departure of Soyuz TMA-18M from the station.

Kelly retired from NASA in 2016. His identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, is also a retired astronaut, and the junior U.S. Senator from Arizona.

Shetterly is the author of Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race, which was a top book of 2016 for TIME and Publisher's Weekly as well as a New York Times bestseller. The book was adapted into a critically-acclaimed film, and a television show based on it is in the works.

Shetterly is the founder of the Human Computer Project, a digital archive for the stories of NASA's "human computers," women whose work tipped the balance in favor of the United States in World War II, the Cold War, and the Space Race. She graduated from the University of Virginia, co-founded the magazine Inside Mexico, is a 2014 Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow, and recently joined the Terra Alpha Investments advisory board.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD from Oxford University. She is a world leader in cognitive science, particularly the study of children's learning and development. She is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books, including the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib (William Morrow, 1999), The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), and The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She writes the Mind and Matter science column for the Wall Street Journal. She has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The New Yorker, Science, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist, and Slate, among others. She has frequently appeared on TV and radio, including The Charlie Rose Show and The Colbert Report. Her TED talk has been seen over 2.75 million times. She has three sons and three grandchildren and lives in Berkeley, California with her husband Alvy Ray Smith.

Salman "Sal" Khan is the founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit with a mission of providing a free, world-class education for anyone, anywhere.

Khan Academy started as a passion project. Sal's cousin was struggling with math. He tutored her remotely and posted educational videos on YouTube. So many people watched the videos that eventually Sal pursued Khan Academy full-time. Nearly ten years later, more than 52 million registered users access Khan Academy in dozens of languages across 190 countries.

Sal is a former Teacher of the Year at Princeton Review, where he taught physics, biology, and chemistry to MCAT students. Sal had a fellowship at MIT to research educational software.

Sal has been profiled by 60 Minutes, featured on the cover of Forbes, and recognized as one of TIME's "100 Most Influential People in the World." In his book The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined, Sal outlines his vision for the future of education. Sal holds three degrees from MIT and a MBA from Harvard Business School.

Today Khan Academy's free online learning resources cover preschool through early college education, including K – 12 math, grammar, biology, chemistry, physics, economics, finance, history and SAT prep. Khan Academy also provides teachers with tools and data so they can help their students develop the skills, habits, and mindsets they need to succeed in school and beyond. And it's all free, for everyone, forever.

Medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer has dedicated his life to improving health care for the world’s poorest people. He is a founding director and the chief strategist of Partners In Health (PIH), an international nonprofit organization that since 1987 has provided direct health care services and undertaken research and advocacy activities on behalf of those who are sick and living in poverty. Dr. Farmer began his lifelong commitment to Haiti in 1983 as a student, working with dispossessed farmers in the Central Plateau. Starting with a one-building clinic in the village of Cange, PIH’s project in Haiti has grown to a multi-service health complex featuring a primary school, infirmary, surgery wing, training program for health outreach workers, 104-bed hospital, women’s clinic, and pediatric care facility. PIH has expanded operations to 12 sites throughout Haiti and ten additional countries. The work has become a model for health care for poor communities worldwide.

Dr. Farmer holds an M.D. and Ph.D. from Harvard University, where he is the Kolokotrones University professor and chair of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He is also chief of the Division of Global Health Equity at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston. Additionally, Dr. Farmer serves as the United Nations special adviser to the secretary-general on community based medicine and lessons from Haiti.

Dr. Farmer has written extensively on health, human rights, and the consequences of social inequality. He has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Outstanding International Physician (Nathan Davis) Award from the American Medical Association.

Michael Pollan is the author of the bestsellers Cooked, Food Rules, and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, among other books. He is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism, and the director of the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism.

For the past twenty-five years, Pollan has been writing about the places where nature and culture intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in the built environment.

Pollan was named to the 2010 TIME 100, the magazine’s annual list of the world’s 100 most influential people. In 2009 he was named by Newsweek as one of the top 10 “New Thought Leaders.” A contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine since 1987, his writing has received numerous awards. The Omnivore’s Dilemma was named one of the ten best books of 2006 by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also won the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, the James Beard Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He received both the President’s Citation Award from the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and the Voices of Nature Award from the Natural Resources Defense Council in 2009. 

Born in 1955, Pollan grew up on Long Island and was educated at Bennington College, Oxford University, and Columbia University, from which he received a Master’s in English. He lives in the Bay Area with his wife, the painter Judith Belzer, and their son, Isaac.

In 1989, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. It was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.

In 1999, he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2004, and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. At the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games, in a song and dance production called “Frankie and June say ... ‘Thanks, Tim,’” Berners-Lee appeared onstage at a computer connected to the stadium’s scoreboard and typed a simple message about his world-changing invention: “This is for everyone.”

Born in London, England in 1955, Berners-Lee learned about electronics from tinkering with model trains, and he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor, and an old television when he was at college. He earned a bachelor’s in physics from Oxford University in 1976.

“Everyone remembers the first teacher to have a profound impact on their life. For me, that teacher was the Museum of Science. When I was a kid growing up in Medford, I’d come to the Museum every Saturday morning. The Museum started me on the path to studying engineering, becoming a technology entrepreneur, and developing a passion for public health.”

In 1981, Michael Bloomberg launched a technology startup providing a real-time financial data service, which ultimately developed into Bloomberg LP, the world’s leading financial news and information company. He went on to serve as Mayor of New York City from 2001-2013, and in 2014 the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appointed him Special Envoy for Cities and Climate Change.

As a philanthropist, Bloomberg has given away more than $3.3 billion, including $452 million in 2013. His foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, is active in more than 90 countries and employs a unique data-driven approach to global change to its five focus areas: public health, education, the environment, the arts, and government innovation.

Born February 14, 1942 at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Allston-Brighton, Massachusetts, Bloomberg graduating from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in engineering and earned his MBA Harvard Business School.

Credited with coining the term “information architecture,” Wurman chaired the IDCA Conference in 1972, the First Federal Design assembly in 1973, and the annual AIA Conference in 1976. He has written, designed, and published more than 80 books on divergent topics, including the ACCESS travel series, several books on healthcare, The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn, and What Will Be Has Always Been.

He has been awarded several honorary doctorates, Graham Fellowships, a Guggenheim, and numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as serving as the Distinguished Professor at Northeastern University. He is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt Museum.

Wurman created and chaired several conferences: TED and TEDMED, as well as EG, and the WWW conference. His major cartographic project with ESRI and Radical Media is called the Urban Observatory, which will open in February 2015 at the restored Smithsonian Castle on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Born on March 26, 1935, grew up in Philadelphia. He received both bachelor and master’s degrees in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

“We're going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul...we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.”

Neil Armstrong’s passion for flight developed at the age of two, when he attended the Cleveland Air Races with his father. In 1966, serving as command pilot of Gemini 8, Armstrong became NASA’s first civilian astronaut to fly into space. Three years later NASA appointed him commander of Apollo 11, the first of six manned missions to the Moon. On July 21, 1969, Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon’s surface, perhaps the most remarkable milestone in human history. Yet Commander Armstrong struggled against public acclaim, preferring to stay out of the spotlight. After his death, his family said of him that he was “a reluctant American hero who always believed he was just doing his job.” In later life, he emerged to publicly express his unflagging support of continued manned space exploration.

Armstrong was the recipient of many honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and a Congressional Space Medal of Honor. Upon his death in 2012, the White House issued a statement placing Armstrong “among the greatest of American heroes—not just of his time, but of all time.”

Jamie Hyneman is founder of M5 Industries, a special effects studio that has produced work for over 800 television commercials and dozens of feature films. Prior to his special career in movies such as Robocop, Arachnophobia, and Naked Lunch, Hyneman captained a charter sailboat business in the Caribbean. He holds several patents, and he has an ongoing collaboration with Villanova College of Engineering to develop new safety concepts for the military. He lives in San Francisco with his wife — who happens to be a high school science teacher.

Adam Savage has a background in the theater as a set designer, prop maker, scenic painter, rigger, carpenter, and producer. His sculpture has been exhibited in more than 50 solo and group shows. He worked at Industrial Light and Magic on Star Wars, Episodes 1 and 2, Terminator 3, and The Mummy. He was a model-shop supervisor at Disney on the two Matrix sequels, and he has taught advanced model-making and problem solving at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco. Savage and his wife are parents of twin boys.

Jean-Michel Cousteau continues the legacy of his father, the legendary ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, as a world-renowned explorer, environmentalist, educator, oceanographer, and filmmaker. He has spent much of his life investigating the world's oceans aboard the research vessels Calypso and Alcyone, and in 1999, he founded the Ocean Futures Society, a marine conservation and education organization that serves as a "Voice for the Ocean." The Society teaches conservation ethics, conducts research, and helps to develop marine education programs, and Cousteau is its chairman of the board and president.

A prolific filmmaker, Cousteau has also produced more than 80 films, yielding him an Emmy award, the Peabody award, the Sept d'Or, and the Cable ACE Award. In 1989, he became a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times where his articles appeared in more than 60 newspapers worldwide. His first book, Jean-Michel Cousteau's America's Underwater Treasures, has also received several awards in independent publishing. His newest book, My Father, The Captain: My Life with Jacques Cousteau, a biography of his father, was released on May 25, 2010, a few weeks before the 100th anniversary of Jacques' birth.

Recognized as a voice for the ocean who communicates to a new generation, Cousteau continues his quest to "carry forward the flame of his faith" and to educate listeners worldwide on the importance of the oceans and preserving underwater ecosystems.

On September 7, 2011, Jean-Michel Cousteau became the first two-generation Washburn Awardee. Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau was the second-ever recipient in 1965.

Atul Gawande, MD, MPH, is a general and endocrine surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Dana Carber Cancer Institute and an associate professor in the Department of Surgery at Harvard Medical School and the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

His research concentrates on strategies to improve medical performance and public health. In 2007 Dr. Gawande became director of the World Health Organization's global campaign to reduce surgical deaths.

A staff writer for the New Yorker since 1998, Dr. Gawande received a MacArthur Award for his research and writing in 2006 and a 2010 National Magazine Award for his article "The Cost Conundrum."

His book Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science, a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award, has been published in more than 20 languages. Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance was a New York Times bestseller and was named one of the ten best books of 2007 by Amazon.com and the Sunday Times of London.

His most recent book, The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right, became a New York Times bestseller and one of Amazon.com's best books of the month for December 2009.

Thomas L. Friedman, a world renowned author and journalist, has earned three Pulitzer Prizes for his work at the New York Times. His twice-weekly foreign affairs column reports on US domestic politics and foreign policy, the Middle East conflict, the environment, international economics, biodiversity, and energy.

For his coverage of the Middle East, Friedman received the 1983 and 1988 Pulitzer Prizes for international reporting (from Lebanon and Israel, respectively). He also won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary for "his clarity of vision...in commenting on the worldwide impact of the terrorist threat."

Friedman's award-winning books include From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989 National Book Award and the Overseas Press Club Award), The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000 Overseas Press Club Award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy), and The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (2005 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award).

His newest book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, brings a fresh perspective to the crises of destabilizing climate change and rising competition for energy.

In 2004 Friedman was awarded the Overseas Press Club Award for lifetime achievement and the honorary title Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Queen Elizabeth II. US News and World Report recognized him in 2005 as one of America's best leaders.

Thomas Friedman now lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife, Ann, and their two daughters.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, PhD, is the first occupant of the Frederick P. Rose directorship of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. He earned his BA in physics from Harvard University and his PhD in astrophysics from Columbia University.

Dr. Tyson's research interests include star formation, exploding stars, dwarf galaxies, and the structure of our Milky Way. He has served on two presidential commissions — one focused on the future of the US aerospace industry and the other on the implementation of the US space exploration policy. In 2006 NASA appointed Dr. Tyson to its prestigious advisory council, which helps the agency fit its ambitious vision into its restricted budget.

In addition to his monthly "Universe" essays in Natural History magazine, Dr. Tyson has written eight books, including his memoir The Sky Is Not the Limit: Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist and his recent New York Times bestseller Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries. His Origins: Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution, which he co-authored with Donald Goldsmith, became the companion book to the 2004 PBS NOVA miniseries Origins, which Dr. Tyson hosted. He is also a host of the PBS NOVA scienceNOW program.

Dr. Tyson is the recipient of nine honorary doctorates and the NASA distinguished public service medal. The International Astronomical Union has recognized his contribution to the public appreciation of the cosmos with the naming of asteroid "13123 Tyson."