CONTRIBUTORS

Ástor Alexander is a figurative illustrator and painter. He specializes in portraits and he's a big fan of the American illustrators of the 60s. His work can be seen at behance.net/astoralexander

Dr. Robert Bartholomew is a medical sociologist who holds a Ph.D. from James Cook University in Australia. He is an authority on culturespecific mental disorders, outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness, moral panics and the history of tabloid journalism. He has conducted anthropological fieldwork among the Malays in Malaysia and Aborigines in Central Australia. His most recently books are A Colorful History of Popular Delusions with Peter Hassall and American Hauntings: The True Stories Behind Hollywood's Scariest Movies—From Exorcist to The Conjuring with Joe Nickell.

Dr. Peter Boghossian is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University and an affiliated faculty member at Oregon Health Science University in the Division of General Internal Medicine. He is the author of A Manual for Creating Atheists. Follow him on twitter @peterboghossian.

TinaDupuy is a syndicated columnist and investigative journalist. She’s the host of Cultish (cultish.org) a new podcast about fanaticism debuting in Feb. 2015. She lives in NewYork. tinadupuy.com@tinadupuy

Dr. Kenneth Hayworth is president and co-founder of the Brain Preservation Foundation (BPF), a small, volunteer-only, non-profit organization formed to skeptically evaluate cryonic and other preservation technologies by examining how well they preserve neural circuitry at the nanometer scale. The BPF’s core mission is to advocate for more scientific research into ultrastructural brain preservation with the eventual goal being the widespread adoption of a rigorouslyproven technique by the mainstream medical community. In his ‘day job’, Hayworth works as a Senior Scientist at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus where his main focus is extending Focused Ion Beam Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) to allow nanometer scale imaging of much larger brain volumes than are currently possible. Previously, Hayworth was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University where he co-invented the Automatic Tape-Collecting Ultramicrotome (ATUM-SEM) connectomics imaging technique. Hayworth received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California for experimental research regarding the nature of the neural representation in the visual system.