Stefan Treyvaud has enjoyed a successful and diverse career in the arts, cultural and lifestyle sectors including senior marketing and communications roles with QPAC, Brisbane Powerhouse, Queensland Music Festival and State Library Queensland.

As a writer and content producer, he has made significant contributions to World Science Festival Brisbane, Melbourne Writers Festival, University of Melbourne Ideas Festival, Melbourne Festival and White Night Melbourne.

Prior to his foray into the arts, Stefan wrote for the Courier Mail’s Books Art and Music lift out and was Editor of Brisbane’s hugely successful map magazine.

Mariano Sigman is a physicist by training and an international leading figure in the cognitive neuroscience of learning and decision making. He is the only Latin American scientist to be a director of the Human Brain Project and has been awarded a Human Frontiers Career Development Award, the National Prize of Physics, the Young Investigator Prize of “College de France,” the IBM Scalable Data Analytics Award, and is a scholar of the James S. McDonnell Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from The Rockefeller University in New York and in 2016 he was made a Laureate of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. His latest book, The Secret Life of the Mind is published by HarperCollins Publishers Australia.
 

Kyo Maclear is a Canadian writer, essayist and beloved children’s author. She was born in London, England (to a British father and Japanese mother) and moved to Toronto at the age of four. Kyo’s latest book Birds Art Life Death follows two artists on a yearlong adventure to find birds in a big city. It is an intimate and exuberant meditation on creativity and life—a field guide to things small and significant. Her books have been translated into twelve languages, and published in nineteen countries. Kyo now lives in Toronto, Canada, where she shares a home with two children, two cats, and a singer.

Bill von Hippel is Professor and prior Head of the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland. Bill received his BA from Yale University and his PhD from the University of Michigan. Bill is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. Bill has published over 100 articles, chapters, and edited books and is currently working on his first trade book. Bill’s research interests are in evolutionary psychology and motivated cognition. His work has been reported in hundreds of media stories worldwide, including the New York Times “100 ideas of the year”, the Economist, USA Today, Le Monde, Il Mundo, Der Spiegel, and The Australian, and television re-enactments on the ABC, BBC, and Fox News. Bill has given numerous invited addresses at universities in Australia, North America, Europe, and the Middle East, and has appeared as a regular guest on several radio programs on the ABC. 

Before moving into roles as producer and director of major festivals including the Out of the Box festival, the Brisbane Asia Pacific Film Festival and the Brisbane Writers Festival, Carol had a long career in book publishing. An avid reader from childhood she achieved a long-held dream to work in books by securing an entry level role into the publishing industry early in her career; she went on to be the publisher at the University of Queensland Press where she worked with some of Australia’s most prestigious authors and then onto international publishing as the director of sales and marketing and international publishing director for Random House Australia. Carol is currently the Executive Producer of the World Science Festival Brisbane, presented by the Queensland Museum.