Stephen R. Culp (Playwright) Born and raised in the mountains of Colorado, Stephen R. Culp received degrees in Directing and English Literature from Regis University. After moving to New York to attend the National Shakespeare Conservatory, he began writing plays between acting jobs. Other plays include: The 13 Hallucinations of Julio Rivera (which premiered at the Magic in 2004), Kitty, Let’s All Clap, Life on Pluto, and Decadent Lawyers in Heat. He is a member of the Dramatists Guild.

Jimmy Bohr (Director) has directed over 30 stage productions ranging from Off-Broadway to regional theatres, including The 13 Hallucinations of Julio Rivera by Stephen R. Culp at the Magic. Previously, he was the casting director for As The World Turns (CBS), Another World (NBC), and the Assistant Casting Director for Guiding Light (CBS). He holds an MFA in Directing from Florida State University and a BA in Theatre from The Catholic University of America. He has taught at the New York School of Film and Television and at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. He is currently on the faculty of the Department of Theatre at Ohio State University.

Kevin Day (Science Expert) spent his early years in Central California frequenting the Sierra Nevada, which cultivated a strong interest in the Earth Sciences. After graduating from Turlock High School, Kevin traveled East to upstate New York where he received a BA degree from Colgate University with a concentration in Geology. As an undergraduate, he gained valuable field experience mapping in the Rocky Mountains and New England. The next few years were spent pursuing outdoor interests in northwestern Wyoming. Kevin then moved to Laramie to study Hydrogeology at the University of Wyoming. His Master's thesis, entitled Aquifer Heterogeneity in Groundwater Flow Modeling, focused on developing code for a groundwater flow model to address contaminant issues in a fluvial aquifer system adjacent to an environmentally sensitive riparian corridor. After earning an MS in Geology from UW in 1999, Kevin began working full-time in the fields of Water Resources
and Environmental Geology, which continue to be his professional focus.

David Ford’s (Playwright) first play, Too Good to Be True, won 2nd place in South Coast Rep’s 6th Annual California Playwrights Competition. His second play, The Interrogation of Nathan Hale, premiered at SCR and was published by Dramatic Publishing Company. His third and fourth plays were commissioned by SCR and Phoenix Pictures (respectively) and have been read at the Mark Taper Forum, the Bay Area Playwright’s Festival, and Magic Theatre. Mr. Ford has been collaborating on new and unusual theatre for fifteen years. His collaboration with Brian Copeland, Not a Genuine Black Man, has been running for six months in San Francisco. Recent work has been with storyteller-holy-man Ron Jones and Michael Rice, a mentally disabled performer on Say Ray; and with Charlie Varon on Rush Limbaugh in Night School, Ten Day Soup, The People’s Violin, and his new CD: “Visiting Professor of Pessimism”. As a director, Mr. Ford has worked regionally at the Public Theatre, Second Stage, St. Clement’s, Dixon’s Place, One Dream Theatre, and Theatre for the New City (NY), Highways (LA) and Woolly Mammoth (Washington, DC) as well as at theatres around the Bay Area including Magic Theatre and Marin Theatre Company. Mr. Ford also teaches Creating and Performing Your Own Work at The Marsh and has taught playwriting at Stanford University and San Francisco State. He is a Resident Artist at the Marsh.

Dr. Brandy Matthews (Science Expert) received her MD from Indiana University. She then completed an internship at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis and trained in neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN. There she served as Chief Resident and Clinical Instructor at the Mayo College of Medicine.

Dr. Matthews completed her Behavioral Neurology fellowship training at the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in 2007 and is currently a Clinical Instructor in the UCSF Department of Neurology. Dr. Matthews participates in the evaluation and management of patients at the Memory and Aging Center clinic and multiple outreach sites serving the San Francisco Chinese community. She acts as Director of Outreach and Co-Director of Education for the UCSF Alzheimer's Disease Research Center and oversees neuropsychiatry rotations for neurology residents, psychiatry interns, geriatrics fellows, medical genetics fellows, and senior medical students.

Her research focuses on the social and emotional interactions of patients with dementia, with a particular emphasis on the emotional response to sound. Her current project, funded by the GRAMMY FoundationR, seeks to characterize the emotional response to music in patients with neurodegenerative diseases. Dr. Matthews also maintains an interest in the representation of neurological conditions in works of art, from opera to Shakespeare to modern literature and film.

Ira Hauptman (Playwright) Ira Hautpman's plays have been performed throughout the United States, as well as in Paris, Brussels, and Bangalore. Starry Messenger is his second play to be developed through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Science & Technology Project.; the first, Partition, is about the early twentieth century mathematicians Ramanujan and Hardy. Partition was presented by the Ensemble Studio Theatre in New York as a staged reading in FirstLight 2002, then seen at San Francisco's Exploratorium in a staged reading co-produced by Magic Theatre and Berkeley's Aurora Theatre Company. It premiered at the Aurora in 2003, with Barbara Oliver directing. Mr. Hauptman's plays have been performed in New York at the Manhattan Theatre Club and in Los Angeles at the Audrey Skirball-Kenis Theatre, FirstStage, Odyssey, and Moving Arts. He has written criticism for Partisan Review and The New Republic. A graduate of Yale Drama School, he teaches at Queens College.

Barbara Oliver (Director) Barbara Oliver has been working in Bay Area theatres since 1967. She created the role of George Sand in Dear Master in 1991. For Aurora Theatre Company she has acted in The Chairs, The Gin Game, Holiday Memories, Bailegangaire, La Castrata, The Aspern Papers and Dear Master. Her Aurora directing credits include The Persians, Partition, Transcendental Wild Oats, Shaw's The Man of Destiny, Saint Joan, The Philanderer, Candida, Mrs. Warren's Profession, and Widowers' Houses, as well as Ibsen's Ghosts, Dorothy Bryant's The Panel, Ayckbourn's Intimate Exchanges, Albee's Seascape and Luce's The Belle of Amherst. She is the recipient of several Bay Area Theatre Critics Circle Awards, including the first Barbara Bladen Porter Award. She is the Founding Artistic Director of Aurora.

Dr. David Eisenbud (Science Expert) Dr. David Eisenbud became Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley in the summer of 1997, and at the same time joined the faculty of UC Berkeley as Professor of Mathematics. He received his PhD in mathematics in 1970 at the University of Chicago under Saunders MacLane and Chris Robson, and was on the faculty at Brandeis University before coming to Berkeley. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Bonn, and Paris. Eisenbud's mathematical interests range widely over commutative and non-commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, topology, and computer methods. In addition to his work in Berkeley, Eisenbud was President of the American Mathematical Society in 2004 and 2005. He is now a Director of Math for America, a foundation devoted to improving mathematics teaching. He has been a member of the National Research Council's Board of Mathematical Sciences and their Applications as well as a member of the US National Committee of the International Mathematical Union. In 2006, Eisenbud was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Algebra and Number Theory, the Bulletin du Societe Mathematique de France, Computing in Science & Engineering, and Springer-Verlag's book series, Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics. His interests outside of mathematics include juggling (he is co-author of a paper on the mathematics of juggling) and music. He plays the flute and studies singing (the art-songsof Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, and Debussy).