Marine Biologist | Ayana Elizabeth

Ayana Elizabeth is an American marine biologist. Elizabeth grew up in Brooklyn, NY and in her bio she proudly shares that she is the daughter of "a former teacher/current egg farmer and a former architect/current potter."

Elizabeth received her BA in Environmental Studies from Harvard in 2002 and her PhD in Marine Biology from the UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 2011. Elizabeth's list of fellowship is lengthy: NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, NSF IGERT Fellowship, UCSD Diversity Fellowship, Switzer Environmental Fellowship, AAUW American Fellowship, and Knauss Sea Grant Fellowship. She is also the recipient of multiple grants and awards including the Rare/National Geographic Solution Search and was named a “World Changer” on Dell’s #Inspire 100 List. She is currently Executive Director of the Waitt Institute and a blogger for National Geographic.

Elizabeth's passion is sustainable fisheres, but when she's not collecting, creating, actualizing, and amplifying the best ideas in ocean conservation - or scuba diving (for work and for pleasure) - she is also a jazz singer and a keen investigator of dance parties.

Elizabeth has been on our Future-ish Stylish Scientist List two years in a row.

>> Blog: National Geographic Ocean Views
>> Twitter: @ayanaeliza

Sceleb | Garrett Lisi

A. Garrett Lisi is an American theoretical physicist and multi-sport surfer (water, snow, air, and asphalt). Lisi completed a B.S. in Physics and a B.S. in Mathematics from UCLA in 1991 and a PhD in Physics in 1999 from UC San Diego where he received UC Regents and ARCS Foundation fellowships.

Although he has held academic positions, Lisi currently works as an independent researcher on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Lisi is widely known for his paper, "An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything", that proposed a theory to unify particle physics with Einstein's theory of gravitation using the E8 Lie Group (a group of mathematical, continuous symmetries that produce a particular multi-dimensional geometric shape). Lisi's theory maps forces and particles to this E8 shape, producing a stunning, yet elegant pattern to quantum scale physics of the universe. A strong advocate of living life to its fullest and balancing life with work, Lisi is as likely to be catching the next wave as he is to be writing the next chapter in modern physics.