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Board of Directors

  • Jacob Bien, Associate Professor of Statistics, University of Southern California
  • Jack Conte, Musician & Videographer and CEO of Patreon
  • Alexander Eccles, Pianist and Composer
  • Alex Filippenko, Professor of Astronomy, University of California, Berkeley
  • Maribel H. Fraser, Director of Information Technology, AT&T, retired
  • Juliana Gallin, Author and Ask a Scientist Creator
  • Kendra Kramlich, Science Enthusiast and Investment Advisor
  • Howard Rheingold, Author and Educator
  • Robert Strong, Comedy Magician, San Francisco
  • Eric Yao, Bioinformatician, UC Berkeley; Technical Director & Board Chair, Wonderfest
Emeritus Directors
 
  • Eugenie Scott, Advisory Council Chair, Nat’l Center for Science Education
  • Richard Zare, Professor of Chemistry, Stanford University
 
Executive Director
 
Tucker Hiatt founded Wonderfest in 1997, inspired by Carl Sagan’s Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. With the reincarnation of Wonderfest as an independent nonprofit corporation in 2011, the Wonderfest Board appointed Tucker to the position of Executive Director.
 
Tucker earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of California with the expressed goal of becoming a science teacher. His thesis research explored a narrow aspect of experimental solid state (condensed matter) physics. Later, Tucker worked with UC Berkeley’s Space Astrophysics Group to develop search algorithms that are now at work around the world in the SETI@home software.
 
Tucker taught physics at UC Santa Cruz, Punahou School, San Francisco University High School, and Branson School. At the Exploratorium, he built an exhibit, wrote a guide book, and trained Explainers. In 2006, Tucker won the Amgen Award for Science Teaching Excellence.
 
Tucker has published several articles and cartoons in The Physics Teacher, the journal of the American Association of Physics Teachers, and an article or two in Mercury, the journal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. In 2001, Tucker wrote and published the Layers of Scientific Understanding poster. From 2008 to 2014, Tucker was a Board member of the Bay Area Skeptics and a Visiting Scholar in the Stanford Chemistry Department.