Arizona State University

Nicholas King "Nick" Nolte is an American actor. His career has spanned over five decades, peaking in the 1990s, when his commercial success made... him one of the better known stars of that decade. His films include 48 Hrs. , Cape Fear , Affliction , The Good Thief , and Warrior . He has been nominated for three Academy Awards, twice for Best Actor and once for Best Supporting Actor. Nolte was born Nicholas King Nolte in Omaha, Nebraska on February 8, 1941. His mother, Helen , was a department store buyer, and his father, Franklin Arthur Nolte, was a farmer's son who worked in irrigation pump sales, and who was an All-American football player at Iowa State University in 1934. Nolte's paternal grandfather was of German descent. Nolte's maternal grandfather, Matthew Leander King, invented the hollow-tile silo and was prominent in early aviation. His maternal grandmother ran the student union at Iowa State University. He has an older sister, Nancy, who was an executive for the Red Cross. Nolte went to Westside High School in Omaha, where he was the kicker on the football team.
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Bert Hölldobler is a German behavioral biologist and Sociobiologist whose primary study subjects are social insects and in particular ants. He... is a co-winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his work on The Ants with Edward O. Wilson. In 1990, he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honour awarded in German research. He also collaborated with Wilson to write Journey to the Ants . In 2008 he and Wilson co-authored their third book about superorganisms. He holds positions at the University of Würzburg and Arizona State University where he is a Foundation Professor in the School of Life Sciences. In addition to his published scientific papers and books, Hölldobler was the subject of the documentary film "Ants - Nature's Secret Power" the winner of the 2005 Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festivals Special Jury Prize. His 2007 interview on the Ask A Biologist podcast program details his early life growing up in Germany as well as his interest in ants and writing.
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George Crumb is an American composer of contemporary classical music. He is noted as an explorer of unusual timbres, alternative forms of notation,... and extended instrumental and vocal techniques. Examples include seagull effect for the cello , metallic vibrato for the piano , and using a mallet to play the strings of a contrabass , among numerous others. He is not an electronic music composer, however many works call for amplification of instruments, such as Black Angels or Ancient Voices of Children . Crumb's music contains an intense humanism, which is reflected in his personal definition of music: "a system of proportions in the service of spiritual impulse." Crumb was born in Charleston, West Virginia, and began to compose at an early age. He studied music first at the Mason College of Music in Charleston where he received his Bachelor's degree in 1950.
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Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and author. From 1993-1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a... position now popularly known as "U.S. Poet Laureate". She was the first, and to date only, African-American to be appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 out of the previous "consultant in poetry" position . Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999-2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004-2006. Dove was born in Akron, Ohio to Ray Dove, the first African American chemist to work in the U.S. tire industry , and Elvira Hord, who achieved honors in high school and would share her passion for reading with her daughter. In 1970 Dove graduated from Buchtel High School as a Presidential Scholar, making her one of the 100 top American high school graduates that year. Later, Dove graduated summa cum laude with a B.A.
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Jonathan Weiner is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of non-fiction books on his biology observations, in particular evolution in the Galápagos... Islands, genetics, and the environment. His latest book is "Long for This World: The Strange Science of Immortality" a look at the scientific search for the Fountain of Youth. He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and the 1994 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science for his book The Beak of the Finch. In 1999 he won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was shortlisted for the Aventis Prize in 2000 for his book Time, Love, Memory about Seymour Benzer. Weiner graduated from Harvard University in 1976. Weiner is the Maxwell M. Geffen Professor of Medical and Scientific Journalism at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches writing about science and medicine. He has taught at Princeton University, Arizona State University and Rockefeller University. He lives in New York with his wife, author Deborah Heiligman, and their two sons, Aaron and Benjamin.
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