Ludovic Blein

Born in Marseille, in July 1979, Ludovic has had a passion for paleontology for as long as he can remember. He started his career at the Mineralogy & Paleontology club of Vitrolles in the South of France. Here he discovered several fossils of importance, such as a nest of 32 intact dinosaur eggs, Cretaceous mammal remains, and some ancient shark teeth. All these discoveries led to one obsession, mastering the technique of copying, thus enabling fossils to be seen by the largest audience possible. Today, Ludovic leads the casting department of the Liaoning Fossil & Geology Park, and his work can be seen in the United States, France, Germany, Peru and China.

Tim Clissold

Tim Clissold studied Physics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University before arriving in Hong Kong in 1987. He moved to Beijing and spent two years studying Mandarin before co-founding a fund that invested more than $400 million in twenty joint ventures all over China. The struggle to recover the invested capital from these businesses is the subject of his first book, Mr. China, which won an Economist Magazine Book of the Year Award and has been translated into eighteen languages. Tim has worked on more than fifty different investment projects in China, including distressed asset investing. Recently he co-founded Peony Capital which is a fund based in Beijing that invests in greenhouse gas emission reduction projects throughout the country. He periodically attempts to live in North Yorkshire with his family and a vast menagerie of animals, but can’t help returning to China. He is currently working on his second book.

Hou Ya Mei

Hou Yamei is a Research Professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. She specializes in lithic tool use by early humans, conducting much of her research ‘in the field’ at various site across China. Hou is a Member of UNESCO’s Executive Committee of the Union Internationale des Sciences Prehistoriques et Protohistoriques. In 2004 she was recognized as one of four winners of China’s first Award for Young Women in Science. She has served as the Associate Editor of the ‘Journal of Human Evolution’, and worked on joint projects with teams from America, Slovenia, France and India.

Michael Keller

Michael C. Keller is the author of a brand new graphic adaptation of Charles Darwin’s masterwork “The Origin of Species.” The book, being published by Rodale in 2009, introduces a contemporary audience to Darwin’s poetically written treatise on the principle of organic evolution.

As a journalist, Keller has extensively covered life in the Gulf Coast before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. Keller’s writing has appeared in Wired, Atlantica, Gold Coast, Boca Life and SPAN magazines and on Forbes.com and others.

In addition to his journalistic work, he has worked at several levels of government as a geographic information analyst and used those skills as a peacekeeper in the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission to Eritrea and Ethiopia, East Africa.

Damien Leloup

Originally from France, Damien Leloup has seen little of his country in over a decade. Following his studies in underwater archeology, and his passion for paleontology, his work has taken him to Australia to work on a 1911 shipwreck, to the Amazon looking for rare plants, to South Africa working for Jacques Cousteau, and to Madagascar to search for dinosaurs. For the past four years he has served as Managing Director of the Liaoning Fossil & Geology Park, the first Joint Venture dedicated to Research, Science and Tourism to be 51% owned by a foreign company in China. The museum has also been hailed by the Chinese press as the first Green Museum in the country, and is about to become a major destination for scientists, students and tourists from around the world.

David Lort Phillips

David Lort Phillips is a conservationist based at the Darwin Institute, Wales, and head of ‘The Beagle Project’ - rebuilding Darwin’s ship and sailing it round the world to promote ecological awareness.

He shares ancestry with John Lort Stokes, the mate and surveyor during Charles Darwin’s 1831-36 voyage, who went on to command HMS Beagle during subsequent surveying voyages to western Australia. David Lort Phillips is a director of the Darwin Centre for Biology and Medicine in Wales and has always had a strong interest in science.

John Mateer

John Mateer is an Australian poet and The Bookworm’s writer-in-residence for Autumn 2009, sponsored by Asialink at the University of Melbourne.

Mateer is currently working on a series of biographical poems based on the life of 16th century Portuguese poet Luis de Camoes who lived in Macao. In addition, he has been working on a homophonic translation of de Camoes’ epic poem Os Lusiadas. These works build on the concentric, expanding logic of Mateer’s earlier works - poems of Australia, South Africa, Indonesia and Japan - which has been an attempt to situate writing and poetics within the deep historical realities of the Indian Ocean and Asian regions.

Mateer has been awarded the Centenary Medal for Contribution to Australian Literature 2003 and the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry in 2001.

David Quammen

David Quammen is a freelance writer and author who lives in Montana and travels on assignment to jungles, swamps, and other far-flung locales around the world. He wrote a column in Outside Magazine for fifteen years (1981-1995), and now does his magazine work mainly for National Geographic and Harper’s. His dozen or so books include three novels, four essay collections, and the nonfiction titles The Song of the Dodo, Monster of God, and The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. His earliest collection, Natural Acts, has lately been released in a revised and expanded edition. He’s also general editor of On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition, a decorative reprise of Charles Darwin’s great work, published by Sterling in October 2008.

Quammen has received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, and (three times) the National Magazine Award, among other recognitions. He is a Contributing Writer for National Geographic, and has recently finished a three-year term as Wallace Stegner Professor of Western American Studies at Montana State University. His current book project involves the ecology and evolution of scary viruses.

Qian Guifeng & Li Chunrui - The Peking Man Museum Team

Qian Guifeng and Li Chunrui are experts at Zhoukoudian, the Peking Man site 50 km southwest of Beijing. Zhoukoudian has yielded many archeological finds, including Peking Man in 1929, one of the earliest specimens of homo erectus. Peking Man is thought to have lived in the Zhoukoudian caves intermittently from 200,000 to 750,000 years ago with early homo sapiens occupying the site in much later periods. A UNESCO World hertiage site, Zhoukoudian continues to this day - research and scientific study of homo erectus and human evolution.

Cathy Sampson

Beijing’s best loved English language crime writer Cathy Sampson has been living in China on-and-off for the past 27 years. She first came to China as part of a Leeds University Chinese degree, spending a year at Fudan University in Shanghai. After studying under the Kennedy Scholarship at Harvard University, Catherine traveled back to China for a year teaching English in the subtropical coastal province of Fujian.

Catherine has worked for the BBC and served as Beijing Correspondent for The Times from the late 1980’s. Her first crime novel, Falling Off Air, was published in 2004. She now writes fiction full time and has set two of her subsequent crime novels in Beijing. She published her fourth crime novel, The Slaughter Pavilion last year.

Xu Xing

Dr. Xu has conducted fieldwork in all the major dinosaur localities in China as well as the Gobi desert in Mongolia. He has named more than 30 new dinosaur species, among them the four-winged Microraptor and the buck-toothed Incisivosaurus. His works on the origin and early evolution of feathers and of bird flight are among the most significant contributions in these fields. He has published over 70 peer-reviewed papers, many of which are in journals of high profile such as Nature. He is a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP). Dr. Xu received a B.S. in paleontology from Peking University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in paleontology from the IVPP in 2002.

Dr. William Wells

In his varied and fascinating career, Dr. Wells has held senior military and advisory position under the US government, worked with NASA and consulted for the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of S&T Innovation. He has been awarded numerous accolades including 2001 American Women in Science Award for mentoring women in science, 1993 Award for Best Science Policy Book of the Year, and many military and sports medals.