Kavita Mehra is executive director of Sakhi for South Asian Women, a community-based organization in the New York metropolitan area committed to ending violence against women of South Asian origin.

Edmund Bertschinger is a physics professor and division head of astrophysics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. His research focuses on the formation and development of cosmic structure after the big bang. He has written articles on the structure and formation of the universe.

James Gunn is a professor of astrophysics at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., where he is a leading researcher on the structure of the universe. His theoretical work in astronomy has helped establish the current understanding of how galaxies form.

Leila R. Milani is senior international policy advocate at Futures Without Violence. She was co-chairwoman of the Working Group on Ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and NGO liaison for women’s issues for the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is in the U.S.

George F. Smoot is co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize; a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley; and research physicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. His publications include, as co-author, the popular book Wrinkles in Time: Witness to the Birth of the Universe.

Paul J. Steinhardt is Albert Einstein Professor in Science on the faculties of physics and astronomy at Princeton University in Princeton, N.J. Along with Neil Turok, he coauthored Endless Universe: Beyond the Big Bang, which provides an outline of the foundation of the “Cyclic Universe” theory.

Adelita Medina is executive director of Alianza, the National Latino Alliance for the Elimination of Domestic Violence. She has said that advocates for women who have experienced domestic violence should take a woman’s faith into consideration when trying to help her.

Joel R. Primack, a professor of physics at the University of California Santa Cruz, is co-author of The View From the Center of the Universe: Discovering Our Extraordinary Place in the Cosmos.

Summer Hathout is a prosecutor in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office and co-founder of the Muslim Women’s League. She has written about misperceptions of domestic violence within the American Muslim community. Contact via the Muslim Women’s League.