Paul Ginsparg arrived a few minutes late to our session at Cornell, still wearing his bike helmet and running shoes. He had pedaled across campus through the cold November air. His office looked like a storm had passed through and decided to stay. Boxes everywhere. Old computers stacked beside piles of journals. Books leaning in crooked towers. Loose papers spilling across the floor.

Kavita Bala, Cornell’s provost, brings both warmth and precision to every conversation. When you meet her, the first thing you notice is her smile, open and deeply kind. Beneath that warmth is a strong sense of purpose. She stepped into the provost role at a time of great change, when universities were adapting to new pressures and research funding was increasingly uncertain.

Geoff Coates is one of the world’s leading polymer chemists, known for finding purpose in the smallest bonds. On a rainy afternoon in Olin Hall at Cornell, we talked about chemistry, entrepreneurship, and the early inspiration he drew from his father, who was also a chemist. In the lab, he still keeps and sometimes wears his father’s old lab coat, a small gesture that ties his work to its beginnings.

Paul Ginsparg’s office in Cornell’s Physical Sciences Building feels like an extension of his mind. Books, papers, and boxes rise in uneven stacks, every surface covered with the traces of long-running projects and passing curiosities. The blackboards behind him are dense with equations, not rewritten each day but slowly added to over time, layer upon layer, as ideas evolve. He laughs about being a “kind of” hoarder, admitting that he has meant to sort through it all for years.

Roald Hoffmann carries the calm focus of someone who has spent a lifetime listening to the quiet language of matter. His office in Baker Laboratory at Cornell feels like a reflection of his mind, filled with carvings, masks, paintings, poems, books, and models of molecules. Every object seems placed with intention, each holding a small story about curiosity and creation.

Mariana Wolfner has spent her life studying a creature so small it could rest on the tip of her finger. In her hands, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster becomes something extraordinary, a key to understanding how life is shaped, sustained, and passed on. On a windy fall afternoon at Cornell, she sat surrounded by papers, notes, and journals. The light came through the window in soft bands as she lifted a golden model of a fly and smiled.

Ann Druyan has spent her life expanding the boundaries of wonder. When I met her on a bright, wind-stirred afternoon in Ithaca, the trees along the slope behind her home flared red and gold, and the air carried that particular autumn light that makes everything feel newly seen. It was the house she once shared with Carl Sagan, the place where…

Bob Farese Jr. has always lived between identities. Trained as both a physician and a scientist, he’s someone who listens as intently as he investigates. You can sense it when he speaks;quiet, deliberate, with a kind of inward momentum that doesn’t announce itself but builds as he connects ideas. His laboratory work focuses on lipid metabolism and its role in disease.

Davis Masten has spent his life navigating the spaces where science, design, and imagination meet. As the longtime CEO and co-chair of Cheskin, he helped shape how organizations think about people and innovation. The firm was among the first to merge anthropology, psychology, and market research into a single practice that could explain why people do what they do. Under his leadership, Cheskin became a laboratory for curiosity, guiding companies as they explored the uncertain terrain of technology and human behavior.