About the Authors

Michael Wysession

Michael Wysession received his Ph.D. in geophysics from Northwestern University in 1991. He is an Associate Professor in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. His area of specialization is using seismic waves to explore Earth's interior. Dr. Wysession is an author on more than 50 scientific publications. For his research, he was awarded a Packard Foundation Fellowship, and in 1996 was awarded a Presidential Faculty Fellowship at the White House. He also has created educational simulations to accurately show how seismic waves propagate. He currently chairs the Education & Outreach program for the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS).

David Frank

David Frank completed his Ph.D. at Purdue University. For the last ten years he has been the head of the Physical Sciences Department at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. He has taught general chemistry courses for science majors and for allied health students. With the assistance of his colleagues, he helped develop a new B.A. program in biochemistry. He has taught students in the university's Math/Science/Technology program, which enrolls gifted high school students. Recently he has worked with Michigan's “Connecting With the Learner” group, which produced a toolkit to help elementary and secondary teachers address diversity issues in the classroom.

Sophia Yancopoulos

Sophia Yancopoulos received her Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University. She has done postdoctoral research in astronomy at Yale University and in biophysics at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. She considers teaching to be a vital and exciting part of her experience, having taught at Barnard College, Vassar College, the Stevens Institute of Technology, and Columbia University, as well as at Bronx High School of Science. She has worked on a neutrino oscillations experiment at Fermi National Laboratory, conducted experiments on acoustic modeling, and analyzed data on the extreme astrophysics of neutron stars. Currently she does research in genome evolution. She works with a team of scientists at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, trying to find a cure for a form of leukemia.

Contributing Writers

• Steve Miller
  Science Writer
  State College,
  Pennsylvania

• Polly Weissman
  Science Writer
  New York, New York

• Dr. Carolyn Sumners
  Houston Museum of Natural Science
  Houston, Texas

• T. Griffith Jones
  P.K. Yonge Developmental Research School
  College of Education—University of Florida
  Gainesville, Florida

Contributing Writers for DK

• Robert Dinwiddie
  M.A. M.Sc.
  Science Writer
  London, England

• Susan Watt
  M.A. M.Sc.
  Science Writer
  London, England

Reading Consultant

• Bonnie Armbruster, Ph.D.
  Department of Curriculum and Instruction
  University of Illinois
  Champaign, Illinois

Laboratory Activity Writers

• Robert W. Arts
  Associate Professor of Physics
  Pikeville College
  Pikeville, Kentucky

• Hasan Fakhrudin
  Physics Instructor
  Indiana Academy for
  Science, Mathematics, and Humanities
  Muncie, Indiana

• Yvonne Favaro
  Science Teacher (retired)
  Englewood Cliffs,
  New Jersey

• JoAnne Mowczko, Ed.D.
  Science Writer
  Gaithersburg, Maryland

• Brian Rohrig
  Science Teacher
  Columbus Public Schools
  Columbus, Ohio

Safety Consultant

• Dr. Kenneth R. Roy
  Director, Science and Safety
  Glastonbury Public Schools
  Glastonbury, Connecticut

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