Bio: Richard Satava, MD, FACS, is Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the University of Washington Medical Center

Prior academic positions include Professor of Surgery at Yale University and a military appointment as Professor of Surgery (USUHS) in the Army Medical Corps assigned to General Surgery at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.  Government positions included Program Manager of Advanced Biomedical Technology at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Senior Science Advisor at the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command in Ft. Detrick, Maryland.

His undergraduate training was at Johns Hopkins University, Medical School at Hahnemann University of Philadelphia, Internship at the Cleveland Clinic, Surgical Residency at the Mayo Clinic, and a Fellowship with a Master of Surgical Research at Mayo Clinic.  

He has served on the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Committee on Health, Food and Safety. He has been a member of numerous committees of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), currently serving on the Committee on Emerging Surgical Technologies and Education (CESTE) and ACS-Accredited Education Institutes (ACS-AEI) and Alliance of Surgical Specialties for Education and Training (ASSET).  He is a past president of the Society of American Gastrointestinal Endoscopic Surgeons (SAGES), the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons (SLS) and the Society of Medical Innovation and Therapy (SMIT).  He was on the Board of Governors of the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME) and is currently on Board of a many surgical societies and on the editorial board of numerous surgical and scientific journals, and active in a number of surgical and engineering societies.  

Dr. Satava has been continuously active in surgical education and surgical research, with more than 200 publications and book chapters in diverse areas of advanced surgical technology, including Surgery in the Space Environment, Video and 3-D imaging, Telepresence Surgery, Virtual Reality Surgical Simulation, and Objective Assessment of Surgical Competence and Training and the Moral and Ethical Impact of Advanced Medical Technologies.  

During his 23 years of military surgery he has been an active flight surgeon, an Army astronaut candidate, MASH surgeon for the Grenada Invasion, and a hospital commander during Desert Storm, all the while continuing clinical surgical practice.  Current research is focused on advanced technologies to formulate the architecture for the next generation of clinical Medicine, education and training.

Bio: Mark Mine is Director of Technical Concept Design at Walt Disney Imagineering and head of WDI's Creative Technology Group. The Creative Technology Groupís mission is to help Imagineering build better theme park rides and attractions through new ways to design, evaluate, and present concepts and ideas. The Creative Technology Group's expertise in virtual reality and computer graphics has been applied to many projects including the Finding Nemo Submarine Voyage, Toy Story Mania, and the new Radiator Springs Racers at Disney's California Adventure. Prior to working at Disney, Mark was a system engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena California working on the Voyager Missions to the outer planets. Mark has a Bachelor's degree in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, a Master's Degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California, and Master's and Ph.D. degrees from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Bio: Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor. Bailenson's main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed. Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction. His findings have been published in over 70 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, law, political science, and psychology. His work has been consistently funded by the National Science Foundation for over a decade, and he also receives grants from various Silicon Valley and international corporations. Bailenson consults regularly for government agencies including the US Army and Air Force, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, the National Research Council, and the National Institute of Health on policy issues surrounding virtual reality. His book Infinite Reality, coauthored with Jim Blascovich, was recently quoted by the Supreme Court outlining the effects of immersive media.