Dr. Prosanta Chakrabarty starts with a niche and goes wide. His specialty is cave fishes, which he deftly connects to bigger ideas about evolution and deep time. We talked about his experience as a Program Officer with the National Science Foundation (NSF) and his current focus of building better scientific infrastructure around the world.

José Luis Ricón Fernández de la Puente is an independent researcher famous for his deep dives into questions and topics on his blog Nintil.

Dr. Chiara Franzoni has built a career researching the economics of science. Improving the funding system, she hypothesizes, requires us to first establish a common understanding of "risk" in science. She recently co-authored a landmark paper to address this keystone issue.

Harry Akligoh is building a community-oriented future for biology. As the founder of the Hive Biolab in Ghana and an active participant in the broader open science hardware movement, his perspective is both local and global. The scientific process, Akligoh says, is not complete if it fails to leave the lab.

Dr. Jenny Molloy is a pillar of the open biology movement. From starting community biolabs to freeing enzymes into the public domain, she's creating a world that everyone can build on.

Dr. Elizabeth Iorns and her company, Science Exchange, have sped up the process of discovery by creating a platform that matches scientists to laboratory services and providers. They embolden researchers through contractual standardization and an easy-to-use project management interface — freeing science from unnecessary bureaucracy and giving everyone access to industrial science infrastructure.

Ben Reinhardt is working to enable a sci-fi future, faster. His in-depth research process spans both science and technology and his "intellectual exhaust" — tweets, blog posts, interviews — are wonderful resources for the rest of us. We go deep on his process as well as his essay: How DARPA Works.