The scientists, filmmakers and volunteers who guide the Raw Science Film Festival and bring it to the screen each year.
A former professional ballet dancer who performed under the direction of Mikhail Baryshnikov, Ruth Page, Larry Long and Peter Anastos, Keri studied bioelectrical engineering at Purdue University and has built a long career in medical device development. She founded the festival in 2014 and is executive producer of At Home and Over There: American Women Physicians in World War I.
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Board of Governors Distinguished Professor Emerita of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Distinguished Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology at the University of Southern California. Her research has focused on nucleic acids, protein-nucleic acid interactions and collagen, and she has published more than 350 scholarly articles.
Helen was a co-founder of the Protein Data Bank (PDB) archive, launched in 1971, and has been committed to the continued development and maintenance of this community resource.
She is also working on ways to use film and digital arts to communicate to a broader audience about the importance of structural biology in medicine and health. She was the Executive Producer of Target Zero, a documentary about HIV prevention in which high-quality molecular animations illustrate how the anti-HIV drugs work. As part of ongoing collaborations between the USC Bridge Institute and the USC School of Cinematic Arts, she is working on the Inner Space/World in a Cell VR experience, which provides a view of the inside of a pancreatic beta cell.
Helen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of numerous scientific societies. She has received several awards, including the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences and the ASBMB DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences.
Award-winning director, author and visualization scientist for NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, with about twenty years of work turning high-energy astrophysics data into images, sound, 3D prints and extended reality.
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Planetary scientist and science advisor for film and television.
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Award-winning documentary director, writer, producer and production executive. His film Squeezed Light: Breaking the Quantum Limit wins the 2026 Kip Thorne Gravity Award, and he moderates this year’s Science Under Siege panel.
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Founder of Protostellar Media, a production company built to help scientists tell stories.
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Documentary director and producer, and Associate Professor and MFA Graduate Advisor in Film/TV Production at San Diego State University. Her films include In a Wintry Season, Ain’t in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm and Target Zero.
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More than 20 years of leadership and operations experience, including a 21-year career at Lowe’s. Named an Influential Woman of 2025, she studied TV and film production at Dutchess Community College and Marist College.
Attorney with a career in financial services, most recently Vice President and Deputy General Counsel at an alternative financing company. A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School and Columbia University, she has served on several nonprofit boards.
Practicing anesthetist at Yale New Haven Hospital and writer-director of Einstein’s God Model, a winner at the 2016 festival. He is in production on the feature Proteus Entangled, about quantum entanglement.
Twenty years in science communication, producing visuals for high-profile international research organizations, including the National Science Foundation.
Spent two decades at the U.S. National Science Foundation, most recently as Media Officer for Artificial Intelligence, publicizing research from quantum computing to paleontology.
See also the 2026 Jury and the 2026 festival films.
