Who We Are
David Beaver
In 2021, David co-founded The Center for Planetary Identity, focusing on the core of the space experience/Overview Effect, which his research identified as the awareness of our planetary existence, and the potential for incorporating this awareness into our personal identity, creating a planetary identity.
In 2008, David Imitated, co-founded, and headed cognitive/media research for The Overview Institute, the first organization dedicated to researching and educating about the Overview Effect; the commonly used term in the space field that describes the impact of spaceflight on mind and society.
Since 2006, David produced or co-produced five national conference events on the Overview Effect. In December 2012, he was interviewed in the Harvard premiered “Overview,” a 19 min. Documentary on the Overview Effect and the work of the Institute, which has now been viewed more than 8M times. He coproduced an Overview panel at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and published “The Case for Planetary Awareness” in Space Times Magazine.
David studied nuclear engineering and physics at The University of Virginia, and the psychology and sociology of perception, and philosophy of science at The University of Richmond. For the last forty years he has researched the cognitive underpinnings of human perception, with a special focus on the interaction of media images with the mind. He has lectured on his research at six major university graduate schools in design, psychology, film, drama, and virtual reality, including one at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.
He received multiple US and international patents for the invention of The Magic Stage, the first commercially viable virtual reality theatre technology. Once built, the Stage attracted representatives from leading international performance artists and companies.
David consults at Applied Magic Consulting, based on his decades of research into, and applications of, the intersection of human perception, media, and magic.
Our Advisory Board
Dan Curry, VES
Dan Curry is a veteran of over 100 feature films and 40 television productions. His visual effects work on STAR TREK was honored with 7 Emmy Awards and 19 nominations, as well as a Visual Effects Society Award for best broadcast VFX, an Omni Award, and three International Monitor Awards. Dan also created the Klingon martial arts style and invented iconic bladed weapons. Dan served as a visual effects department head at 21st Century Fox, Warner Bros, and Paramount Pictures. He was Vice President, Director of Creative Services at Cinema Research Corporation, and Art Director at Modern Film Effects. Dan is a founding member and has represented the Overview Institute at events in Spain and Las Vegas. He was also commencement speaker at three universities and has lectured at the invitation of the Malaysian government, as well as New Zealand, Germany, Thailand, and venues in the US. Together with NASA scientists has delivered presentations on the symbiotic relationship between science fiction and real science.
Dan holds an MFA in Film and Theatre. Prior to entering the film industry Dan taught Fine Arts, Film, and Theatre at the university level. His personal fine arts is in collections in the US, Canada, Germany, The Netherlands, Thailand, Malaysia, New Zealand, Jordan, and South Africa. Dan is a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Community Development designing and supervising construction of small dams and bridges in rural Thailand while teaching architectural drafting during monsoon season at Khon Kaen University. Subsequently he worked for Thailand’s Ministry of Education as part of a team producing a children’s television series mixing live action, puppets, and animation.
Curry went on to accept commissions in art, architecture, and production design. Projects included a library for the United States Information Service, production designer for the Bangkok Opera, designing and painting murals for what became a famous nightclub in an international hotel, and becoming the only non-Thai to win the competition for production designer for King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s Royal Charity Ball hosting dignitaries and performers from around the world.
Dan is a past Governor of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and is a member of the Directors Guild of America, American Society of Cinematographers, Art Directors Guild, and is a past Board Member of the Visual Effects Society and was honored as a Visual Effects Society Fellow.
Blanka Deroko
Blanka Deroko is a designer, multimedia artist, educator, and entrepreneur. For over 20 years, she has provided visionary strategies, pioneering new products, services, and technologies through hands-on design and management as well as authored information technology and media and television content. She is a public speaker and researcher in areas spanning digital media, human computer interaction, art and science, and space experience design. As a storyteller and experience architect she creates liminal environments on the intersection of human and technology to transform and empower people. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters and conference proceedings while her work has been exhibited and broadcasted internationally.
Blanka is currently a PhD candidate at the Planetary Collegium, Centre for Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts, University of Plymouth, UK. She received her MFA from the department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was a recipient of the University Fellowship in the Graduate School at Northwestern University and Study Abroad at École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris, France.
For more information see: www.liminalatelier.com
Jason Jerald, PhD
Jason is Co-Founder and CEO at NextGen Interactions, serves on multiple advisory boards, and speaks at various events throughout the world. His focus is on simulation and training using virtual reality (VR) technologies, where he has been creating VR systems and applications for over 20 years. He has been involved in over 70 VR-related projects across more than 40 organizations including Fortune 500 companies (Google, AT&T, and General Motors), VR Market Leaders (Valve, Oculus, and HTC), national laboratories (NASA Ames Research Center, Naval Research Laboratory, and Argonne National Laboratory), and seven universities. Jason's work has been featured on ABC's Shark Tank, on the Discovery Channel, in the New York Times, and on the cover of the MIT Press journal Presence. He has held various technical and leadership positions, and has served on the ACM SIGGRAPH, IEEE Virtual Reality, and IEEE 3D User Interface Committees. Jason earned a PhD in Computer Science from UNC-Chapel Hill where he created and validated a new model of latency perception for users of head-mounted displays. Jason has authored over 30 publications and patents directly related to VR, most notably the best-selling book The VR Book: Human-Centered Design for Virtual Reality.
Tomasz Kozlowski
Tomasz Kozlowski is a motivational speaker and world-recognized skydiver as well as an experienced coach, psychologist, trainer, and consultant. Tomasz is the author of The Story of a Thousand Fears and numerous publications on health, psychology, and mountain safety. He is the initiator of JUMP FOR THE PLANET, a global charity campaign to support climate refugees, especially children who have been adversely impacted by climate change.
In December 2014, Tomasz completed the highest skydive jump in Europe (35220 ft) after being raised to the stratosphere on a hot air balloon. On June 21, 2017, he jumped 50 times in seven hours. Each jump was dedicated to a person with a particular challenge or health crisis. The project raised over 50,000 euros for charity purposes, which led to Tomasz receiving the CHARITY HERO award. A year later, Tomasz completed 100 jumps in one day, raising $150,000 to purchase specialized wheelchairs for handicapped children.
Tomasz is a specialist in diagnosing teams and leadership, and he is a Crisis Intervention specialist. He works in Poland and New Zealand on TEAM BUILDING projects. He has conducted training courses that include the multicultural aspects of leadership, including for officers of the NATO Multinational Corps.
Tomasz completed courses in critical intervention, psychological support in critical situations and psychological and social aid in mass traumatic events. His past affiliations include being a member of the Polish Association of Research on Traumatic Stress, a psychologist of the Polish Medical Mission, and Vice President of the Management Board of the Association of Critical Intervention. He was also a member of a task force for the psychological support of rescue services and organizations under the auspices of the Department of Critical Management and Defensive Matters of the Ministry of the Interior and Administration. Additionally, at the request of the Ministry of the Interior and Administration, he provided psychological aid to refugees from Lebanon in 2006.
Between 1995 and 2012, Tomasz was a rescuer and instructor of Mountain Volunteer Search and Rescue and a ski instructor. Certified and qualified in first aid rescue, he was an instructor in the training of the Polish military, police, and Special Forces.
Dr. Andrew Newberg
Andrew Newberg is an American neuroscientist who is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences and the Director of Research at the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital,[1] previously an Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies and a Lecturer in Psychology in the Biological Basis of Behavior Program at the University of Pennsylvania.
He has been a prominent researcher in the field of nuclear medical brain imaging and neurotheology. In particular, his research has focused on the development of neurotransmitter tracers for the evaluation of religiosity as well as neurological and psychiatric disorders including clinical depression, head injury, Alzheimer's disease, and Parkinson's disease.
His 2010 book Principles of Neurotheology gives a basic understanding on the research done so far on neurotheology.
Dr. Annahita Nezami
(CPsychol, DPsych, MSc, BSc) is a chartered counselling psychologist with almost 20 years’ experience of working in mental health. She provides psychological consultation, assessment, and therapy to organizations, individuals, and couples. She is the founder and CEO of VR Overview Effect Healthtech (VROE). VROE offer hybrid VR experiences (involving sublime celestial content, meditation, binaural beats, music, haptic and bio-feedback), with the intention of inducing self-transcendent states analogous to the Overview Effect. The VR element can be utilised as an adjunct to psychotherapy, workshops, or as a standalone well-being tool for individuals, groups and organizations. Dr. Annahita is passionate about providing novel evidence-based psychological treatments and interventions that help rejuvenate, regenerate and that lead to growth!
Robert Poole
Robert Poole is Professor of History at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and lives in Manchester. He is author of Earthrise (Yale, 2008), a history of the first views of Earth from space and of the idea of the whole Earth. He has also written several articles on the film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the cultural history of the space age (below), and has appeared on public radio and TV in the UK, US and Germany. In 2011-16 he was an associate of ‘The Future in the Stars’ research programme, Friedrich-Meinecke Institut at the Free University of Berlin. He has also been a visiting fellow at the universities of Manchester and Hertfordshire and the Smithsonian Institution, and in 2022 at the Sorbonne University, Paris, and at Durham University. He has also published extensively on British history, writing a much-praised history of the 1819 Peterloo massacre in Manchester Peterloo: the English Uprising (OUP, 2019), co-authoring a graphic novel, Peterloo: Witnesses to a Massacre (New Internationalist, 2019), and working as consultant to the Peterloo bicentenary programme in 2019. Having enthusiastically watched the Apollo missions live, he now believes that the future of humanity lies wholly on the Earth.
Publications
Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (Yale University Press, 2008)
‘The myth of progress: 2001: A Space Odyssey’, in Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo ed. A. Geppert (Palgrave, 2018).
‘2001: A Space Odyssey and the dawn of man’, in Stanley Kubrick: New Perspectives ed. P. Kramer (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2015).
‘What was whole about the whole Earth?’, in The Surveillance Imperative: the Rise of the Geosciences during the Cold War ed. S. Turchetti (Palgrave, 2014).
‘The challenge of the spaceship: Arthur C. Clarke and the history of the future, 1945-75’, History and Technology 28, 3 (2012).
‘Seeing our Planet, Finding Ourselves’, Living on Earth, NPR, http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=08-P13-00050&segmentID=6
Doc Searls
Doc Searls is author of The Intention Economy, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto, a fellow with the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara, and a founder and board member of Customer Commons. He also directs ProjectVRM at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
Mike Simmons
Mike Simmons has been an amateur astronomer and outreach leader for more than 40 years and loves sharing the sky with others. His outreach activities began in the 1970s with the Los Angeles Astronomical Society and at Griffith Observatory where he operated the Zeiss 12-inch refracting telescope for the public. In the 1980s, Mike founded the Mount Wilson Observatory Association, a support organization dedicated to improving the experience of visitors to the renowned observatory.
Mike's outreach efforts in astronomy went international following a trip to Iran for the solar eclipse of 1999. In one of his return visits, he led a group of Westerners to Iran to observe the rare Transit of Venus alongside hundreds of Iranian amateur astronomers in 2004. In 2006 he traveled to Iraq with observing equipment donated by American astronomers to their enthusiastic but isolated Kurdish counterparts. His online assistance of amateur astronomers and educators around the world also increased as the internet expanded. Seeing astronomy as a universal interest that transcends cultural differences, Mike founded Astronomers Without Borders in 2006 to unite astronomy and space enthusiasts around the world through their common interests. During the UN-declared International
Year of Astronomy 2009, Mike led the effort to organize the Cornerstone Project 100 Hours of Astronomy in more than 100 countries, with an estimated one million people looking through outreach telescopes in one night.
Since retiring from Astronomers Without Borders, Mike has co-founded AstroGear Today and OneSky Expeditions, and has other projects in the works. Mike is also a writer and photographer who has contributed to publications including Scientific American, Astronomy and Sky and Telescope where he is a Contributing Editor. He regularly gives presentations, both in the US and abroad, on his experiences and interests, and on his outlook on international relations through astronomy.
Minor Planet Simmons (22294) was named in Mike’s honor in 2003, in part for his "varied outreach activities in astronomy." In 2005 Mike was presented with the Clifford W. Holmes Award, an honor given annually by RTMC for a "Major Contribution to Popularizing Astronomy." In 2009 Mike received the prestigious G. Bruce Blair Award given annually by the Western Amateur Astronomers for "outstanding contributions to amateur astronomy." Mike was also awarded the prestigious 2014 Gabrielle and Camille Flammarion Prize from the Société Astronomique de France (SAF) for “setting a worldwide example that astronomy does transcend political and cultural borders.”
Mike is retired from his 36-year career as a biomedical researcher at the School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Retirement doesn’t suit him, though, and he is as busy as ever, now focusing on astronomy outreach and education with organizations worldwide. He lives with his wife in the Santa Monica Mountains of Southern California and has happily become a doting grandfather.
Facebook Twitter AstroGear Today OneSky Expeditions
Email: mike@mikesimmons.net
Douglas Trumbull
Academy Award Winning Visual Effects Pioneer and Filmmaker
Douglas Trumbull was one of the Special Photographic Effects Supervisors for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He went on to become the Visual Effects Supervisor for such classics as Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and Blade Runner (1982), each of which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects.
He directed Silent Running (1972), Brainstorm (1983), Back to the Future…The Ride (1991) and numerous other special format films.
He is the recent recipient of the coveted Gordon E. Sawyer Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement as well as Lifetime Achievement Awards from the American Society of Cinematographers and the Visual Effects Society, for his outstanding contributions in the field of filmmaking.
Douglas has devoted recent years toward a goal of improving the cinema experience by reimagining the format, frame rate, resolution, and projected screen image field of view in order to enable a more immersive cinema experience. This work has been underway at Trumbull Studios in the Berkshires, and includes a new kind of all-digital cinema experience in his prefabricated theater concept called the Magi Pod, exploring 2D and 3D in 4K resolution at 120 frames per second.
Trumbull is continuing to write, experiment and develop motion picture projects combining his new technologies with his groundbreaking filmmaking magic.
Richard Whitehurst
Richard Whitehurst is the Founder and Director of the Overview Institute of Australia and its sister organisation - Planetary Human. He has been immersed in contemplating the imagery and video footage of the Earth from space since these were first made available through the various space agencies in the 1960’s. An enhancement of this intense fascination occurred when he acquired Kevin W. Kelly’s beautiful book: The Home Planet - released in 1988. A chord was struck as he saw the awe-inspiring images and read the statements of astronauts and cosmonauts about their life-changing experiences induced by looking back at the Earth from their utterly new vantage point – the planetary overview.
His eventual exposure to Frank White’s landmark book – The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution – served as a powerful catalyst to create something tangible that might foster a deeper awareness and understanding of the realities of our contextual circumstance ... as one human family bound together within, and as part of, the thin and fragile film of the Earth’s biosphere.
Richard has also been equally absorbed in the study of consciousness and altered states since undergoing a powerful transpersonal experience in June of 1970. From that juncture he spent eight years as a Vedic monk, much of that time traveling and speaking throughout the Indian subcontinent. In 1979 he married, raised a family and eventually settled in Australia in 1990. His professional studies in Ericksonian psychotherapy, clinical hypnosis, and heart-cantered transformation, including training in HeartMath and heart-rhythm practices, further evolved and deepened throughout the 1990’s.
His extensive experience, both in teaching awareness-enhancing processes and in presenting visionary topics through public speaking events and group-based activities has well prepared him to pursue the transformational work, goals and visions of these various organisations.
Richard is the administrator of the Facebook group 'Overview Earth.' He is also an advisory board member for Pulsar Aerospace, a research and development company in Brisbane, an in-house psychotherapist at a busy medical practice on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, as well as a member of the Guardianship Council of 'Be The Change' - the Australian arm of the Pachamama Alliance.
Alan A. Allen
Technical Advisor & Field Supervisor - World Export In Burnoffs
Mr. Alan A. Allen, doing business as Spiltec, is based in Redmond, Washington, and has well over 55 years of experience as a technical advisor and field supervisor involving hundreds of oil spills around the world. He has developed specialized strategies and equipment for the prevention, surveillance and control of oil spills; and he has conducted many hundreds of oil spill training courses under arctic, temperate and tropical conditions in over 50 countries. He is also an aquanaut, having lived in Hydro-Lab on the ocean floor for weeks at a time conducting research on the effects of oil pollutants on benthic plant and animal communities. Mr. Allen has provided operational guidance for government and industry organizations involving critical on-scene decisions related to the use of mechanical cleanup, the application of chemical dispersants, and the use of controlled burning. He is recognized as a leading consultant and trainer involving waterborne petroleum fires and their control, the application of chemical dispersants on offshore oil spills, and the containment, recovery and/or combustion of spilled oil under arctic and sub-arctic conditions. Mr. Allen holds three patents on oil spill response equipment and has used his practical experience in the field to help develop computer models for the fate and transport of oil spills. He has also developed models for the planning and assessment of response options in support of meaningful regulations involving performance-based, spill response Planning Standards.