--David Carroll, 64, naturalist, Warner, N.H. For more than 40 years the author of Swampwalker's Journal and Self-Portrait with Turtles has chronicled the lives of freshwater turtles and other wildlife around New England.

--Regina Carter, 40, jazz violinist, New York. Although classically trained, Carter draws from Motown, Afro-Cuban, swing, folk and world music. She used a violin owned by Nicolo Paganini to record her 2001 album Paganini: After a Dream.

--Kenneth Catania, 40, neuroscientist, Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. Catania's study of insect-eating mammals, particularly the star-nosed mole, sheds light on how a mammal's sensory cortex responds to changing conditions.

--Lisa Curran, 45, tropical biologist, Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Curran's research on the forests of Indonesian Borneo helps develop strategies to combat deforestation.

--Kevin Eggan, 32, developmental biologist, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. Eggan's work on embryonic stem cell lines could lead to treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's and insulin-dependent diabetes.

--James Fruchterman, 47, electrical engineer-turned-entrepreneur, Palo Alto, Calif. Fruchterman's nonprofit company is a launching pad for socially oriented uses of technology. The Benetech Initiative's Bookshare.org, a web-based downloadable library, provides thousands of titles for people with visual or learning disabilities.

--Atul Gawande, 40, surgeon and author, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Gawande, also a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine and author of the Notes of a Surgeon column for the New England Journal of Medicine, examines ways to prevent human error in surgery. One of his innovations is a bar code on instruments and sponges to prevent surgeons from accidentally leaving them in patients.

--Linda Griffith, 46, bioengineer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. Griffith's latest experiments in tissue engineering, or creating living tissues and organs from cells, involve fabricating scaffolds on which cultured cells can grow.

--Victoria Hale, 45, pharmaceutical entrepreneur, San Francisco. Hale's nonprofit Institute for OneWorld Health tries to treat parasite-borne diseases that typically strike in the world's poorest areas and are ignored by pharmaceutical companies because they are unprofitable.

--Adrian LeBlanc, 43, nonfiction writer, New York. LeBlanc, the former fiction editor at Seventeen magazine, spent 10 years involved in the lives of residents in an impoverished Bronx neighborhood researching her first book Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble and Coming of Age in the Bronx.

--David Macaulay, 59, author and illustrator, Norwich, Vt. The England native and former high school art teacher's book The Way Things Work is considered a leading work in the field of illustrated educational books.

--Josiah McElheny, 40, sculptor, New York. The master glassblower's 2005 work An End to Modernity consists of a 12-foot-wide by 10-foot-high chandelier modeled on the 1960s Lobmeyr design for the chandeliers at Lincoln Center.

--D. Holmes Morton, 55, pediatrician, Strasburg, Pa. Morton's treatment of Amish and Mennonite children afflicted with genetic diseases makes his Clinic for Special Children in rural Pennsylvania an international resource for inherited disorders found in isolated groups.

--John Rich, 47, physician, Drexel University in Philadelphia. Rich, who created the Young Men's Health Clinic at the Boston Medical Center, is a leading scholar in the health care needs of urban black men.

--Jennifer Richeson, 34, social psychologist, Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Richeson investigates how race and gender affect the way people think, feel and behave.

--Sarah Ruhl, 32, playwright, New York. Ruhl's The Clean House, a 2004 play about a successful doctor whose Brazilian maid hates to clean, was a finalist for a 2005 Pulitzer Prize.

--George Saunders, 47, short story writer, Syracuse University in Syracuse, N.Y. Saunders, whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's and Esquire, has an undergraduate degree from the Colorado School of Mines and worked as a technical writer and geophysical engineer before joining the Syracuse faculty.

--Anna Schuleit, 31, artist, New York. German-born Schuleit uses flowers, grasses and music to bring historic institutions back to life. For 2003's Bloom she blanketed the hallways of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center's original building with begonias, lilies and tulips.

--Shahzia Sikander, 37, painter, New York. Born in Pakistan and trained at the National College of Arts in Lahore, Sikander's works merge the traditional South Asian art of miniature painting with contemporary forms, styles and vibrant hues.

--Terence Tao, 31, mathematician, Los Angeles. The Australian-born former child prodigy is the first mathematics professor in the history of the University of California Los Angeles to win the Fields Medal, mathematics' highest honor.

--Claire Tomlin, 37, aviation engineer, Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. The England native uses mathematical theories to address practical problems in air traffic control and collision avoidance.

--Luis von Ahn, 28, computer scientist, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Von Ahn, who was born in Guatemala, helped develop CAPTCHA, a test used on many commercial Web sites to determine whether the user is human.

--Edith Widder, 55, deep-sea explorer, Fort Pierce, Fla. Widder helped design a remotely operated camera system known as Eye in the Sea, which detects and measures bioluminescence on the ocean floor and has produced rare footage of sharks, jellyfish and squid.

--Matias Zaldarriaga, 35, cosmologist, Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. The Argentina native is the co-creator of computer software known as CMBFAST, a standard tool for astronomers to estimate the total density of mass and energy in the universe.

--John Zorn, 53, musician and composer, New York. Zorn, a saxophonist, is at the center of the "downtown" experimental music scene in lower Manhattan.

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