Jesse Dunietz wasn't thrilled to be the one assigned to the music portion of his high school science team -- the one part of the team that was definitely going to lose.

Jesse Dunietz is a Ph.D. student in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. Originally from New Jersey, Jesse's circuitous route to Pittsburgh has included residences in Israel, Cambridge (the Massachusetts one), Cambridge (the English one), and California (the only one). He teaches computers to understand language, coaxing them to stitch the pieces of a sentence into a coherent interpretation. He is also a founder and the current president of Carnegie Mellon's Public Communication for Researchers program, which helps graduate students learn and practice communicating science to people of all backgrounds. He is easily distracted by birds.