Jenn Hullen
Dr. Jennifer Hullen
You never wanted to be on this damn board. The fools at the National Science Foundation stuck you here because they didn't-- no, they CAN'T appreciate your genius.
Twenty years ago you earned a PhD in Temporal Psychology at Hofstra University (you tried to go to Yale, but you've always been far too ahead of your time and they didn't accept you). Your calculations have shown that the secret to eternal life could be discovered by observing the ways humans interact with the time stream when it behaves abnormally. Of course, since time travel had not been invented, the only way to cause temporal abnormalities was to induce hallucinations of them. Your first three thesis proposals were rejected by the Ethics Board, even after you explained that the hallucinations only had a 20% chance of recurring later in life, and the drug cocktail you were using only caused seizures in 8 of the rats you'd tried it on. Eventually your thesis advisor helped you design an independent study program that avoided the Ethics Board completely. So technically your PhD is in "Temporo-Anthropic Studies." But that's pretty much the same thing as Temporal Psychology. Unfortunately, this meant your thesis had to be entirely theoretical, and the lack of demonstrable results made it a lot harder to get hired after graduation.
After being turned down by three research institutions (Three! They turned YOU down! The indignity!), you did the only obvious thing and went into seclusion, planning on building your own research facility, with observation cells and an aerosol hallucinogen dispersal system. Unfortunately, there was some financial mismanagement on the part of your accountant - he refused to listen to your stock advice even though your economic genius is outshone only by your genius in the field of Temporal Psychology, so you fired him. You tried to recover, but he'd already squandered most of your capital, and the resulting funding difficulties prevented you from actually opening your facility. That's ok, though, because just as you were about to give up hope, you read about the discovery of the time machine. This was perfect! True time travel would allow for far more variation and flexibility in the types of temporal anomalies. You approached the NSF with your academic credentials and offered to share your data with them if they'd let you run your experiment.
They pretended to be interested. You were interviewed by seven different NSF staffers and corporate backers, all of whom expressed interest in one aspect or another of your theory. Then three weeks later you received a letter from Sony, the main corporate funder of the project. It was a fairly thick letter. Finally, vindication! ...Almost. You opened the letter, only to find that you'd been hired for this ridiculous bureaucratic mess, and as the chairwoman, no less. Sony had you placed on the board so that you could ensure that no time travelers affect Sony in any adverse fashion, and they've promised to fund your research fully, once your tenure on the board runs out. The thought of you working for someone else is... abhorrent, yes. But they assure you that once you're done here, you'll have full control over your research, and effectively unlimited funding, so you'll play their game for a while. Apparently, they don't want anyone to know they've done this; you're not sure why, since it seems like a good idea to you, but your funding is contingent upon you keeping it a secret, so you'll do what they say. It goes without saying that your funding is also contingent upon your success, so keep an eye out for anyone who might want to tamper with Sony's history.
Since they made you chairwoman, and you can't exactly conduct your experiments while you have this other full-time job, you've designed some other experiments to see how humans behave in various circumstances. Today's is adversity and group conflict. As chairwoman, you're responsible for collecting the applications from the processing office and bringing them to the meetings, so the board knows who's applying to travel through time. You've carefully avoided pointing that out to anyone, and have pretended to not know where they come from each day. Today you left them at home, to see how the board will react. Oops.
