Philip W Ingham is Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Developmental and Biomedical Genetics at the University of Sheffield UK and deputy Director of the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Singapore. He graduated in Genetics from the University of Cambridge and did research for his PhD in Developmental Genetics at the University of Sussex. He has used genetic analysis to study early embryonic development in Drosophila, identifying key regulators of Hox gene expression as well as pioneering the analysis of the Hedgehog signaling pathway. He was in the vanguard of researchers who adopted the zebrafish, Danio rerio, as a model system for developmental genetics in the late 1980s and now uses this organism as a model for the analysis of human diseases as well as normal development. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society (London) and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and was awarded the Medal of the UK Genetics Society in 2005.

Tanya T Whitfield graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1989 and took a PhD there with Chris Wylie in early vertebrate development. She did postdoctoral work with Julian Lewis at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Developmental Biology Unit, first in Oxford and later in London, working on the genetic analysis of zebrafish ear development. In 1994 she spent some time as an EMBO short term fellow in the laboratory of Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard in Tübingen, where she participated in the analysis of mutants isolated in one of the first large scale zebrafish screens. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield, where she continues to research into the development and patterning of the zebrafish ear.

Kevin Fowler graduated from the University of Leeds in 1979 and obtained a PhD in evolutionary genetics from the University of Sussex in 1984. He completed postdoctoral research with Linda Partridge at the University of Edinburgh, working on successive projects on antagonistic selection on body size and the evolution of ageing in Drosophila. In 1991 he obtained a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to investigate genetic variation in net fitness and the evolutionary consequences of inbreeding in Drosophila. He joined University College London in 1994 and is currently a Reader in Evolutionary Genetics. His primary research in the context of sexual selection uses developmental, evolutionary and quantitative genetics to evaluate condition dependence of male ornamental and female sexual preference traits in stalk-eyed flies.