Anthony L DeFranco graduated from Harvard College in biochemistry and molecular biology in 1975 and did his PhD on bacterial chemotaxis with Daniel E Koshland Jr at the University of California at Berkeley before turning to his present principal research interest, the activation of B lymphocytes, as a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of William E Paul at NIH in 1979. He is currently Chairman of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California San Francisco Medical School where his research interests are the mechanisms of signaling by the B cell antigen receptor and Toll-like receptors, and B cell autoimmunity.

Richard M Locksley graduated from Harvard College in biochemistry in 1970 and in medicine from the University of Rochester in 1976. He was at the Moffitt Hospital in San Francisco for four years as a Medical Resident, trained in infectious diseases at the University of Washington for three years and then returned to the University of California in San Francisco where he served as Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases from 1986-2004. He is currently the Sandler Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Microbiology and Immunology, Director of the Sandler Asthma Basic Research Center and an HHMI Investigator at UCSF. The principal focus of his research is on cellular immune responses in infectious and inflammatory disease.

Miranda Robertson studied psychology at Birkbeck College London and at the University of Chicago in the 1960s without graduating from either and then spent the greater part of a quarter of a century on the editorial staff of Nature, ultimately as its Biology Editor, since when she has had the privilege of working on behalf of Garland Publishing Inc and Current Biology Ltd with the authors of several outstanding textbooks. She is now the Managing Director of New Science Press Ltd.