Lorena A. Barba is Associate Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the George Washington University, in Washington DC. She has MSc and PhD degrees in Aeronautics from the California Institute of Technology and BSc and PEng degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Chile. Previous to joining GW, she was Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Boston University (2008–2013) and Lecturer/Senior Lecturer of Applied Mathematics at University of Bristol, UK (2004–2008). Barba is an Amelia Earhart Fellow of the Zonta Foundation (1999), an awardee of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) First Grant scheme (UK, 2007), an NVIDIA Academic Partner award recipient (2011), and a recipient of the National Science Foundation Early CAREER award (2012). She was named CUDA Fellow by NVIDIA in 2012, and is a sought-after speaker about high-performance computing, fast and efficient algorithms and computational science.

Nick is a CPython core developer, a Fellow of the Python Software Foundation. He is the author or co-author of several accepted Python Enhancement Proposals, including PEP 343 (which added the with statement and context managers to the language), and PEP 453 (which integrated the "pip" package manager with the CPython installation process). Nick has also accepted a number of PEPs on Guido van Rossum's behalf, and is the current default BDFL-Delegate for packaging related PEPs.

Since June 2011, after more than 12 years in the aerospace and defence sector, Nick has been working on testing support tools for Red Hat, most recently as the development lead for Beaker, a full stack software integration and testing system.

Greg Wilson is the creator of Software Carpentry, a crash course in computing skills for scientists and engineers. He has worked for 25 years in high-performance computing, data visualization, computer security, and academia, and is the author or editor of several books on computing (including the 2008 Jolt Award winner "Beautiful Code") and two for children. Greg received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Edinburgh in 1993, and presently works for the Mozilla Foundation.