Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Collegiate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan. She holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from Southern Methodist University and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Oxford University. Mihalcea is a renowned figure in natural language processing, multimodal processing, and computational social science, having co-invented the widely used TextRank Algorithm for text summarization. She leads the Language and Information Technologies (LIT) Lab at the University of Michigan and has authored over 400 articles on various topics. Mihalcea has received numerous accolades for her contributions, including being elected as the president for the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) in 2021 and receiving the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2009. Notably, her work extends to promoting diversity in computer science and developing programs like Girls Encoded to support women in the field. She is also recognized for her research in lie detection and identifying linguistic cues in fake news stories. Mihalcea has co-authored several books and published extensively in journals and conferences. Her work has earned her recognition as an ACM Fellow and AAAI Fellow, among other prestigious awards.

Vera Radaslava Dyson-Hudson (née Demerec) was an American anthropologist known for her pioneering work in the field of anthropology. Born on July 8, 1930, on Long Island, New York, she was raised in a scientific environment, which greatly influenced her career path. After winning the 1947 Westinghouse Science Talent Search for her research on fruit fly genetics, she pursued a PhD and later switched to anthropology after meeting her husband, Neville Dyson-Hudson, at Oxford.Dyson-Hudson conducted field studies in East Africa, focusing on the Karamojong and Turkana people. Her extensive research led to significant contributions in the understanding of human adaptation, resulting in the co-authorship of notable works such as "Rethinking Human Adaptation: Biological and Cultural Models" and "HRAFlex." Throughout her career, she held academic positions at various institutions, including the University of Khartoum, Johns Hopkins University, Binghamton University, and Cornell University.Despite facing challenges, including gender discrimination, Dyson-Hudson's dedication to her research and her invaluable contributions to the field of anthropology solidified her legacy as a respected scholar. She passed away on April 14, 2016, leaving behind a rich body of work that continues to inspire and inform anthropological studies.