El-Ashry was senior fellow with the UN Foundation. He has previously held a number of positions: CEO and chairman of the Global Environment Facility (GEF); chief environmental adviser to the president and director of the Environment Department at the World Bank; senior vice president of the World Resources Institute (WRI); and director of Environmental Quality with the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). He has held teaching and research positions at Cairo University, Wilkes University, and Illinois State Geological Survey. He has received numerous international awards and honours including UNEP's Champions of the Earth and The Haub Prize for Environmental Diplomacy. He is a fellow of the Geological Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the African Academy of Sciences.

Gingrich is full professor at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Real member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology of the ÖAW. Foreign Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Member of the Publishing House Committee of the ÖAW. He obtained his PhD in 1979 at the University of Vienna. He has served as a Delegate in the Assembly of the Austrian Science Fund. He was a founding member of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and he was a Panel Chair for the European Research Council, Advanced Grant SH2. His awards include the Wittgenstein Prize, City of Vienna Award in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural and Legal Studies.

Alberts is a US Natl. Medal of Science awardee (2014). He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Science (2008-2013) and as one of President Obama’s first three United States Science Envoys (2009-2011). Alberts holds the Chancellor's Leadership Chair in Biochemistry and Biophysics for Science and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, to which he returned after serving two six-year terms as the president of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Dr. Alberts is noted as one of the original authors of The Molecular Biology of the Cell, a pre-eminent textbook in the field soon to be in its sixth edition. Alberts has earned many honors and awards, including 16 honorary degrees. He currently serves on the advisory boards of more than 25 nonprofit institutions, including the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP).

Abidi is Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He received his BSc in electrical engineering from Imperial College, London, UK, in 1976, and his MS (1978) and PhD (1981) in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. He has also served in many other capacities including: Member, technical staff, Advanced LSI Development Laboratory, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, 1981-84; visiting faculty researcher, Hewlett Packard Laboratories, 1989; and editor, IEEE Journal of Solid-state Circuits, 1992-95. He has received several honours including the IEEE Donald O. Pederson Solid-State Circuits Award; Lockheed-Martin Award for Excellence in Teaching, UCLA; IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits Best Paper Award; IEEE Millennium Medal; and membership in the US National Academy of Engineering and IEEE. He specializes in the design of analog integrated circuits, and is credited with single-chip CMOS radios. Abidi is the inaugural holder of the Abdus Salam Chair at LUMS, Lahore, Pakistan.