Benjamin W. Roberts is the publisher and a founding director of Roberts and Company. Prior to forming the company, Ben served as an executive editor at Benjamin Cummings and Addison Wesley, both imprints of Pearson. He started his college publishing career in 1990 as a sales representative for Heinle and Heinle and has also worked in the college divisions of Macmillan and Prentice Hall. Over the past two decades, Ben has published a wide variety of science textbooks and monographs, many of which are leading books in their fields. Like his father, after whom the company is named, Ben cares deeply about publishing books that make an important contribution to education.

Prior to forming Roberts and Company, Mr. William M. Roberts was the CEO of The Brooks/Cole Group of Companies (owned by International Thomson), a $95M educational publishing conglomerate in the fields of science, engineering, math, psychology, and counseling. In 1979, Mr. Roberts established the North American branch of Pitman Publishing, specializing in upper-level texts and references in business, engineering, mathematics, and computer science. Mr. Roberts published a number of best sellers throughout his career, among them several editions of Morrison and Boyd's Organic Chemistry. Bill passed away in 2006. He spent nearly 40 years in academic publishing.

John N. Abelson is George Beadle Professor of Biology Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, where he was also chairman of the Biology Division. He earned a bachelor's degree in physics from Washington State University in 1960 and his PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1965. From 1965 to 1968 he worked with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. Dr. Abelson is one of the major figures in the area of gene expression. His work has made possible an understanding of how the products of genes, RNA precursors, are matured to give their functional products.

In 1978, Dr. Abelson founded and is currently the President of Agouron Institute, a non-profit research organization which sponsors innovative research in biology. The Institute has a substantial endowment because it founded a for profit company, Agouron Pharmaceuticals. This company, a pioneer in rational drug design, discovered and brought to market the effective HIV protease inhibitor, Viracept. In 1999, the company was bought by Warner Lambert for $2.1 Billion.

Dr. Abelson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1985 and is the past-president of the RNA Society. For the past 15 years Dr. Abelson has been an editor of the series Methods in Enzymology.

Joseph W. Goodman is William E. Ayer Professor of Electrical Engineering Emeritus at Stanford University. He received the A.B. Degree in Engineering and Applied Physics from Harvard University in 1958, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1960 and 1963, respectively.

He has served as a Director of several corporations, including Optivision, Inc. (for which he was a co-founder), ONI Systems (for which he was the founding Chairman of the Board), and E-TEK Dynamics. He serves on the Technical Advisory Committees of several small private photonics companies. Dr. Goodman is a Fellow of the OSA, the IEEE, and the SPIE. In 1971, he was chosen recipient of the F.E. Terman award of the American Society for Engineering Education. He received the 1983 Max Born award of the Optical Society of America, for his contributions to physical optics, and in particular to holography, synthetic aperture optics, image processing, and speckle theory.

Dr. Goodman has written two books, Speckle Phenomena in Optics (published in 2007) and three editions of Introduction to Fourier Optics, which is widely considered as the standard in the field.

Aaron E. Hirsh is a science writer and the Director of The Vermilion Sea Institute. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Princeton and his Ph.D from Stanford University. His scientific research uses theoretical and computational tools to investigate basic questions about the evolutionary process. Often, these questions are examined at the molecular level, where they may be uniquely accessible due to the detailed record of evolutionary history that is embedded in organisms' genomes. Other areas of research include theoretical ecology, epidemiology, and fisheries management..

In addition to starting Roberts and Company, Dr. Hirsh was a founder of the biotechnology company InterCell. During the past five years, Dr. Hirsh has turned his attention to writing for a broader audience. His essays on science and the environment have appeared in literary journals and in The Best American Science Writing. In 2002, in collaboration with Dmitri Petrov, Veronica Volny, and D. Graham Burnett (Princeton University), he designed and taught "The Ecology, Evolution, and Natural History of Baja California," a seventeen-day field course, which has inspired him to write his first book—a literary account of travel and science in the Vermilion Sea (in progress).

David Hirsh is the Executive Vice President for Research at Columbia University. He received his BA from Reed College and his PhD from Rockefeller University. From 1968 to 1971 he was a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medical Research Council, Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. There he worked with Sydney Brenner and Francis Crick on aspects of the genetic code and the structure and function of nucleic acids. He was a Professor at the University of Colorado from 1971-1985, where his research focused on the genetic control of development. In 1979 he was a Guggenheim Fellow as Visiting Professor at New York University Medical School. In 1980, he co-founded the biotechnology company, Synergen, and served as its Executive Vice President for Research until 1990 and on its Board of Directors until the company was sold to Amgen in 1994.

Dr. Hirsh currently serves as a Trustee of Rockefeller University and a Director of ZymoGenetics, Inc. and the Agouron Institute, a foundation devoted to supporting creative scientific research. He is a member of the Technology Advisory Boards of Warburg Pincus and of Intercell, Gmbh. He is also a member of the Biomedical Sciences International Advisory Council of the Singapore Economic Development Board. Since 1990, Dr. Hirsh has continued his research activities in the molecular genetics of development, nucleic acid structure and function and the molecular basis of the inflammatory response.

Leroy Hood is the President and Director of the Institute for Systems Biology. He is recognized as one of the world's leading scientists in molecular biotechnology and genomics. Dr. Hood earned an M.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1964 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the California Institute of Technology in 1968. His professional career began at Caltech, where he and colleagues pioneered four instruments that constitute the technological foundation for contemporary molecular biology. One of the instruments has revolutionized genomics by allowing the rapid automated sequencing of DNA. Dr. Hood also was one of the first advocates and is a key player in the Human Genome Project.

Dr. Hood has played a role in founding several biotechnology companies, including Amgen, Applied Biosystems, Systemix, Darwin, and Rosetta. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Hood was given the Lasker Award in 1987 for studies on the mechanism of immune diversity. He also holds honorary degrees from Montana State University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine of the City University of New York, the University of British Columbia, the University of Southern California, Wesleyan University, Whitman College, Bates College, and Johns Hopkins University.

Dr. Hood has co-authored five textbooks on topics such as immunology, biochemistry, and  genetics. His sixth book, entitled Biological Information and the Emergence of Systems Biology, is currently in process.

Irving Weissman is the Director of the Stanford Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine and Director of the Stanford Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Weissman was a member of the founding Scientific Advisory Boards of Amgen (1981-1989), DNAX (1981-1992), and T-Cell Sciences (1988-1992). He co-founded SyStemix in 1988, StemCells in 1996, and Celtrans (now Cellerant), the successor to SyStemix, in 2001. He is a Director and Chair of their Scientific Advisory Boards.

His research encompasses the biology and evolution of stem cells and progenitor cells, mainly blood-forming and brain-forming. He is also engaged in isolating and characterizing the rare cancer and leukemia stem cells as the only dangerous cells in these malignancies, especially with human cancers. Finally, he has a long-term research interest in the phylogeny and developmental biology of the cells that make up the blood-forming and immune systems.

Professor Weissman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine at the National Academy, and the American Association of Arts and Sciences. He has received the Kaiser Award for Excellence in Preclinical Teaching, the Pasarow Award in Cancer Research, the Outstanding Investigator Award from the National Institutes of Health, the De Villiers International Achievement Award of the Leukemia Society of America, the Van Bekkum Stem Cell Award, the Rabbi Shai Shacknai Memorial Prize in Immunology and Cancer Research from the Lautenberg Center for General and Tumor Immunology. He is also the 2004 New York Academy of Medicine Award for distinguished contributions to biomedical research.