Harold A. Black, PhD, is the James F. Smith, Jr. Professor of Financial Institutions at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He lectures, consults and publishes extensively in the areas of financial institutions and the monetary system. His articles have appeared in publications including the American Economic Review, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Research and the Journal of Monetary Economics. His consulting clients include major national banks and financial organizations such as Fleet Financial Corporation, Home Savings of America, Chrysler Financial Corporation, and the National Credit Union Administration.

His government service includes Deputy Director, Department of Economic Research and Analysis, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Board Member, National Credit Union Administration. He has served as a Director and Chairman of the Nashville Branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Among his numerous honors, he has received the Department of Treasury's Special Achievement Award, the National Urban League's Outstanding Service Award, and the National Credit Union Administration's Exceptional Service Award.

In addition to being listed in Who's Who Among Black Americans, Prof. Black has recently served as a public interest member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation's Savings Association Insurance Fund Advisory Committee, Washington, DC. and as a Director of H. F. Ahmanson & Co., Irwindale, California, the parent company of Home Savings of America, one of the nation's largest consumer banking organizations prior to its merger with Washington Mutual Savings Bank.

Robert V. Sideli, M.D. became the Chief Information Officer for Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC) in June of 2007. Dr. Sideli was a resident and the chief resident in Pathology at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, completed a fellowship in Medical Informatics in the Center for Medical Informatics at CUMC, and was then an Assistant Professor of Pathology (in the Center for Medical Informatics) at Columbia University of Physicians & Surgeons from 1993-1995. He played an important role in developing and installing the clinical information systems that were built by the clinical informatics group in the Center for Medical Informatics. Dr. Sideli spent several years with a consulting firm, and then held the position of Chief Information Officer at the Metropolitan Jewish Health System in Brooklyn. In 2003 he took a senior position at Cerner and led the implementation of Cerner information technology products at a major hospital system in Indiana prior to returning to CUMC.

Gio Wiederhold, PhD, is a Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Medicine and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, where he began in 1976. Professor Wiederhold’s current research and consulting work focuses on privacy protection in collaborative settings, large-scale software composition, and interoperation of semantically heterogeneous information systems, including simulations for projecting outcomes. Born in Italy, he received a degree in Aeronautical Engineering in Holland in 1957 and a Ph.D. in Medical Information Science from the University of California at San Francisco in 1976. Prior to his academic career, Professor Wiederhold spent 16 years in the software industry, including research and development work for IBM. He has authored and coauthored more than 350 publications and reports on computing and medicine. Professor Wiederhold has been elected fellow of the ACMI, the IEEE, and the ACM, and spent 1991-1994 as the program manager for Knowledge-based Systems at DARPA in Washington DC. He has been an editor-in-chief of several IEEE and ACM publications and has citations for "Crash", "Datum", "Sector" in the Oxford English Dictionary.