Stuart A. Rice received his master's and doctorate from Harvard University and was a Junior Fellow at Harvard for two years before joining the faculty of The University of Chicago in 1957 where he remains a well-known theoretical chemist who also does experimental research and is currently the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at The University of Chicago. Professor Rice has served the university in a wide variety of capacities during his forty-eight year tenure. He served as the director of the James Franck Institute (the university's center for physical chemistry and condensed matter physics) from 1961 to 1967, was Chairman of the Department of Chemistry from 1971 to 1976 and was Dean of the Physical Sciences Division from 1981 to 1995. In 1999 he received the National Medal of Science.

Aaron R. Dinner received his bachelor's degree and doctorate from Harvard University, after which he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Oxford and the University of California, Berkely. He joined the faculty at the University of Chicago in 2003 and is the Principal Investigator of The Dinner Group, which develops and applies theoretical methods for relating cellular behavior to molecular properties.