Steve McKillup is an Associate Professor of Biology in the School of Medical and Applied Sciences at Central Queensland University, Rockhampton. He has received several tertiary teaching awards, including the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Quality Teaching and an Australian Learning and Teaching Council citation 'for developing a highly successful method of teaching complex physiological and statistical concepts, and embodying that method in an innovative international textbook' (2008). He has gained a further citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning, in the latest Australian Awards for University Teaching 2014. The citation has been awarded for 'developing resources that… engage, empower and enable environmental science students to understand and use biostatistics', which includes his books on statistics that are being used worldwide. He is the author of Geostatistics Explained: An Introductory Guide for Earth Scientists (Cambridge, 2010).
Melinda Darby Dyar is an Associate Professor of Geology and Astronomy at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. Her research interests range from innovative pedagogies and curricular materials to the characterization of planetary materials. She has studied samples from mid-ocean ridges and every continent on Earth, as well as from the lunar highlands and Mars. She is a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America, and the author or coauthor of more than 130 refereed journal articles. She is the author of two mineralogy DVDs used in college-level teaching, and a textbook, Mineralogy and Optical Mineralogy (2008).