Joan L. Slonczewski is a professor of biology at Kenyon College, where she teaches microbiology every year. She received her Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University and did her postdoctoral work at the University of Pennsylvania. She has earned a silver medal in the National Professor of the Year program of the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education. She has published numerous research articles with undergraduate authors on pH regulation, as well as publishing numerous science-fiction novels. One of these novels, A Door into the Ocean, earned the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.
Erik R. Zinser received his AB from Kenyon College, where he worked in the lab of coauthor Joan Slonczewski. He received his PhD in microbiology from Harvard Medical School for his research with Roberto Kolter on the evolution in Escherichia coli during prolonged starvation. He performed his postdoctoral research at MIT with Penny Chisholm on the ecology of the marine cyanobacterium, Prochlorococcus. He currently teaches in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He and his students study phytoplankton and associated bacteria from marine and freshwater environments. Laboratory and field studies by his group led to the development of the Black Queen… Hypothesis, an evolutionary theory that explains the adaptive nature of genome streamlining in free-living microbes. He has been a member of the American Society for Microbiology since college and has served on the editorial boards for the journals Applied and Environmental Microbiology and Environmental Microbiology.