Marc De Graef was born in Antwerp (Belgium) on April 7, 1961. He studied Physics at the University of Antwerp, and graduated with a Ph.D. in Physics from the Materials Department of the Catholic University of Leuven in 1989. He was a post-doctoral researcher in the Materials Department at the University of California at Santa Barbara before becoming a faculty member in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, PA). He is currently a Full Professor and co-director of the J. Earle and Mary Roberts Materials Characterization Laboratory .

Professor De Graef has published more than 130 papers in reviewed journals, such as: Ultramicroscopy, Micron, Journal of Microscopy, Philosophical Magazine, Physical Review, Journal of Applied Physics, Acta Materialia, Scripta Materialia, and the Journal of Solid State Chemistry. In 1996 he received the George Tallman Ladd Research Award from the CMU Engineering College, and in 2005 he received the Philbrook teaching award. He has co-edited a book on the characterization of magnetic materials in the series Experimental Methods in the Physical Sciences (Academic Press, 2000), and wrote a textbook on conventional transmission electron microscopy (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Michael McHenry was born in Oakland, California. He graduated with a B.S. in Metallurgical Eng. and Materials Science from Case Western Reserve in 1980. From 1980 to 1983 he was employed as Process Engineer at U.S. Steel Lorain Works . In 1988 he earned a Ph.D in Materials Science and Eng. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he studied magnetic properties of quasicrystals. He was a Director's Funded Post-doctoral Fellow at Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1988 to 1989 where he performed research on high temperature superconducting materials. He joined the faculty at Carnegie Mellon University in 1989. He is currently a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, with an appointment in Physics.

Prof. McHenry has published over 200 scientific journal articles. His current research interests are in the area of nanocrystalline magnetic materials. He was a recipient of an National Science Foundation National Young Investigator Award and directed a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) for developing high temperature magnetic materials for aircraft power applications. He is Publication Chair for the Magnetism and Magnetic Materials (MMM) Conference. His research involves rapid solidification processing, plasma synthesis of magnetic nanoparticles and characterization of magnetic properties as a function of field, temperature and frequency. He has performed ab initio calculations on the magnetic properties of materials. He is a 1998 Honorary Member of the Indian Materials Research Society. He was awarded the 2003 Professor Philbrook Award in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University for Excellence in Teaching.