Robert N. Compton received degrees in physics from Berea College (BA), the University of Florida (MS), and the University of Tennessee (PhD). He was a Senior Corporate Fellow at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory from 1965 to 1995 and was a Professor of Physics and Zeigler Professor of Chemistry at the University of Tennessee until retirement in 2015. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of Aarhus, the University of Paris, and the FOM Institute in Amsterdam. In 2001, he was an Erskine Fellow at the University of Christchurch, New Zealand. He was a Fellow of the APS, AAAS, and OSA, and received the Beams Award from the American Physical Society, and the Meggers Award from the Optical Society of America. His research interests include negative ions, laser spectroscopy, and molecular chirality. He has published one other book with Nathan I. Hammer, Ethan C. Lambert, and J. Stewart Hager entitled Raman Spectroscopy Under Liquid Nitrogen (RUN).
Michael A. Duncan was born in Greenville, SC, and attended Furman University (B.S. 1976). He received his Ph.D. (1982) at Rice University with Richard Smalley, working on laser photoionization mass spectrometry. He held an NRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics (Boulder, CO) with Stephen Leone in 1981-1983. He joined the University of Georgia faculty in 1983 and is now Franklin Professor and Regents' Professor. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was Senior Editor for the Journal of Physical Chemistry (1998-2015).