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Lee C. Speight graduated from The College of William and Mary in 2009 with a B.Sc. in Chemistry. During this time he worked in the laboratory of Professor R. J. Hinkle and studied the bismuth(iii) catalysed disastereospecific syntheses of cis-2,6-dihydropyrans. In 2009, he commenced his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania in the laboratory of Professor E. J. Petersson. In the last few years, he has investigated the in vitro incorporation of backbone thioamides and devised improved syntheses of acridone amino acids, as well as pioneering in vivo methods for their ribosomal incorporation into proteins. His research interests include sustainable chemical synthesis methods, such as biocatalysis and ribosomal translation.

Moumita Samanta obtained her Ph.D. in Biophysics from the Indian Institute of Science under the supervision of Professor P. Balaram in 2011. Her first postdoctoral research position was at Baylor College of Medicine at Houston (TX, USA) with Professor Timothy G. Palzkill, and she is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Petersson group at University of Pennsylvania (since 2012). Her current research area involves investigation of conformational motion in proteins using unnatural amino acids as fluorescent tags.

E. James Petersson pursued his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, where he worked in the laboratory of David Lemal. He then studied under Dennis Dougherty at the California Institute of Technology. After receiving his Ph.D. from Caltech in 2005, Petersson was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University with Alanna Schepartz. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. His work in developing protein labelling methods has been recognized by his selection as a Searle Scholar and a Sloan Research Fellow, as well as receipt of the 2013 Early Excellence in Physical Organic Chemistry Award, presented at the Physical Organic Chemistry Gordon Research Conference.