Bernhard Huber, although born in Austria, grew up partly in Bogotá, Colombia, and partly in Upper-Austria. He studied Biology at the University of Vienna, and worked for his diploma thesis on the physiology of accessory hearts in Crustacea. For his Ph.D. he switched to spiders, and has published on functional morphology and evolution of spider genitalia. During a three year postdoctoral fellowship in Costa Rica he increasingly focused on pholcid spiders, their reproductive biology and systematics, and continued to work on topics related with sexual selection. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the AMNH and works on the taxonomy and systematics of neotropical pholcids.

Diana Silva Davila is an associate researcher at the Museo de Historia Natural of Lima, Peru, in charge of the Arachnida and Myriapoda collection since 1983. She got her MS from Western Carolina University in 1993? and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in the Entomology Department at Cornell University where she is enrolled in the joint AMNH/Cornell Doctoral Program in Arthropod Systematics. Her main interests are systematics, distribution patterns, and species diversity of Neotropical spiders. For her dissertation work she is focusing on the systematics of tropical wandering spiders (Ctenidae) worldwide, a common but yet poorly understood family of nocturnal cursorial spiders.

Mohammad U. Shadab was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Karachi, Pakistan in 1972 where he studied entomology. Since 1970 he has worked at the American Museum of Natural History as a scientific assistant. For many years he has concentrated on spider illustration and has co-authored numerous taxonomic papers with Dr. Norman I. Platnick. He is Senior Scientific Assistant in the Department of Entomology.

Xinping Wang is a doctoral candidate in the joint AMNH/Cornell Doctoral program in Arthropod Systematics. He obtained his undergraduate degree from Northwest Normal University and Masters from Shaanxi Normal University. His previous research involved the systematics of Lycosidae and Thomisidae from China. His current research encompasses a revision and the biogeography of the coelotine spiders including the genera Coelotes, Paracoelotes, Coras, Wadotes, Tonsilla, and Coronilla which are distributed in Europe, Northern Asia, and North America.

Louis N. Sorkin, a board certified entomologist, is a native of New York City and obtained his Masters Degree from the University of Connecticut. Since 1978 he has worked at the American Museum of Natural History where he is Senior Scientific Assistant in the Department of Entomology. His duties involve curating the arachnid and myriapod collections under the direction of Dr. Norman Platnick and dealing with public inquiries for the Department. His interests are wide ranging, extending to external parasites of arachnids, especially spiders; encompassing forensic, medical, and general entomology, as well as the identification and biology of pest arthropods. He also has keen interest in computers.

Priyantha Wijesinghe pursued his early education in Sri Lanka and in England and became interested in spiders, insects and other terrestrial invertebrates while an undergraduate in zoology at University College London (University of London) (1983). After a period of employment in Sri Lanka as a systematic entomologist, during which he studied the spider fauna of Sri Lanka, he did his Ph.D. with Norman Platnick at the City University of New York and the American Museum of Natural History (1997) on the relationships of basal groups in the spider family Salticidae (jumping spiders). His current projects include revisions of several tropical Asian jumping spider genera and jumping spider higher phylogeny. He is also interested in Indo-West Pacific biogeography and South Asian natural history and biodiversity conservation.