Vladimir V. Ghukasyan is a research assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology and Physiology and a director of the Confocal and Multiphoton Imaging Facility of the Neuroscience Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He earned a PhD in biology from the Institute of Biotechnology, Yerevan, Armenia, and completed postdoctoral training at the Institute of Biophotonics, Taipei, Taiwan.

Ahmed A. Heikal is a professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Swenson College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota Duluth. His research interests in molecular and cellular biophysics were inspired by his work with Watt W. Webb as a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University. Dr. Heikal earned a PhD in applied physics from the California Institute of Technology under the supervision of Nobel Laureate Ahmed H. Zewail.