Vocation : Education : Researcher

John Scales Avery (May 26, 1933 – January 4, 2024) was an American theoretical chemist noted for his research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. Since the early 1990s, Avery had been an active world peace activist. During these years, he was part of a group associated with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. In 1995, this group received the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. He was an Associate Professor in quantum chemistry at the University of Copenhagen. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin and evolution, including human cultural evolution, has its background situated over thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Avery died on January 4, 2024, at the age of 90.

Keith W. Perkins was a professor of Church History and Doctrine at Brigham Young University (BYU). He has written widely on the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) in the period when it was headquartered at Kirtland, Ohio. Perkins has written articles on figures in the recording of the history of the LDS Church, such as Andrew Jenson, whose work as a historian was the subject of Perkins' masters' thesis. His thesis was cited in Charles T. Morrissey's article "We Call it Oral History", which moved the accepted time of the origin of the term back from the late-1940s to the mid-1860s.Perkins was born in Phoenix, Arizona. He has a BA in History Education from Arizona State University and an MA and PhD from BYU in Church History and Doctrine. He was seminary principal at the LDS seminary adjacent to Granite High School in Salt Lake County, Utah, and then instructor at the Tempe Institute of Religion (adjacent to the campus of Arizona State University) before joining the BYU faculty in 1975. During the mid-1980s, as chair of the department of Church History and Doctrine, Perkins developed the idea for special symposium to be held in various locations related to church history. This was the beginning of the various publications in the LDS Church History in place x series, with New England, New York and Pennsylvania, Ohio, Missouri, Illinois, the Pacific, and the United Kingdom having been some of the places featured over the years in the series. He has also written articles on subjects such as the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible.Among other works, Perkins compiled with Milton V. Backman Jr. Journals, Diaries, Biographies, Autobiographies and Letters of Some Early Mormons and Others Who Knew Joseph Smith, Jr. and/or His Contemporaries. With LaMar C. Barrett and Donald Q. Cannon, he edited the book Sacred Places: Ohio and Illinois, published by Deseret Book in 2001. Perkins was also a co-author with Bruce A. Van Orden, David J. Whittaker, Truman G. Madsen, John W. Welch and James P. Bell of the book Book of Mormon Scholars. Perkins compiled a book entitled Marriage is Ordained of God, which was a collection of talks on the subject by general authorities of the LDS Church.
Perkins and his wife, Vella Crowther, are the parents of four children. Perkins is a member of the LDS Church and has worked with Ezra Taft Benson, Gordon B. Hinckley and Thomas S. Monson in developing the church's visitors center and other properties and programs in Kirtland, Ohio. Among other callings in the LDS Church, Perkins has served as a bishop and a stake president.

Earl Stannard Herald (April 10, 1914 - January 16, 1973) was an American zoologist, Ichthyologist and television presenter. He was born in Phoenix, Arizona, and got his Ph.D. in 1943. In 1948, he became the director of the Steinhart Aquarium in San Francisco, California, and from 1952 to 1966, he presented the popular science television programme Science in Action. Throughout his life, he studied a variety of aquatic organisms, especially pipefishes, and described many new taxa. He died in Cabo San Lucas, Baja California, in a scuba diving accident.

Ervin Wilson (June 11, 1928 – December 8, 2016) was a Mexican/American (dual citizen) music theorist.

Silvio Arturo Zavala Vallado (February 7, 1909 – December 4, 2014) was a Mexican historian who was considered to be a pioneer in law history studies and Mexico’s institutions.

Sarah Elizabeth Stewart (August 16, 1905 – November 27, 1976) was a Mexican-American researcher who pioneered the field of viral oncology research, and the first to show that cancer-causing viruses can spread from animal to animal. She and Bernice Eddy co-discovered the first polyoma virus, and SE (Stewart-Eddy) polyoma virus is named after them.

Charles E. Dibble (18 August 1909 – 30 November 2002) was an American academic, anthropologist, linguist, and scholar of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures. A former Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of Utah, Dibble retired in 1978 after an association with the university as lecturer and researcher spanning four decades. Post-retirement Dibble continued to conduct and publish research in his area of expertise, studies of Mesoamerican historical literature and the historiography of conquest-era Mesoamerican cultures, in particular those of the Aztec and others of the central Mexican altiplano. Among many contributions to the field Dibble is perhaps most recognised for his collaboration with colleague Arthur J.O. Anderson, producing the modern annotated translation into English of the volumes of the Florentine Codex.
Born in Layton, Utah, Dibble attended the University of Utah, obtaining a B.A. in history in 1936. Dibble traveled to Mexico in the year preceding his graduation, and his experiences there shaped the direction of his future career as a Mesoamericanist scholar. Dibble enrolled at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City for postgraduate studies, completing a Master's degree in anthropology in 1938. Upon receiving his MA Dibble gained a teaching position at his alma mater in Utah commencing in 1939, where he would be based for the remainder of his long academic career. At the same time he pursued his doctoral studies at UNAM, and was awarded his PhD from UNAM in 1942. Dibble also undertook a year's post-doctoral work at Harvard, in 1943. In 1994, a festschrift entitled Chipping away on earth: studies in prehispanic and colonial Mexico in honor of Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble was published.

A native of Terre Haute, Indiana, Stuart E. Dreyfus is professor emeritus at University of California, Berkeley in the Industrial Engineering and Operations Research Department. While at the Rand Corporation he was a programmer of the JOHNNIAC computer. While at Rand he coauthored Applied Dynamic Programming with Richard Bellman. Following that work, he was encouraged to pursue a Ph.D. which he completed in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 1964, on the calculus of variations. In 1962, Dreyfus simplified the Dynamic Programming-based derivation of backpropagation (due to Henry J. Kelley and Arthur E. Bryson) using only the chain rule. He also coauthored Mind Over Machine with his brother Hubert Dreyfus in 1986.