Joshua M. Pearce is the Richard Witte Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a Professor cross-appointed in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering and in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering at the Michigan Technological University where he runs the Open Sustainability Technology Research Group. He was a Fulbright-Aalto University Distinguished Chair (2017-2018) and is a visiting professor of Photovoltaics and Nanoengineering at Aalto University.

His research concentrates on the use of open source appropriate technology to find collaborative solutions to problems in sustainability and poverty reduction. His research spans areas of electronic device physics and materials engineering of solar photovoltaic cells, and RepRap 3-D printing, but also includes applied sustainability and energy policy. His research is regularly covered by the international and national press and it is continually ranked in the top 0.1% on Academia.edu. He is the faculty advisor for the Michigan Tech Open Source Hardware Enterprise. He is the editor-in-chief of HardwareX, a journal dedicated to open source scientific hardware and the author of the Open-Source Lab:How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs and Create, Share, and Save Money Using Open-Source Projects.

Joshua Pearce received his Ph.D. in Materials Engineering from the Pennsylvania State University. He then developed the first Sustainability program in the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education and helped develop the Applied Sustainability graduate engineering program while at Queen's University, Canada.

Dr. David Denkenberger (also known as 3D) received his B.S. from Penn State in Engineering Science, his M.S.E. from Princeton in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Building Systems Program. His dissertation was on his patent-pending expanded microchannel heat exchanger. He is also a research associate at the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute. He received the National Merit Scholarship, the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, and is a Penn State distinguished alumnus. He has authored or co-authored over three dozen publications. He has given over 60 technical presentations.

He is close to completing his so-called "ultra-liberal arts education," which consists of taking a course or reading a textbook in all the major fundamental and applied areas, with continuing education of listening to all the TED talks. He signed up to be cryogenically preserved if he dies: he believes if people expected to live much longer, they would care more about problems further in the future. He has walked the talk by eating insects and bacteria. His personal goal is hiking each year as much vertical gain and loss as going from sea level to the top of Mount Everest and back.