David Leader obtained his D.Phil. in biological sciences in the University of Oxford, and, after a post-doc at the University of Chicago, took up a position as lecturer at Glasgow University. Initially he worked on molecular biological problems in the area of ribosomes, protein kinases and viral genomes, where he had acquired experience of bioinformatics tools. He then took an MSc in Information Technology, and moved his research and teaching into the area of Bioinformatics. He has written a standalone genome browser (BugView) and has produced a web application for querying a database of protein structural motifs (Motivated Proteins). Most recently he has set up a web server (Pathos) for processing mass spectrometry data for metabolomics and visualizing the results on maps of metabolic pathways.

Richard Cooper was a lecturer in the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and now holds the position of Honorary Research Fellow. He has been a technical leader with ESPRIT projects and has also initiated a series of International Workshops on Interfaces to Database Systems. He has worked and taught extensively in the area of usability of database systems, concerning himself with both data modeling and user interface issues. The latter increasingly involved internet applications, has been applied to a variety of different subject areas.