Steven B. Heymsfield, M.D. is Professor and Director of the Body Composition-Metabolism Laboratory at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center of the Louisiana State University System in Baton Rouge. He is on the visiting faculty at Harvard Medical School and a former Professor of Medicine at Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons. Dr. Heymsfield has published more than 700 peer-reviewed papers covering topics such as obesity, malnutrition, cancer, cachexia, body composition, and caloric expenditure. His contributions to the study of human nutrition led to the TOPS Award from The Obesity Society (TOS), the Rhoads Award from the American Society of Parenteral and Enteral Nutrition (ASPEN), the Robert H. Herman Memorial Award, American Society of Nutrition (ASN), and the George Bray Founders Award from TOS. Dr. Heymsfield is past president of ASPEN, ASN and TOS. He was appointed as an Amazon Scholar in 2021.

Dympna Gallagher BA, MA, Ed.D. is a Professor of Nutritional Medicine, a Director of the New York Nutrition Obesity Research Center, and Director of the Human Body Composition Laboratories at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, New York. Dr. Gallagher is Chair of a Diversity Equity and Inclusion Working Group from among the 11 NIH-NIDDK funded Nutrition Obesity Centers and leads a program that supports mentoring of early career clinical researchers from diverse backgrounds. Dr. Gallagher research projects have involved human phenotyping in areas with clinical and translational relevance involving pregnancy, newborn, growth, obesity, aging, disease states including type 2 diabetes, bariatric induced weight loss, behavioral lifestyle intervention mediated weight loss and post-weight loss maintenance, methodology development, ethnic differences in body composition. A cornerstone of her work involves precision and rigor in the measurement of body composition. 

Jonathan Wells is Professor of Anthropology and Pediatric Nutrition at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, UK. He received a BA in Social Anthropology, an MPhil in Biological Anthropology and a PhD in Biological Anthropology / Human Nutrition from the University of Cambridge. He is a biological anthropologist specialising in research on the developmental origins of adult health and disease, with particular interests in infant and child nutrition, breastfeeding, growth and body composition, childbirth, social inequality and evolutionary public health. He contributes to cohort studies and randomised trials of nutritional interventions across South America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. He led a Lancet series on Evolutionary Public Health in 2017, and has published two books with Cambridge University Press: ‘The evolutionary biology of human body fatness: thrift and control’ (2010), and ‘The metabolic ghetto: an evolutionary perspective on nutrition, power relations and chronic disease’ (2016).  

Lindsay Plank, DPhil, is an associate professor in the Department of Surgery, University of Auckland. He was appointed to the late Professor Graham Hill’s laboratory some 35 years ago, a body composition and metabolism laboratory encompassing neutron activation analysis, 40K whole-body counting, dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, dilution techniques, bioimpedance technologies, anthropometry, muscle function, and indirect calorimetry, and was director of that laboratory for over 20 years. Research interests include diagnosis of malnutrition in disease, particularly chronic liver disease, nutritional and other interventions to improve recovery from critical illness and after major surgery including organ transplantation, and approaches to improve glycaemic control in pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes.