Professor Sara Seager was born and grew up in Toronto, Canada. Among her first memories is a trip to a “star party” with her father, to see the moon through a telescope—spectacular! Professor Seager graduated from Jarvis Collegiate Institute, and studied at the University of Toronto. After graduating with a B.Sc. in the Math and Physics Specialist Program at the U of T, Seager attended the Ph.D. program in Astronomy at Harvard.

Henry Norris Russell (1877-1957) was elected an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada on 1946-01-18. The following citation was read:

Professor Henry Norris Russell has just completed forty years on the faculty of Princeton University. During this period there are few fields in astronomy and astrophysics in which, alone or with collaborators, he has not made outstanding contributions.

Herbert Hall Turner (13 August 1861, Leeds – 20 August 1930, Stockholm) was a British astronomer and seismologist.

Sir Frank Watson Dyson, KBE, FRS (8 January 1868 – 25 May 1939) was an English astronomer and Astronomer Royal who is remembered today largely for introducing time signals ("pips") from Greenwich, England, and for the role he played in testing Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Édouard Benjamin Baillaud (14 February 1848 – 8 July 1934) was a French astronomer.

Born in Chalon-sur-Saône, Baillaud studied at the École Normale Supérieure (1866-1869) and the University of Paris. He worked as an assistant at the Paris Observatory beginning in 1872. Later he was director of the Toulouse Observatory from 1878 to 1907, during much of this time serving as Dean of the University of Toulouse Faculty of Science.

Johan Oskar Backlund (April 28, 1846 – August 29, 1916) was a Swedish-Russian astronomer. His name is sometimes given as Jöns Oskar Backlund, however even contemporary Swedish sources give "Johan". In Russia, where he spent his entire career, he is known as Oskar Andreevich Baklund (Оскар Андреевич Баклунд). Russian sources sometimes give his dates of birth and death as April 16, 1846 and August 16, 1916, in the Julian calendar that was used in Russia during that period.