Louay M. Safi is a Syrian-American, a scholar of Islam and the Middle East, and an advocate of Arab and Muslim American rights. He published on such issues as social and political development, modernization, democracy, human rights, and Islam and Modernity. He is the author of 11 books and numerous papers, and speaker on questions of leadership, democracy, Islam and the Middle East.

Louay Safi is also chairman of the Syrian American Council and testified in front of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission on Syria.

Safi was born in Damascus where he received his early education. He moved to the United States in the early eighties where he received his B.Sc. in civil engineering, and later a M.A. and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. He has written books on social and political development, modernization, democracy, human rights, and Islam and the Middle East.

Safi has served as Executive Director and Director of Research for the International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT), editor of the Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, and President of the Association of Muslim Social Scientists (1999–2003). He has also taught at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, the International Islamic University in Malaysia and George Washington University in Washington, DC.

Willard Mitt Romney (born March 12, 1947) is an American businessman and the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States in the 2012 election. He was the 70th Governor of Massachusetts (2003–07).

The son of Lenore and George W. Romney (Governor of Michigan, 1963–69), he was raised in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. In 1966, after one year at Stanford University, he left the United States to spend thirty months in France as a Mormon missionary. In 1969, he married Ann Davies, and the couple had five children together. In 1971, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Brigham Young University and, in 1975, a joint Juris Doctor and Master of Business Administration from Harvard University as a Baker Scholar. He entered the management consulting industry, which in 1977, led to a position at Bain & Company. Later serving as Chief Executive Officer, he helped bring the company out of financial crisis. In 1984, he co-founded the spin-off Bain Capital, a private equity investment firm that became highly profitable and one of the largest such firms in the nation. His net worth is estimated at $190–250 million, wealth that has helped fund his political campaigns. Active in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he served as Ward Bishop and later Stake President in his area near Boston. He ran as the Republican candidate in the 1994 U.S. Senate election in Massachusetts, losing to long-time incumbent Ted Kennedy. In 1999, he was hired as President and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee for the 2002 Winter Olympics and Paralympics; and he helped turn the fiscally troubled games into a success.