Renate Loll is a physicist who works at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She received her Ph.D. from Imperial College, London, in 1989. In 2001 she joined the permanent staff of the ITP, after spending several years at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Golm, Germany. With Jan Ambjørn and Polish physicist Jerzy Jurkiewicz she helped develop a new approach to nonperturbative quantization of gravity, that of Causal Dynamical Triangulations.

Don Tapscott (born 1 June 1947, Toronto, Ontario) is a Canadian business executive, author, consultant and speaker, specializing in business strategy, innovation, organizational transformation and the role of technology in business and society. Tapscott is chairman of business strategy think tank New Paradigm (now nGenera Insight), which he founded in 1993. Tapscott is also a member of World Economic Forum and Adjunct Professor of Management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Tapscott consults with heads of state, cities and corporations under Tapscott Group advisory services.

Tapscott holds a B.Sc. in Psychology and Statistics, and an M.Ed. specializing in Research Methodology. He also holds three honorary Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) granted by the University of Alberta in 2001, Trent University in 2006, and McMaster University in 2010. While earning his Master's of Education at the University of Alberta, he ran for mayor of Edmonton in the 1977 municipal election.

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, CC (July 21, 1911 – December 31, 1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries.

McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and predicted the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. Although he was a fixture in media discourse in the late 1960s, his influence started to wane in the early seventies. In the years after his death, he would continue to be a controversial figure in academic circles. With the arrival of the internet, however, there was renewed interest in his work and perspective.

McLuhan was born in Edmonton, Alberta, to Elsie Naomi (née Hall) and Herbert Ernest McLuhan. His brother, Maurice, was born two years later. "Marshall" was a family name: his maternal grandmother's surname. Both of his parents were born in Canada. His mother was a Baptist schoolteacher who later became an actress. His father was a Methodist and had a real estate business in Edmonton. When war broke out, the business failed, and McLuhan's father enlisted in the Canadian army. After a year of service he contracted influenza and remained in Canada, away from the front. After Herbert's discharge from the army in 1915, the McLuhan family moved to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where Marshall grew up and went to school, attending Kelvin Technical School before enrolling in the University of Manitoba in 1928.

Thomas Kennerly "Tom" Wolfe, Jr. (born March 2, 1931) is a best-selling American author and journalist. He is one of the founders of the New Journalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Wolfe was born in Richmond, Virginia, the son of Louise (née Agnew), a landscape designer, and Thomas Kennerly Wolfe, Sr., an agronomist.

Wolfe was student council president, editor of the school newspaper and a star baseball player at St. Christopher's School, an Episcopalian all-boys school in Richmond, Virginia.

Upon graduation in 1949, he turned down admission at Princeton University to attend Washington and Lee University, both all-male schools at the time. Wolfe majored in English and practiced his writing outside the classroom as well. He was sports editor of the college newspaper and helped found a literary magazine, Shenandoah. Of particular influence was his professor Marshall Fishwick, a teacher of American Studies educated at Yale. More in the tradition of anthropology than literary scholarship, Fishwick taught his classes to look at the whole of a culture, including those elements considered profane. The very title of Wolfe's undergraduate thesis, "A Zoo Full of Zebras: Anti-Intellectualism in America," evinced his fondness for words and aspirations toward cultural criticism. Wolfe graduated cum laude in 1951.

Rinaldo Walcott is a Black Canadian academic and writer, currently employed as an associate professor at OISE/University of Toronto in the Department of Sociology and Equity Studies in Education. He was previously an assistant professor in the Division of Humanities at York University (2000). Walcott's work focuses on Black Studies, Canadian Studies, Cultural Studies, Queer Theory and Gender Theory, and Diaspora Studies. He is currently the Canada Research Chair of Social Justice and Cultural Studies.

Rinaldo Walcott's work recognizes that "articulating Canadian blackness is difficult not because of the small number of us trying to take the tentative steps towards writing it, but rather because of the ways in which so many of us are nearly always preoccupied with elsewhere and very seldom with here". In this comment, Walcott highlights the dearth of Black Canadians writing about Black Canadian experiences and expressions, and points to his further assertion that a belief that "something important happens here [in Canada]" is a necessary precursor to increasing the scholarly engagement with Black Canadian experiences and expressions. Walcott's explicit engagement with Blackness in Canada and Canadian experiences of Black themes therefore represent foundational work in these areas. The uniqueness of Walcott's scholarship is also connected to his analysis of popular culture as it relates to issues of race, gender, sexuality, and nationality.