The chairman is the highest officer of an organized group such as a board, committee, or deliberative assembly. The person holding the office is typically elected or appointed by the members of the group. The chairman presides over meetings of the assembled group and conducts its business in an orderly fashion. When the group is not in session, the officer's duties often include acting as its head, its representative to the outside world and its spokesperson.

Other terms sometimes used for the office and its holder include presiding officer, president, moderator, chair, and convenor. The chairman of a parliamentary chamber is often called the speaker. Though chairwoman is sometimes used as a female counterpart to chairman, the terms chair and chairperson are sometimes used to avoid gendered titles altogether. The National Association of Parliamentarians does not approve using "chairperson". In the United States, the presiding officer of the "lower" house of a legislative body, such as the House of Representatives, is frequently titled the Speaker, while the "upper" house, such as the Senate, is commonly chaired by a President.

Akhil Gupta (born 1959) is an Indian-American anthropologist whose research has focused on the anthropology of the state and of development, as well as on postcolonialism. He is currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He is married to Purnima Mankekar.

Akhil attended St. Xavier's School in Jaipur and graduated in 1974. Gupta did his undergraduate studies in Mechanical Engineering from Western Michigan University, following that with a Mechanical Engineering Masters from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gupta then spent the next eight years getting a Ph.D. in Engineering-Economic Systems from Stanford University.

In 1992, while still at Stanford, Gupta along with fellow Stanford anthropologist James Ferguson wrote the well-known and oft-cited essay, "Beyond 'Culture': Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference." which argued that the analytic concept of culture had remained largely unproblematized by anthropological discourse, and that anthropologists of the day had failed to recognize and analyze the politics of cultural difference, how such differences were produced, and how such differences were used and abused by the state and by capital. The article argues for the examination of cultural anthropology as an unconscious mechanism of neo-imperialism.

Tessy Scholtes (born 1 June 1981 in Luxembourg City) is a Luxembourgian karateka and politician. In 2002, she finished as runner-up in the world championships in the kumite 60 kg+ category. For the achievement, she won the title of Luxembourgian Sportswoman of the Year. On December 7, 2009, she declared her retreat for personal reasons.

She is a member of the Christian Social People's Party (CSV). In the 2009 election to the Chamber of Deputies, Scholtes ran in the Centre constituency. She finished thirteenth on the CSV list. On May 3, 2011 she was sworn into parliament in order to replace Mill Majerus, who had recently died in a car accident.