The lead author is the first named author of a publication - i.e. a research article or audit. The lead author is typically the person who carried out the majority of the research, and wrote and edited most of the manuscript. The list of trailing co-authors reflects, typically, diminishing contributions to the work reported in the manuscript.

Authorship standards vary widely across disciplines . The proportion of multi-author papers has increased in recent decades, reflecting increasingly complex multi-investigator research projects , as well as the "publish or perish" culture of academic performance evaluation.

Sheryl Kara Sandberg (born August 28, 1969) is an American businesswoman. She has served as the chief operating officer of Facebook since 2008. Prior to Facebook, Sandberg was Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google. She also was involved in launching Google's philanthropic arm Google.org. Prior to Google, Sandberg served as chief of staff for the United States Department of the Treasury. In 2012, she was named in Time 100, an annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world assembled by Time.

Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., the daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg and the oldest of three siblings. Her family moved to North Miami Beach, Florida when she was two years old. She attended public school, where she was "always at the top of her class." Sandberg taught aerobics in the 1980s while in high school.

In 1987, Sandberg enrolled at Harvard College and in 1991, graduated with a B.A. in Economics and was awarded the John H. Williams Prize for the top graduating student in economics. While at Harvard, Sandberg met then professor Larry Summers who became her mentor and thesis adviser. Summers recruited her to be his research assistant at the World Bank, where she worked on health projects in India dealing with leprosy, AIDS, and blindness.

Eric Emerson Schmidt (born April 27, 1955) is an American software engineer, businessman and the current executive chairman of Google. From 2001 to 2011, he served as the chief executive of Google.

Additionally, Schmidt was a former member on the board of directors for Apple Inc. and sat on the boards of trustees for both Carnegie Mellon University and Princeton University.

Along with Mike Lesk, Schmidt co-authored the lex analysis software program for the Unix computer operating system.

Schmidt was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Blacksburg, Virginia, United States. After graduating from Yorktown High School, Schmidt attended Princeton University where he earned a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1976. At the University of California, Berkeley, he earned an MS in 1979 for designing and implementing a network linking the campus computer center, the CS and the EECS departments, and a PhD in 1982 in EECS with a dissertation about the problems of managing distributed software development and tools for solving these problems. He was joint author of lex (a lexical analyzer and an important tool for compiler construction). He taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business as a part time professor.

Anand Patwardhan is an Indian documentary filmmaker, known for his activism through social action documentaries on topics such as corruption, slum dwellers, nuclear arms race, citizen activism and communalism. Notable films include Bombay: Our City (1985), Ram ke Nam (In the Name of God) (1992), Pitr, Putr aur Dharmayuddha (Father, Son and Holy War) (1995), and Jang aur Aman (War and Peace) (2002), which have won national and International awards. His latest documentary is Jai Bhim Comrade (2011) based on police firing incident against 10 Dalits at Ramabhai Colony in Mumbai in 1997.

Anand Patwardhan was born in 1950, in Mumbai, Maharashtra.

He completed a B.A. in English literature at Bombay University in 1970, a B.A. in Sociology at Brandeis University in 1972, and an M.A. in Communication studies at McGill University in 1982.

Virtually all his films faced censorship by the Indian authorities but were finally cleared after legal action. His film ‘Bombay Our City’ was shown on TV after a four year court case, while, 'Father Son and the Holy war' (1995), was adjudged in 2004 as one of 50 most memorable international documentaries of all time by DOX, Europe's leading Documentary film magazine; though it was shown on India’s National Network, Doordarshan only in the year 2006, 11 years after its making, and that too after a prolonged court battle which lasted 8 years and ended with the nation’s Supreme Court ordering the state-owned media to telecast the film without any cuts.

Max Sieben Baucus (born December 11, 1941) is the senior United States Senator from Montana and a member of the Democratic Party. First elected to the Senate in 1978, he is the longest-serving Senator from Montana, and the fifth longest-serving U.S. Senator in office.

As the current chairman of the Senate Committee on Finance, Baucus has played an influential role in the debate over health care reform in the United States. He is also chairman of the Joint Committee on Taxation, and a member of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry and Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and is chairman of the Subcommittee on Transportation and Infrastructure.

Before his election to the Senate, Baucus was a member of the United States House of Representatives from 1975 to 1978, representing Montana's (now defunct) 1st congressional district. He previously served in the Montana House of Representatives from 1973 to 1974.

On August 9, 2011, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appointed Baucus to the United States Congress Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.