Dame Valerie Beral AC DBE FRS MRCP (born 1946) is an Australian-born British epidemiologist, academic and a preeminent specialist in breast cancer epidemiology. She is Professor of Epidemiology^[where?], a Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford and has been the Head of the Cancer Epidemiology Unit at the University of Oxford and Cancer Research UK since 1989.

Valerie Beral was born in Australia in 1946. She completed her Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery degree graduating with first class honours from the University of Sydney in 1969. She then spent six months travelling the "hippie trail" through Asia of which she said "That taught me how much I wanted to work. But I still wanted to leave Australia." She then travelled to England where a friend working at the Hammersmith Hospital told of her of a job that she applied for and got.

At Hammersmith Hospital Valerie Beral worked under Charles Fletcher, who recognised that she was suited to epidemiology and so propelled her towards the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. There she completed a combined course in Epidemiology & Statistics between 1971–72 under the tutorship of Donald Reid. Beral felt very comfortable with the move because she had never felt happy in clinical medicine. She says that "she had never been able to understand how her peers could be so certain about making decisions on incomplete evidence. Epidemiology has offered her not an escape from that uncertainty but the opportunity to tackle it head on." She also became a member of the Royal College of Physicians.

Valerie Hall is a Professor in Palaeoecology at Queens University Belfast. She gained a 2:2 in Botany at Queen's University Belfast in 1968 and subsequently a PhD in Palaeoecology in 1989. She has produced a number of publications of which the best known may be Flora Hibernica which she co-wrote along with J. Pilcher and published in 2001.

She is the Director of Research in the School of Archaeology-Palaeoecology at Queens University, Belfast.

Valerie is Vice President of the INQUA Commission for Tephrochronology and Volcanology and is the Honourary Company Secretary of the Irish Naturalists' Journal Ltd.

She has 30 peer-reviewed papers as listed in Scopus. The most cited is "Dates of Holocene Icelandic volcanic eruptions from tephra layers in Irish peats" Pilcher, J.R., Hall, V.A., McCormac, F.G. Holocene 5 (1), pp. 103-110, (1995), which has been cited 85 times by March 2010.

Hall, V.A. and Bunting, L. (2000) Tephra-dated pollen studies of medieval landscapes in the north of Ireland. In: Gaelic Ireland c.1250-1650: land lordship and settlement. Eds P. Duffy, D. Edwards and E. Fitzpatrick. Four Courts Press Dublin, 207-222.

Bruce Robinson (born (1946-05-02)2 May 1946) is an English director, screenwriter, novelist and actor. He is arguably most famous for writing and directing the cult classic Withnail and I (1986), a film with comic and tragic elements set in London in the 1960s, which drew on his experiences as 'a chronic alcoholic and resting actor, living in squalor' in Camden Town.

As an actor, he has worked with Franco Zeffirelli (on whom he based the character of Uncle Monty in Withnail and I), Ken Russell and François Truffaut. In 1998, he returned to acting with a cameo in the 70s rock rival film Still Crazy.

Bruce Robinson was born in Broadstairs in Kent. In his youth, Robinson aspired to be an actor and was admitted to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. His first film role was as Benvolio in Franco Zeffirelli's film adaptation of Romeo and Juliet (1968). He then appeared in Ken Russell's The Music Lovers (1970), Barney Platts-Mills's Private Road (1971), and François Truffaut's The Story of Adele H. (1975), but eventually became disenchanted with acting after spending several years out of work and living on social security payments and began writing screenplays. He was soon commissioned by David Puttnam to write the screenplay for Roland Joffé's The Killing Fields (1984). Robinson was nominated for an Academy Award and won a BAFTA for his work. In 1989, Robinson wrote again for Joffé on Fat Man and Little Boy.

Michael Kirk Douglas (born September 25, 1944) is an American actor and producer, primarily in movies and television. He has won three Golden Globes and two Academy Awards; as producer of 1975's Best Picture, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and as Best Actor in 1987 for his role in Wall Street. Douglas received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2009. He is the eldest of actor Kirk Douglas's four sons.

Douglas was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the first child of actor Kirk Douglas and Bermudian-born actress Diana Dill. His paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Gomel in Belarus (at that time a part of the Russian Empire). His mother was from Devonshire Parish, Bermuda; Douglas's maternal grandfather, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Melville Dill, served as Attorney General of Bermuda and was commanding officer of the Bermuda Militia Artillery. Douglas has a younger brother, Joel Douglas (born 1947), and two paternal half-brothers, Peter Douglas (born 1955) and Eric Douglas (1958–2004), from stepmother Anne Buydens.