Jason Fletcher is a professor of public affairs at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. A specialist in health economics, economics of education and child and adolescent health policy, Fletcher focuses his research on examining social network effects on adolescent education and health outcomes, combining genetics and social science research, estimating long-term consequences of childhood mental illness, and child and adolescent mental health policy.

Stephen J. Suomi, Ph.D. is Chief of the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD), National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland. He also holds research professorships at the University of Virginia, the University of Maryland, College Park, the Johns Hopkins University, Georgetown University, the Pennsylvania State University, and the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Dr. Suomi earned his B.A. in psychology at Stanford University in 1968, and his M.A. and Ph.D.

Terrie E. Moffitt studies how genetic and environmental risks work together to shape the developmental course of abnormal human behaviors and psychiatric disorders. Her particular interest is in antisocial and criminal behavior, but she also studies depression, psychosis, and substance abuse. She is a licensed clinical psychologist, who completed her clinical hospital training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. She is associate director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows 1000 people born in 1972 in New Zealand from birth to age 38 so far.

George Davey Smith is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology at the University of Bristol, Honorary Professor of Public Health at the University of Glasgow and Visiting Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. He is Scientific Director of the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) and Director of the MRC Centre for Causal Analyses in Translational Epidemiology.

Michel Boivin is a Professor of Psychology at Université Laval, Canada Research Chair in Child Development, and Director of the Research Unit on Children's Psychosocial Maladjustment (GRIP). Boivin was previously (2000-05) a senior fellow of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). He leads a program of research on the biological, psychological, and social components of child development, a program that is mainly anchored to population-based longitudinal studies of children, including the Quebec Longitudinal Study of Child Development and the Quebec Newborn Twin Study.