Dr. Stephens graduated with B.S. in Physics from BYU in 1996 and then went on to receive a M.S and Ph.D. in Astronomy from New Mexico State University in 1999 & 2003. He also holds a Masters of Library Science degree from the University of North Texas which he received in 2016. After receiving his Ph.D, Dr. Stephens went to work at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center doing software development for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope mission, a project he still works on. He has served as a developer, the Testing and Release Manager, Software Manager, and as a Senior Scientific Software Developer over the years. He also served for a year as the Information Systems Development Manager at the Science Support Center of NASA's Stratospheric Observatory for Infra-red Astronomy (SOFIA). For three years (2014-2017) Dr. Stephens was the Physical and Mathematical Sciences Librarian at the Harold B. Lee Library here at BYU before NASA lured him back. He started as professor in the Computer Science Department in December of 2020.

Dr. Richardson joined the BYU Computer Science faculty three years ago. He is the Counselor and former President of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) and has been involved in Machine Translation (MT) research and development since attending BYU as an undergrad and graduate almost five decades ago. Before coming to teach at BYU, he worked for 10 years as the Manager of Machine Translation and Translation Systems at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Prior experiences include presiding over the Brazil São Paulo South mission, 17 years at Microsoft Research as a Partner Researcher and Manager of the Machine Translation Group, and 11 years at IBM working on NLP and MT, including at the TJ Watson Research Center. His BS and MA degrees are in Computer Science and Linguistics from BYU, and his PhD is in Computer Science from the City University of New York. He and his wife Marianna have 12 children and 33 grandchildren. He is excited to teach and work with the amazing CS students at BYU!

Nancy Fulda the director of BYU's DRAGN Lab, a research group that studies machine learning, knowledge representation, and societal impacts of generative AI. She was a 1995 Howard W. Hunter scholar, a 2011 Jim Baen Memorial Award winner, and a team lead in Amazon's inaugural Alexa Prize Competition. In 2024 she was named one of Utah's top 100 AI professionals. Recent publications from Dr. Fulda's research group include Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples and A Tale of Two Cultures: Comparing Interpersonal Disclosure Norms on Twitter. Ongoing research in her lab is studying ways to make large-scale language models more usable and energy-efficient. Part of this involves developing machine learning algorithms that more closely resemble the neurochemical processes in biological brains. She is also studying the application of neural programming interfaces in the context of knowledge grounding and mechanistic interpretability. In addition to her academic work, Dr. Fulda also writes science fiction. She has been nominated for the both the Hugo and Nebula Awards and has written on request for David Brin, TOR Books, and MIT’s Technology Review, as well as for the Dark Expanse space strategy game. She is the delighted mother of six children.