Naomi Feil was born in Munich in 1932 and grew up in the Montefiore Home for the Aged in Cleveland, Ohio, where her father was the administrator and her mother the head of the Social Service Department. After graduating with a master's degree in social work from Columbia University in New York, she began working with the elderly. Between 1963 and 1980, Mrs. Feil developed Validation as a response to her dissatisfaction with traditional methods of working with the severely disoriented old-old people who were her clients. In 1982 she published her first book, Validation: The Feil Method (rev. ed. 1992). Her second book, The Validation Breakthrough, was published in 1993 (rev. ed. 2002). Feil and her husband have made many films and videos about aging and Validation. She is a popular speaker in North America and Europe; since 1989 she has toured Europe three times a year offering workshops in Validation to participants in Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, France, Belgium, Italy, Great Britain, and Austria. Her books have been translated into French, Dutch, German, Italian, Finnish, Danish, and Swedish.

Florence Gray Soltys began her career in nutrition and, after parenting two daughters, returned to find a new and fulfilling career in Geriatrics.  In her current position, she is able both to work with graduate students and to continue clinical work with frail elders and their families. Conducted in an interdisciplinary setting in which individuals and their families are facing chronic and severe diseases that greatly impact their lives, this work has as its goal assisting people in the appreciation of life and maintaining the best possible functional level. "In the end," she says, "little things are the essence of life!" She has received several awards including: The Distinguished Teaching Award for Post Baccalaureate Instruction at UNC-Chapel Hill, The Trustee of the Year Award by the National Association of Nonprofit Homes for the Aged, The N.C. Advocate Award, and the Messar Award for Planning in North Carolina. Volunteering to bring change is important to her, and she serves on numerous boards that provide services to elders.

Before leading the Illinois Caucus, Jenny trained community agencies in health care advocacy for the Suburban Health Systems Agency in Oak Park, Illinois, and taught community health care advocacy at the University of Illinois Medical School.  She was born in 1937 in Melbourn, U.K. Memories of the bombs that fell around her parents' small farm near Melbourn-aimed at the ammunition dump across the road-and of her maternal grandparents' happy home in Melbourn are among her earliest. After graduating from Somerville College at Oxford University in 1958, she began preparing a Ph.D. thesis on the history of West Africa in the period before independence from British rule. This work took her 1960 to Nigeria, where she was on staff at the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, and a Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Ibadan and the University of Ghana. In 1965 she moved to the African Studies Program at Northwestern University in Chicago, intending to continue her Ph.D. work. Quickly, however, her interest turned to health advocacy, initially as a member of the Chicago Women's Liberation Union. It is thus no surprise that her response to Alzheimer's was, with her husband Don Moyer, to start a non-profit organization-Alzheimer's Spoken Here, Inc. "Our goals overlap with the goals of Memory Bridge, and we're delighted to also join in the Memory Bridge work."

Graham’s research has been featured on "The Today Show" and in O, The Oprah Magazine. His projects have been designed for various environments where older adults live, recreate, and work, and have been funded by the National Institute on Aging, National Institute of Mental Health, and National Institute of Nursing Research. In addition to his research program, Dr. McDougall, a Gerontological Nurse Practitioner, developed a novel in-home service delivery model for Medicare-certified home health agencies to provide mental health services to homebound elderly. As a gerontologist, Dr. McDougall believes that we all must continue working to dispel the many widely held ageist myths. His overall goal for advancing the field of gerontology is to proactively participate in the ongoing transformation of the aging paradigm from a worldview of inevitable decrement to one of possibility, which includes health promotion, development, growth, and learning. Graham, a native of New Orleans, is passionate about jazz music.

Don received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and has taught and done research there as well as at IIT, Northwestern, Fermilab, and Texas A&M. Support for his research has come from many sources, including the NDEA, NSF, MacArthur Foundation, Welch Foundation, and Ford Foundation. He was elected to Sigma Xi and Sigma Pi Sigma and is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published extensively on topics in physics, history, philosophy, and sociology, and he is a frequent consultant, invited speaker, and organizer of meetings on these and other topics. During the Harold Washington administration in Chicago in 1983, he created the not-for-profit Inventors' Council-work for which he was named Innovator of the Year for 1986 by the U.S. Small Business Administration. His pro bono work has included service on the Executive Committee of Chicago's MIT Enterprise Forum, on the Board of the Economic Development Council, and as Chair of the Economic Development Sub-Committee of Chicago's Community Development Block Grant Advisory Committee. All this may seem an odd background for doing the nuts and bolts work of the non-profit organization Alzheimer's Spoken Here, Inc., founded with his wife Jenny Knauss, but it is actually quite useful for helping give fellow travelers greater voice. He shares Jenny's delight at being able to join in the Memory Bridge work.

In the summer of 2002, Kimberly was one of 25 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows in the institute "Medicine, Literature and Culture," a month-long seminar at the Penn State College of Medicine that entailed clinical work with medical doctors, nurses, and patients, as well as theoretical work with fellow humanists and ethicists. Her essay "Coming Out: Considering the Closet of Illness" will appear in the Fall 2004 issue of Journal of Medical Humanities, and her essay "A Perspective on the Role of Stories as a Mechanism of Meta-Healing" has been solicited for a collection on Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine. She is currently editing a volume of illness narratives entitled Illness in the Academy: A Collection of Pathographies by Academics, and her own pathography was a finalist for the 2004 Journal of General Internal Medicine national creative writing prize. In addition to her regular courses in the English Department, Kimberly also lectures in the WWAMI (Washington, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, and Idaho) medical school on narrative medicine and medicine and literature. She has won numerous awards for university teaching, including the President's Award for Excellence in Teaching and Distinguished University Educator for the state of Montana.

James has developed and directed a Leadership Intern program for seniors, and has also worked with the Independent School Association of the Central States to develop the Youth Leadership Institute, a three year, multi-school, summer-based program developing youth leadership. He is playing a major role in integrating all curricular and noncurricular leadership programs at LFA. In addition to his leadership development experience, he brings many years of expertise in business management and strategic planning.

Lucia Norton Woodruff graduated from Swarthmore College with a major in history. She then earned an M.S. degree in education from Bank St. College in New York City and taught pre-school and first grade for several years. Since moving to Austin, Texas, she has been a violinist in the Austin Symphony Orchestra and has been involved with introducing strings to schoolchildren via an outreach program run by the symphony. She teaches violin and viola and is affiliated with other Suzuki teachers in the area. On the chamber music side, she serves on the Advisory Board of the Amateur Chamber Music Players, an organization that provides an international network of chamber musicians as well as educational outreach that aims to keep chamber music alive as a living art form for all ages and levels of ability. She plays in chamber music groups in Austin, and in New England during the summer. She has been close to many older people over the years, cherishing their stories and their eras.  She says, "Memory Bridge seems a very important, humane venture, especially in these times."