Emmanuel Bernard: After graduating from Supelec (French "Grande Ecole"), Emmanuel has spent a few years in the retail industry where he started to be involved in the ORM space and in full text technology. He joined the Hibernate team in 2003 and is now a lead developer at JBoss, a division of Red Hat. Emmanuel is the lead developer of Hibernate Annotations and Hibernate EntityManager, two key projects on top of Hibernate core implementing the Java Persistence(tm) specification. He has also lead the Hibernate Search project from its inception, reconsiling the two fields Emmanuel has been involved in: ORM and Full Text search. He is a regular speaker at various conferences and JUGs, including JavaOne, JBoss World and Javapolis (Javoxx). He is also involved in the Java Community Process as a specification lead for JSR 303 (Bean Validation) and as a expert group member for JSR 317 (Java Persistence 2.0).

John Griffin has been in the software and computer industry in one form or another since 1969. He remembers writing his first FORTRAN IV program on his way back from Woodstock. Currently, he is the software engineer/architect for SOS Staffing Services, Inc. He was formerly the lead e-commerce architect for Iomega Corporation, lead SOA architect for Realm Systems and an independent consultant for the Dept of the Interior among many other callings. John has even spent time as an adjunct university professor. He enjoys being a committer to projects because he believes it's time to get involved and give back to the community. John is the author of XML and SQL Server 2000 published by New Riders Press. He is a member of the ACM. Currently, he resides in Layton, Utah with wife, Judy and Australian Shepherds, Clancy and Molly.