KAI BIRD is an award-winning historian and journalist and current Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin), which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer. His work has been honored with the BIO Award for his significant contributions to the art and craft of biography. He has also written about the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C.

MARTIN J. SHERWIN (1937–2021), distinguished historian and writer. After twenty years of research, he joined with Kai Bird to complete the award-winning biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Sherwin served on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College. He founded the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center at Tufts University. In the last decade of his life, he was a University Professor at George Mason University and worked with the Wilson Center's History & Public Policy Program in Washington, DC, to develop the "Nuclear Boot Camp,” a program to support young scholars of nuclear history.