Peter B. Cotton is Professor of Medicine, and Director of the Digestive Disease Center, at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. He was born and educated in England, where his father was a rural family physician. He graduated in 1963 from Cambridge University and St. Thomas Hospital Medical School. During a year of bench research as part of his GI training, he came across a paper describing the first fiberoptic gastroscope with a biopsy capability. The instrument was acquired, and a career was born. He developed the Endoscopy Laboratory at St. Thomas Hospital while still officially in training, and wrote many of the first European papers on the use of endoscopy in the investigation of dyspepsia, bleeding and other contexts.

Joseph W. Leung is Professor of Medicine at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine and Chief of Gastroenterology, VA Northern California Health Care System, USA. Dr. Leung is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, as well as the Hong Kong College of Physicians and Hong Kong Academy of Medicine. He is also a Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and Master of the American College of Gastroenterology. He pioneered a number of therapeutic endoscopy procedures including epinephrine injection for ulcer hemostasis, urgent nasobiliary drainage for acute suppurative cholangitis, the design and development of the Cotton-Leung stent for biliary drainage and palliation of malignant obstructive jaundice. Dr. Leung received the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Senior Governor Award in 2004 and American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy (ASGE) Master Endoscopist Award in 2005 and Master of the ACG in 2010. He was a former Associate Editor for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy and currently Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Interventional Gastroenterology. He is a reviewer for a number of prestigious journals including the New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Gastroenterology. He has had over 400 articles, abstracts, and book chapters published and is the editor of 4 books.