Atilla Aydin was born in a small village in eastern Turkey. Partly because of his good luck, he received his B.S. degree in Geological Engineering from Istanbul Technical University (Turkey) and M.S. and Ph. D. degrees in Geology from Stanford University (California, USA). He taught Structural Geology for about 10 years at Purdue University (Indiana) and a graduate course titled Faults, Fractures, and Fluid Flow at Stanford University for about two decades. The latter led to the inception of this Knowledgebase. He is the author or coauthor of more than 140 refereed papers, the references for which can be found here.

Atilla was the co-founder and co-director of the Rock Fracture Project and the founder and director of the Shale Smear Project at Stanford University. Many field trip guidebooks and numerous workshop volumes out of these projects are now available in digital (pdf) format from the Rock Fracture Project and Shale Smear Project data repositories of the Stanford University Library.

Jian Zhong received her B.S. degree in Geochemistry from the University of Science and Technology of China, M.S. degree in Geoscience and Computer Science from SUNY Stony Brook, and Ph.D. degree in Geology from Stanford University. Her dissertation under the supervision of the senior author was focused on Ontology application and knowledge representation in Structural Geology.

Sadly, Atilla passed away on February 8, 2022, in Istanbul, Turkey.