David Stronach (born 1931) is a Scottish archaeologist of ancient Iran and Iraq. He is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He is an expert on Pasargadae. Stronach was educated at Gordonstoun and Cambridge University. During the 1960s and 1970s he was Director of the British Institute of Persian Studies in Tehran. In the 1990s, he excavated several parts of Nineveh. His scholarship has earned him several honours and awards, including the invitation to deliver endowed lectures at Harvard and Columbia. He is also the recipient of the 2004 Archaeological Institute of America Gold Medal for "Distinguished Archaeological Achievement".
During his time in Iran, he met Ruth Vaadia (1937–2017), an Israeli archaeologist who was also working in Iran, and married her. They have two daughters, The family left Iran at the time of the 1979 Iranian Revolution He became a professor at Berkeley in 1981 and retired in 2004.
Professor Sukumar Sen was born in 1900 in Gotan, near Shyamsundar in the Purba Bardhaman district. He obtained an F.A. in 1919 from Burdwan Raj College, then affiliated with the University of Calcutta. He received a divisional scholarship and earned first class honours in Sanskrit from the Government Sanskrit College in 1921. He studied Comparative Linguistics in Kolkata, scoring the highest marks in 1923. He received a Premchand Roychand Scholarship and a PhD degree. He joined the University of Calcutta as a lecturer in 1930, where he served as a professor for thirty four years. He became the second Khaira Professor in the Department of Comparative Philology. His interests were in Bengali linguistics but he was also well versed in Pāli, Prakrit and Sanskrit. He died in 1992.