Christine Strothotte née Helms is on the scientific staff of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany and is a fellow of the Humboldt Foundation. She was born in 1968 and raised in the former East Germany. She studied Computer Science at the Technical University of Dresden and the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, completing her Dipl.-Ing. degree in 1990. She earned a doctorate in Computer Science in Magdeburg in 1994, specializing in computer simulation.

Thomas Strothotte is Professor of Computer Science and Chairman of the Department of Simulation and Graphics at the Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg in Germany. Born in 1959 and raised in Canada, he was educated in Vancouver (British Columbia), Montréal (Québec), and Waterloo (Ontario). He holds a B.Sc. (1980) in Physics and an M.Sc. (1981) in Computer Science from Simon Fraser University, and a Ph.D. (1984), also in Computer Science, from McGill University. He has worked in teaching and research as a computer scientist at INRIA Rocquencourt, the University of Stuttgart (where he completed a Habilitation degree in 1989), the IBM Scientific Center in Heidelberg and the Free University of Berlin. He moved to Magdeburg in October 1993, where he served as the Dean of his faculty from 1994 to 1996. He is presently a Vice President of the university.