David Knoke (Ph.D., University of Michigan, 1972) is a professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota, where he teaches and does research on diverse social networks, including political, economic, healthcare, intra-  and interorganizational, and terrorist & counterterror networks. In addition to many articles and chapters, he has written seven books about networks: Network Analysis (1982, with James Kuklinski), The Organizational State (1985, with Edward Laumann), Political Networks (1990), Comparing Policy Networks (1996, with Franz Pappi, Jeffrey Broadbent, and Yutaka Tsujinaka), Changing Organizations (2001), Social Network Analysis (2008, with Song Yang), and Economic Networks (2012).

Song Yang (Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 2002) is a professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Arkansas. His teaching and research areas are social network analysis, including business, economic, and organizational networks, work and organization studies, and social statistics. He published many articles and chapters, with the most recent ones on Journal of Business Research and Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly. He has written several books, including Social Network Analysis (2008, with David Knoke), The Invisible Hands of Political Parties in Presidential Elections: Party Activists and Political Aggregation from 2004 to 2012 (2013, with Andrew Dowdle, Scott Limbocker, Patrick Stewart, and Karen Sebold), and Social Network Analysis: Methods and Examples (2016, with Franziska Keller, and Lu Zheng).