Stella Cottam was born in New York City in 1949, and has B.S. degrees in physics and medical technology from Fordham University and the University of Nevada respectively, an M.S. degree in library science from the University of Kentucky and a Master of Astronomy from the University of Western Sydney in Australia. She worked as a microbiologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Reno, Nevada and Lexington, Kentucky for 30 years. She obtained her Ph.D. through the Centre for Astronomy at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. Her thesis topic was "Solar Eclipses and Transits of Venus, 1868-1882, and Their Role in the Popularization of Astronomy in the USA," for which her supervisors were Wayne Orchiston and Richard Stephenson.John E. Ventre was born in 1936, and he has degrees in engineering, industrial management, and business administration. He taught astronomy for 12 years at the University of Cincinnati. During the late 1990s he was one of the principals who formed the Cincinnati Observatory Center (COC), a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization to save the Observatory from demolition. Ventre was one of the signatories of the incorporation document, served as the COC's first Administrator/Director, and served on the Center's Charter Board. Then for the following 23 years he served as the COC's Historian, accumulating the rich history of Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, the Observatory's founder in 1842, and the history of the Observatory to current times. It is the history of the birthplace of American Astronomy.
