Dame Jane Morris Goodall is an English primatologist and anthropologist. Considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960, where she witnessed human-like behaviours amongst chimpanzees, including armed conflict.  She is the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots & Shoots programme, and she has worked extensively on conservation and animal welfare issues. She has served on the board of the Nonhuman Rights Project since its founding in 1996.  In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council.  During August 2019, Goodall was honoured for her contributions to science with a bronze sculpture in midtown Manhattan alongside nine other women, part of the "Statues for Equality" project. In 2020, continuing her organization's work on the environment, Goodall vowed to plant 5 million trees, part of the 1 trillion tree initiative founded by the World Economic Forum.

Emmanuelle Marie Charpentier is a French professor and researcher in microbiology, genetics, and biochemistry.  Since 2015, she has been a Director at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin. In 2018, she founded an independent research institute, the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens. In 2020, Charpentier and American biochemist Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of a method for genome editing". This was the first science Nobel ever won by two women alone.  In 2013, Charpentier co-founded CRISPR Therapeutics and ERS Genomics along with Shaun Foy and Rodger Novak.

Melinda Ann Gates is an American philanthropist and a former general manager at Microsoft. In 2000, she and her husband Bill Gates co-founded the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization. In 2019, Gates debuted as an author with the book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. The book highlights the failure to acknowledge women's unpaid work, drawing on feminist economist Dame Marilyn Waring's book If Women Counted. In 2002, Melinda and Bill Gates received the Award for Greatest Public Service Benefiting the Disadvantaged, an award given out annually by Jefferson Awards.  In December 2005, Melinda and Bill Gates were named by Time as Persons of the Year alongside Bono.  Gates was appointed an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2013 for services to philanthropy and international development. In 2016, President Barack Obama awarded Gates and her husband with the Presidential Medal of Freedom for their philanthropic efforts.  In 2017, President François Hollande awarded Gates and her husband with France's highest national award, the Legion of Honour, in Paris for their charity efforts.

Jennifer Anne Doudna is an American biochemist known for her pioneering work in CRISPR gene editing, for which she was awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Emmanuelle Charpentier.  She is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor's Chair Professor in the Department of Chemistry and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She has been an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute since 1997. Dr. Doudna is also the president and chair of the board of the Innovative Genomics Institute, a faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a senior investigator at the Gladstone Institutes, and an adjunct professor of cellular and molecular pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco.