Maria Atallah is a Lebanese Canadian composer of contemporary classical music, a pianist, and a teacher, originally from Ottawa, Ontario. In 2015, she graduated from the University of Ottawa (B.A. in Music) under the instruction of John Armstrong and Frédéric Lacroix in composition and Andrew Tunis in piano. Maria was awarded a First Prize (Godfrey Ridout Awards) in the 2017 SOCAN Foundation Awards for Young Composers for Hymn to Inana and reached the semifinals at the 2014 International Sorodha Composition Competition based in Antwerp, Belgium, for her Three Pieces for Unaccompanied Cello. Other awards include the University of Ottawa’s Jean-Marie Beaudet Scholarship for outstanding potential in composition and a City of Ottawa YCPP grant. During the summer of 2016, Maria participated in the Orford Academy’s Creation Workshop, where she had the privilege of studying with composers Ana Sokolovic and Jean Lesage and collaborating with the academy’s contemporary ensemble under the direction of conductor Véronique Lacroix. Maria is currently (2017) pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at the Schulich School of Music with Jean Lesage. She was named Composer-in-Residence with the Schulich Singers, McGill’s premiere chamber choir directed by Jean-Sebastien Vallée. Maria’s research is inspired by the connection between ancient and contemporary music. Her thesis explores melodic and heterophonic writing articulated by electroacoustically inspired techniques. When she is not working on her music, Maria enjoys reading, training in the art of Muay Thai, and listening to hip-hop.

Waldorf Astor was born on May 19, 1879, in New York City, New York, the eldest son of William Waldorf Astor, 1st Viscount Astor (1848-1919).

He was an American-born English politician and newspaper proprietor, a member of the legendary Astor family. He spent much of his life travelling and living in Europe before his family settled in England in 1889. Waldorf attended Eton College and New College, Oxford, where he excelled as a sportsman, earning accolades for both fencing and polo. In 1905, while a passenger on an Atlantic voyage returning to Britain, Astor met Nancy Langhorne Shaw (1879-1964), a divorced woman with a young son (Robert Gould Shaw III). Coincidentally, both he and Mrs. Shaw shared the same birthdate, May 19, 1879, and both were American. After a rapid courtship, the two married in May 1906 and settled at the Astor family estate in Cliveden. Nancy encouraged her husband to launch a career in politics. He entered Parliament in 1910, acting as secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George in 1917. He retired from public office in 1919, his seat being taken by his wife, Nancy Witcher, Viscountess Astor, the first woman to sit in the British House of Commons. Astor was proprietor of The Observer, a London Sunday newspaper formerly owned by his father (to whose title he succeeded in 1919), from 1919 to 1945, when he turned it over to a trust. Astor became governor of the Peabody Trust and Guy's Hospital. His interest in international relations fuelled his involvement with the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and he served as its chairman from 1935 to 1949. He was also a considerable benefactor to the city of Plymouth and served as its Lord Mayor from 1939 to 1944. Astor was appointed Honorary Colonel of the Devonport, Plymouth-based Devonshire Heavy Brigade, Royal Artillery of the Territorial Army in 1929. An authority on agricultural problems, Astor became chairman in 1936 of a committee that was the progenitor of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

He died on September 30, 1952, in Cliveden, Buckinghamshire, England.

Lady Nancy Witcher Langhorne Astor, known as Viscountess Astor, was born on May 19, 1879, in Danville, Virginia.

She was an American-born British politician who was the first woman seated as a Member of Parliament (MP), serving from 1919 to 1945. Raised in Albemarle County, Virginia, by a Confederate veteran father who made his fortune in the railroad boom, she was a noted beauty in her time. She and her four sisters were collectively called the "Gibson Girls" from images created by her older sister Irene's husband, painter Charles Dana Gibson. She attended a finishing school in New York City, where she met her first husband, the socialite Robert Gould Shaw II (1872-1930). Moving to England in the early 1900s following a broken marriage, she quickly became a much-desired member of high society. After meeting Waldorf Astor (1879-1952), a child of the legendary Astor family, she married him in 1906 and established herself as mistress of Cliveden, the couple's Buckinghamshire estate. Playing hostess to a wide circle of upper-crust friends, she was also liked by the general populace because of her charitable activities which included setting up a World War I hospital for Canadian soldiers on her property, where she personally helped care for the wounded troops. When her husband succeeded to his father's title and seat in the House of Lords in 1919, Lady Astor stood as the Conservative candidate for Plymouth. Her effort was handicapped by her prohibitionism, lack of political experience, and knack for saying outrageous things, but was helped by her good looks and nature, willingness to moderate her views, and genuine devotion to her constituents. During most of her 25 years in Parliament, she proved popular and energetic, though with time her anti-Catholic and anti-Semitic views caused comment and the term "Cliveden Set" became, probably unjustly, a synonym for "Nazi." During World War II, she again established a hospital on her estate, but she was showing early signs of mental decline and reluctantly retired from Parliament in 1945. Thoroughly established in her adopted land, Nancy never lost her identity as an American and more especially as a Virginian, visiting frequently over the years, donating both money and artifact collections to the University of Virginia during the 1930s, and contributing materially to the 1929 restoration of Stratford Hall, Robert E. Lee's Westmoreland County birthplace and ancestral home.

Gradually isolated as her health deteriorated, she became a virtual recluse prior to her death on May 2, 1964, at her daughter's home in Grimsthorpe, England.

Underground infrastructure has been a staple of Associated Engineering’s portfolio since 1945, when the firm formed as Davis, Ripley and Associates with offices in Edmonton and Calgary. In 1948, the firm renamed itself to the more inclusive Associated Engineering Services Ltd. With offices across Canada, Associated Engineering is one the largest Canadian-headquartered engineering firms designing trenchless projects across the country. With more than 70 years of service in Canada, the firm was incorporating trenchless into its designs long before trenchless was a term in the construction industry lexicon. Today, Associated Engineering is still a leading engineering consultant firm in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Joseph S. Aspler is a retired Canadian research scientist at the Pulp and Paper Research Institute of Canada in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. He is also a veteran reader of science fiction and an amateur photographer.