Elizabeth Stern was a Canadian-born American pathologist, especially well known for her insights on the cell's progression from a healthy to a cancerous state. Stern was one of the first scientists specializing in cytopathology, the study of diseased cells. Stern received her medical degree from the University of Toronto in 1939 and the following year migrated to the United States, where she became a naturalized citizen in 1943. She completed residencies at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and at Cedars of Lebanon and Good Samaritan Hospital, and was certified by the American Board of Pathology. She began her career as the Director of Laboratories and Research at the Cancer Detection Center of Los Angeles, California. During this time, Stern became interested in the progression of cervical cancer published her first papers on the subject. In 1961 she became a research coordinator at the University of Southern California Medical School and began teaching classes in the department of pathology at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical School. In 1963 she joined the UCLA School of Public Health as an associate researcher, and was promoted to professor of epidemiology at UCLA in 1965.

Theodor Albrecht Edwin Klebs- He was a German-Swiss pathologist. He is mainly known for his work on infectious diseases. His works paved the way for the beginning of modern bacteriology, and inspired Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. He was the first to identify a bacterium that causes diphtheria, which was called Klebs–Loeffler bacterium (now Corynebacterium diphtheriae). He was the father of physician Arnold Klebs. Klebs was born in Königsberg, Province of Prussia. He studied at the University of Würzburg under Rudolf Virchow in 1855 and received his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1858. He achieved his habilitation at the University of Königsberg the following year. Klebs was an assistant to Virchow at the Charité in Berlin from 1861 until 1866, when he became a professor of pathology at the University of Bern in Switzerland. He married Rosa Grossenbacher, a Swiss, and also acquired Swiss citizenship. He served as a military physician for the Prussian Army in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War; several of his ancestors had fought during the Napoleonic Wars. Klebs taught at Würzburg from 1872 to 1873, at Prague from 1873 to 1882, and at Zürich from 1882 to 1892. Because of disagreements with the rest of the faculty, the impetuous Klebs resigned from Zürich in 1893 and ran an unsuccessful private business in Karlsruhe and Strassburg in 1894.