Dr. John Troyer is the Director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath. His interdisciplinary research focuses on contemporary memorialisation practices, concepts of spatial historiography, and the dead body’s relationship with technology. Dr. Troyer is also a theatre director and installation artist with extensive experience in site-specific performance across the United States and Europe. He is a co-founder of the Death Reference Desk website (http://www.deathreferencedesk.org) and a frequent commentator for the BBC. His forthcoming book, Technologies of the Human Corpse (published by the University of North Carolina Press), will appear in 2016.

His current project, the Future Cemetery, is a REACT Heritage Sandbox collaboration between Arnos Vale Cemetery, Calling the Shots media, and the Centre for Death and Society. The Future Cemetery can be followed on Twitter at @FutureCemetery, on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/thefuturecemetery and via a project blog: http://www.watershed.co.uk/ished/heritagesandbox/projects/2012/the-future-cemetery/ .

As Facebook's product manager for memorialization, Vanessa Callison-Burch is responsible for how Facebook cares for the accounts of people who have passed away. She created and launched a landmark new feature that lets people choose a legacy contact—a family member or close friend to serve as a steward for their account after they pass away.

Vanessa has also been deeply involved in hospice care for the past 20 years. She first became a hospice volunteer when she was in high school and has volunteered at hospices in California and in Ethiopia. She recently joined the board of ehospice, a globally-run news resource sharing information about palliative and end of life care throughout the world.