Member of the Royal Irish Academy in the context of "Humphry Davy"

Sir Francis Beaufort KCB FRS FRGS FRAS MRIA (/ˈboʊfərt/ BOH-fərt; 27 May 1774 – 17 December 1857) was an Irish hydrographer and naval officer who created the Beaufort cipher and the Beaufort scale.

Seamus Justin Heaney MRIA (13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013) was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".

Heaney was born in the townland of Tamniaran, near Castledawson, Northern Ireland. His family moved to nearby Bellaghy when he was a boy. He became a lecturer at St. Joseph's College in Belfast in the early 1960s, after attending Queen's University, and began to publish poetry. He lived in Sandymount, Dublin, from 1976 until his death. He lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006. He was a professor at Harvard from 1981 to 1997, and their Poet in Residence from 1988 to 2006. From 1989 to 1994, he was also the Professor of Poetry at Oxford. In 1996 he was made a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and in 1998 was bestowed the title Saoi of Aosdána. He received numerous prestigious awards.

Brian C. McGing is a papyrologist and ancient historian, who specialises in the Hellenistic period. He was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College, Dublin until his retirement in 2017. He served as editor of the college's journal of the classical world, Hermathena.

In 2004, McGing was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA).

Robert Brendan McDowell MRIA (14 September 1913 – 29 August 2011) was an Irish historian. He was a Fellow Emeritus and a former Associate Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin. He was born in Belfast. He was referred to colloquially as "RB", "McDowell" or "the White Rabbit". His politics were strongly Unionist and he was a member of the British Conservative Party.