Augustin de la Peña was born December 28, 1942, in Brownsville, Texas. He graduated in psychology from the University of Texas, Austin, with a minor in mathematics, and held a PhD, Cum Laude, from Stanford University. His doctorate focused on cognitive developmental psychology and developmental sleep-wake psychophysiology. He conducted postdoctoral research at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in the psychology and psychophysiology of boredom and interest, entertainment, arousal, alertness, sleepiness, and fatigue. With more than 30 years of clinical and research experience in sleep disorders, he served as director of sleep disorder centers in California and Texas. He also taught for 15 years in medical schools. Throughout his career, he wrote more than 50 academic publications, including The Psychobiology of Cancer: Automation and Boredom in Health and Disease (Praeger, 1983).
Josefa Ros Velasco is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she leads the project “Pre-Bored. Well-being and Prevention of Boredom in Spanish Nursing Homes”. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University as part of the Distinguished Junior Scholars program. She is a specialist in boredom studies, and the president of the International Society of Boredom Studies. She is the author of The Disease of Boredom (Alianza Editorial, 2022), and editor of Suicide in Modern Literature (Springer, 2021), The Faces of Depression in Literature (Peter Lang, 2020), The Culture of Boredom (Brill, 2020), and Boredom Is in Your Mind (Springer, 2019). She is the recipient of the Spanish National Research Prize (2022) and the Lincoln Book Prize for Excellence in Teaching and Service at Harvard University (2019).
Christian Parreno is assistant professor of history and theory of architecture at Universidad San Francisco de Quito. His research explores conditions of boredom and sameness in the ideation and experience of the modern built environment. He is the author of Boredom, Architecture, and Spatial Experience (Bloomsbury, 2021); and his writings have appeared in Architectural Histories; Architecture & Culture; Emotions: History, Culture, Society; Log; The Journal of Architecture; The Journal of Architectural Education; The Journal of Boredom Studies; Textual Practice; and several edited volumes.