Mohd. Sayeed Akhtar, PhD, is a Senior Assistant Professor at Gandhi Faiz-e-Aam College, Shahjahanpur, U.P., India. He was formerly an Assistant Professor at Jimma University in Ethiopiaand a research fellow at the Universiti Putra Malaysia's Institute of Tropical Agriculture. He has been listed among the top 2% of scientists in the world consecutively for the past three years, according to Stanford University in the United States. Dr. Akhtar is the author and co-author of more than 150 articles in peer-reviewed journals, conference proceedings, and book chapters, and has edited 21 books with international publishers. He has received numerous awards and honors for his work. He is a member of several professional organizations and is an editorial board member and reviewer for several international journals. He received his PhD degree from Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India, prior to conducting postdoctoral research at the Botanical Institute, University of Basel, Switzerland, and Chonbuk National University, Republic of Korea.

Khalid Rehman Hakeem, PhD, is Professor at King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He was formerly affiliated with the University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India; Universiti Putra Malaysia, Selangor, Malaysia; and Jinan University, Guangzhou, China. Dr. Hakeem has more than 15 years of teaching and research in plant ecophysiology, biotechnology and molecular biology, medicinal plant research, plant-microbe-soil interactions, as well as in environmental studies. Currently, he is involved with several international research projects with government organizations. To date, Dr. Hakeem has authored and edited more than 95 books with international publishers. He also has to his credit more than 200 research publications in peer-reviewed international journals and 55 book chapters in edited volumes. At present, Dr. Hakeem serves as an editorial board member and reviewer for several high-impact international scientific journals. He is an advisory board member of Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK, and a fellow of the Plantae Group of the American Society of Plant Biologists, among other memberships.