Dr Stålberg is Professor emeritus in Clinical Neurophysiology, Uppsala University Sweden. Together with J Ekstedt he developed Single Fiber EMG in the Department of Pharmacology when they were medical students together in Uppsala University. After his PhD thesis on “Propagation Velocity in Single Muscle Fibers” he joined the EMG lab in 1967, where Karl-Erik Hagbarth was chairman. After retirement in 2001, he has continued in the lab with teaching and research. The early years were filled with methodological struggles (with the first report in 1963 saying that spikes from small electrodes really are single fiber action potentials), and his interest in signal analysis continued throughout his career. Stålberg developed a number of EMG methods in addition to SFEMG, including Macro EMG, Scanning EMG and methods for quantitation of conventional EMG, and he has used these techniques to study the microphysiology of normal and diseased muscle. Likewise, his interest in computers has made deep impressions on routines at the EMG lab, and in national and international telemetry projects. Through many publications, courses and lectures he has tried to spread the message that SFEMG and Quantitative EMG have a place in the diagnosis and monitoring of the neurologically ill patient.

Together with his wife Eva (who does not work with fibers) he has 3 children and 9 grandchildren, a great crowd.
Like the entire family he is interested in boating, based at Edshagen, the name of their family compound of summer houses on the west coast of Sweden.

Jože Trontelj was Professor of Neurology at the Ljubljana School of Medicine, Slovenia. His research interest in human reflexes led him to visit Erik Stålberg in 1967, where he picked up SFEMG and started a friendship, spanning over more than four decades. His PhD thesis was on the behaviour of single human motor neurons in the H-reflex and F-response, and an early paper on this was published in Nature. His elder and younger brothers, Lojze and Janez, electronics engineers, designed the powerful Ljubljana Jittermeter, which contributed to the development of stimulation SFEMG as a routine method of jitter measurement.

During his last 15 years, Trontelj was active in the field of bioethics. He chaired the Slovenian National Medical Ethics Committee, and had the privilege to contribute to drafting the Oviedo Convention of the Council of Europe on Human Rights and Biomedicine, as well as the Protocol on Biomedical Research. His achievements in science and ethics won him a place in the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, of which he became president.

Jože Trontelj’s wife Tatjana was, besides being a wonderful housewife, an expert neurophysiology technician, assisting her husband in SFEMG examinations. Jože’s hobby was fishing. He was an expert fisherman, but his eldest son Jurij outmastered him and other Slovenian fishermen by catching a brown trout of 15.2 Kilo when he was still a teenager.
Jože had three children and five grandchildren.

Jože Trontelj passed away in Dec 2013, see separate section.

Dr. Donald Sanders is Professor of Neurology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, NC, USA, where he founded, and for 25 years, directed, the Duke MG Clinic and the Duke EMG Laboratory. He has had an abiding interest in the diagnosis and treatment of MG and related diseases since training in Neurology with T.R. Johns, at the University of Virginia in the late 60’s. He trained in EMG and Neuromuscular Physiology with Ed Lambert at the Mayo Clinic in 1972, and has been at Duke since 1980.

In the early 1970’s Dr. Sanders became interested in SFEMG as a sensitive diagnostic technique in the evaluation of patients with MG. Like other early practitioners of SFEMG, he learned the technique from Erik Stålberg, in Uppsala, beginning a lasting professional collaboration and personal friendship. He incorporated SFEMG into his practice and training program in 1974 and has subsequently published more than 80 papers on SFEMG and its role in the evaluation and management of neuromuscular diseases. For more than 40 years he has participated in courses on SFEMG around the world, many together with Erik Stålberg.

His wife, Lynda, is an artist. They have two daughters and three boisterous grandsons. His hobby is restoring old cars. He enjoys Formula One racing, travel, old movies and good wine.