John McWhorter is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, teaching linguistics, Western Civilization and music history. He has written extensively on issues related to linguistics, race, and other topics for Time, The New York Times, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, The New Republic and elsewhere, and is a Contributing Editor for The Atlantic. He was Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute from 2002 until 2010. He is the author of The Power of Babel, Doing Our Own Thing, Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, The Language Hoax, Words on the Move, Talking Back, Talking Black, Losing the Race, and twelve other books, including three academic monographs and two academic article anthologies. The Teaching Company has released five of his audiovisual courses. He spoke at the TED conference in 2013 and 2016, hosts the Lexicon Valley language podcast at Slate, and has appeared regularly on Bloggingheads.TV since 2006.

Ben Tolkin is the winner of BAHFest East 2018. Other than that, he doesn't have any particularly interesting degrees, publications, or achievements, but when it comes to fake science, he is exactly as qualified as everyone else.

Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer, is director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT. She is the author of six books, including last year's New York Times Notable Book, The Poison Squad, and has written for publications ranging from The New York Times to Wired to TIME to The Boston Globe. She is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers (US), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a life-time associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

Sarah M. Hird is an assistant professor in the Molecular and Cell Biology Department at the University of Connecticut. She is an evolutionary biologist and is fascinated by the microorganisms that live on and in macroorganisms. Her greatest accomplishments are her three degrees, two kids and one BAHfest trophy. Her favorite bird is the Yellow-billed Magpie, her favorite food is Tex-Mex and her favorite book is a toss-up between Beloved by Toni Morrison and the Harry Potter heptad by J. K. Rowling. You can find her on twitter at @sarahmhird.

Gretchen McCulloch is an internet linguist and author of the book BECAUSE INTERNET: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW RULES OF LANGUAGE (coming out July 23 from Riverhead). She's also the Resident Linguist at Wired and cohost of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. She lives in Montreal, but also on the internet. 

Though he has fewer BAHFest wins than Ben Tolkin, fewer NYT best sellers than Rosemary Mosco, fewer Pulitzers than Deborah Blum, and fewer math publications than retired NFL legend John Urschel, Jerry does have something not held by any member of this year’s esteemed judge panel: A master’s thesis autographed by retired NFL legend John Urschel.