Dr. Pier Massimo Forni is a professor at Johns Hopkins University who co-founded the Johns Hopkins Civility Project (JHCP) in 1997. An aggregation of academic and community outreach activities, the JHCP aimed at assessing the significance of civility, manners and politeness in contemporary society. The JHCP has been reconstituted as The Civility Initiative at Johns Hopkins, which Dr. Forni now directs.

Professor Forni, author of Choosing Civility: The Twenty-five Rules of Considerate Conduct, is a professor in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Germanic and Romance Languages and Literatures. For the scientific background on this essay, he consulted Johns Hopkins cardiologists Ilan Wittstein and James Weiss, psychiatrist and author Edward Hallowell, Harvard psychiatrist John Ratey, clinical psychologist and author Arthur Ciaramicoli, Johns Hopkins psychiatrist Rudolf Hoehn-Saric, University of Maryland neurologist Stephen Reich, and Johns Hopkins neurologist Guy McKhann.