Ron Kurtz developed Hakomi as a mindfulness-based, body-centered form of experiential psychotherapy. His contribution was to make present-moment bodily experience, core beliefs, relationship, and compassionate curiosity part of a teachable therapeutic process. For sensuality, Hakomi offers useful attention to contact and choice while requiring clear boundaries and humility about interpretation.

Greta Bauer is an epidemiologist and sex-and-gender science researcher known for community-based LGBT health research, transgender health studies, and methods that bring intersectionality and multidimensionality into quantitative analysis. Her work shows how study design can either reveal or erase lived complexity.

Rosemary Basson was a physician, sexual-medicine researcher, and founding director of the UBC Program in Sexual Medicine. Her circular, context-dependent model of sexual response challenged a simple desire-arousal-orgasm sequence and helped clinicians recognise responsive desire, intimacy, pleasure, and relationship context. The model is influential but should not become another universal script.

Sari van Anders is a psychologist, gender-studies scholar, neuroscientist, and Canada Research Chair whose work develops inclusive models of gender/sex and sexual diversity. Her research connects desire, orgasm, pleasure, social context, hormones, power, and feminist and queer science.

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen developed Body-Mind Centering, an approach to movement exploration and consciousness that works with developmental patterns, anatomy, touch, voice, and attention. Her contribution gives sensuality a richly embodied vocabulary while requiring care about metaphor, teaching scope, consent, and individual difference.

Juno Obedin-Maliver is an obstetrician-gynaecologist and researcher whose clinical and scientific work focuses on the sexual and reproductive health needs of sexual and gender minorities. Through inclusive gynecology, longitudinal research, and the PRIDE Study, she brings visibility to care experiences often excluded from standard models.

June Reinisch is a psychologist and former director of the Kinsey Institute whose leadership broadened the institute’s public mission across sex, gender, reproduction, education, and cultural collections. Her work illustrates how sexual knowledge is built not only through experiments but also through archives, public communication, interdisciplinary research, and attention to reproduction and embodied life.

Marta Meana is a clinical psychologist and sex researcher whose work examines sexual desire, sexual pain disorders, women’s sexual health, cognitive processing, and the limits of drive-based models. Her biopsychosocial and systems approach connects physiology, relationships, culture, meaning, and eroticism.

Stephen Porges is a neuroscientist who proposed Polyvagal Theory to explain relationships among autonomic regulation, defense, communication, and social behavior. The theory has influenced trauma-informed and body-oriented practice, but its clinical popularity exceeds the certainty of some claims. A careful account separates useful observation from contested neuroanatomy and avoids treating “nervous-system state” as a complete explanation of a person.

Virginia Johnson was a sex researcher and clinician whose partnership with William Masters helped establish modern sex research and sex therapy. Her interviewing, observation, communication, and clinical contributions were central to the Masters and Johnson programme, even when public narratives reduced her to an assistant. Her legacy invites a more accurate account of collaboration, women’s expertise, consent, and sexual health.