Kings and Queens of Geek Proms past are charged each year with the awesome task of choosing the new bearers of the crowns and sashes. The names and credentials of the 2009 judges are listed below to show that we're not messing around here.

Trish (Stinnett) Dagen is the 2008 Queen Geek and a lifelong costume fanatic. She’s also a landscape architect, water aerobics instructor, manager of the Duluth Women's Soccer League and a Photoshop guru. Some of her other accomplishments include first place at the 2002 Fargo Valley Con costume contest, second place in the 2005 Food as Art costume contest, and vice president of the Wild Ones native plant society. Trish really likes miniature things and even has a dollhouse under her bed that her grandfather made for her mother in the 1940s. She was in Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, 4-H, Rainbow Girls, the National Honor Society, American Society of Landscape Architects, Duluth Garden Flower Society and an academic fraternity in college. Her favorite math is geometry and she even goes to high schools to tell them how, as a landscape architect, she uses it on a daily basis.

Lawrence Lee, the 2008 King Geek, was born and raised in Wapakoneta, Ohio, the hometown of Neil Armstrong. He started playing D&D in 1977 when players still had to use crayon to color in the crappy plastic dice. He learned BASIC on a TRS 80 and FORTRAN using a card reader. In high school he was salutatorian of his class, medaling in the state Mathletes competition and also serving as a library assistant. In college he studied physics, mathematics and philosophy, and worked as a civil engineering lab assistant. In graduate school he ran the A/V department. His current interests include HTML, blogging, board games (especially Settlers of Catan), World of Warcraft and helping his kids learn math (which he insists is fun). He works as a Presbyterian minister, and his study is decorated with a lava lamp, an original Chris Monroe painting and Star Wars paraphernalia. As Geek King he would like to decree for all time: “Han shot first.”

Katy Haugland is the 2007 Queen Geek and a student at Macalester College with an independently designed major that combines astrophysics, sociology and education. She built her first telescope when she was 11 years old and could fit inside it then. “It’s close now,” she says. “There are pictures to prove it. My feet stick out the end.” Katy also enjoys baking, welding, costuming, drumming in a bagpipe band and organizing astronomy slideshows for herself. She really like jokes about German physicist Werner Heisenberg, she once calculated the terminal velocity of a cat, and recently made an optical radio and had a dance party with it in her optics lab. She spends the time between Christmas and New Year’s Day in Death Valley every year with a crazy old astronomer doing public service astronomy education. And she’s also “really into African geography, sometimes.”

Neal Spinler is the 2007 King Geek and a compulsive downloader of bootleg episodes of Battlestar Galactica. Sci-fi rules his life, and his obsession with Doctor Who is downright unhealthy. His Dalek ring tones often frighten and confuse those around him, and his style of clothing is influenced by the tenth incarnation of the good Doctor (suits and Chuck Taylor All Star basketball shoes). He can recite the dialogue from most Firefly episodes – as well as the film Serenity -- from memory. In high school, Neal was president of the National Honor Society and Students Against Drunk Driving, played trombone in jazz band, and had his grad picture taken with his euphonium. Neal can be found at the Children’s Theatre Company creating intricate spreadsheet calculations, on the road driving his art car, or at home working on his Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator project. He plans to take his fiancée’s last name when they get married so he can legally be called Neal Armstrong.

Shari Hartshorn is the 2006 Queen Geek. A science fiction and fantasy nut, Shari enjoys staying up late reading (or re-reading) a great book or watching sci-fi TV. Currently, she's enjoying Stargate, Doctor Who and Torchwood. She laments the passing of Farscape, Firefly and Invisible Man, and soon will "suffer great anguish when SG-1 finishes its stellar run." Shari loves to play the card game Munchkin, especially epic style with all the sets. She has worked at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival and still volunteers there for Gaeltacht Minnesota, the Irish language group she's involved with. "Mostly we spend our time letting people know that there is in fact an Irish language and it is not just English with an Irish accent," she said. In college, Shari took more calculus than she needed, just for fun. She lives in St. Paul with a cat and five birds.

Eric Houston is the 2006 King Geek, a title he bears with pride, despite his little brother screaming in horror upon learning the news. In high school, Eric was an avid mock trial and quiz bowl player, and he wishes he still was. Other hobbies from his younger days continue on, however. Eric owns several thousand comic books and continues to be a huge fan of Star Trek and Doctor Who. He is prone to quoting dialogue from Ghostbusters, Blues Brothers, Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Star Trek II without provocation and ad infinitum. These days he lives in Hudson, Wis, where he works in television production and lives alone with his pet G5. Other hobbies include pina coladas, taking walks in the rain, the smell of the ocean, and the taste of champagne, as well as using lyrics from "The Pina Colada Song" to pad his bio. He also has a deep, abiding love of pie.