Heng Li from the Sanger Institute wrote most of the initial source codes
of SAMtools and various converters.

Bob Handsaker from the Broad Institute is a major contributor to the
SAM/BAM specification. He designed and implemented the BGZF format, the
underlying indexable compression format for the BAM format. BGZF does
not support arithmetic between file offsets.

Jue Ruan for the Beijing Genome Institute designed and implemented the
RAZF format, an alternative indexable compression format. RAZF is no longer
used by or provided with SAMtools. Source code remains available in older
SAMtools 0.1.x releases and from the standalone branch in the repository.

Colin Hercus updated novo2sam.pl to support gapped alignment by
novoalign.

Petr Danecek contributed the header parsing library sam_header.c and 
sam2vcf.pl script.