Cedric Beust - now at Google, (ex-BEA, Weblogic Container Architect)
Joshua Bloch - now at Google, author of "Effective Java" and spec lead of Assertions, Metadata, Enumerations, Autoboxing, Enhanced for loops, Static Import, Class File Specification and the Java Language Specification.
Graham Hamilton? - VP of Sun and spec lead of the Logging API. Contributed to CORBA support, JDBCAPI, JavaBeans, Java Plug-in, RMI-IIOP, JAX-RPC and others. He was the spec lead to Java 1.3 and 1.4 and one of the designers of the JCP program
Jason Hunter? - author of Java Servlet Programming and writer at JavaWorld, creator of Tomcat, representative of the Apache Software Foundation on JCP, being a member of the expert groups responsible for Servlet/JSP and JAXPAPI development.
Reggie Hutcherson? - manager of the Java evangelists
Doug Lea? - author of "Concurrent Programming in Java", spec lead of Concurrency Utilities and member of the expert group of Java Memory Model and Thread Specification Revision; currently involved with JSR 236+237
Tim Lindholm? - CTO of Sun, architect of J2ME platform and the JVM, and spec lead of Java Memory Model and Thread Revision
Patrick Linskey? - Founder and CTO of Solarmetric, now BEA
Richard Monson? - author of the books "Enterprise JavaBeans" and "Java Message Service", architect of OpenEJB and member of the expert groups of J2EE 1.4, JDO and EJB 2.1
Kia Mousavi - co-founder and CTO of Protecode, a technology company that focuses on software Intellectual Property (IP) determination and software Bill of Materials (BOM) management.
Rickard Oberg - developer of JBoss, XDoclet and other open source J2EE projects. Author of "Mastering RMI"
Sam Ruby? - VP of the Apache Software Foundation, former chairman of the Apache Jakarta project. Developer on the Apache Soap and Bean Scripting Framework projects
we might also want to include guidelines on how to decide if someone should be mentioned at all -- or everyone who even looked funny in Java's direction once may wind up on this list (for example: Bill Gates: Chief Wizard of the Anti-Java Society)