Piya Tan, who works on the Sutta Discovery Project, and teaches them, was a former Theravada monk (Piyasilo) for 20 years. Today he is a full time lay Dharma teacher specializing in early Buddhism. He was consultant and regular lecturer to the Buddhist Studies Team (BUDS) that successfully introduced Buddhist Studies in Singapore Secondary Schools in the 1980s. After that, he was invited as a visiting scholar to the University of California at Berkeley, USA. He has written many ground-breaking and educational books on Buddhism (such as Total Buddhist Work) and social surveys (such as Buddhist Currents and Charisma in Buddhism).
As a full-time Dharma teacher, he runs Buddhist, Sutta and Pali classes like the basic Pali course series, the Sutta Study Group (NUSBS), Dharma courses (the Singapore Buddhist Federation), Sutta Discovery classes (Buddhist Fellowship and elsewhere), and Sutta-based (including meditation) courses (Brahm Education Centre), besides his own full-time Pali translation and research project, the Pali House, and doing a comparative study of the Pali Nikayas and the Chinese Agamas. As a Theravada monk, he learned insight meditation from Mahasi Sayadaw himself in the 1980s. As a lay teacher, he learned forest meditation from the Ajahn Brahmavamso. He has run numerous meditation courses and retreats for students and adults (including non-Buddhists) since 1980s. In 1992, he taught meditation at the University of California at Berkeley, USA, and also to BP, JPMorgan, the Defence Science Organization, GMO, HP and SIA. He is doing all this for the love of Dharma and of Ratna and their two children.
Wikipedia entry on Piya Tan: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piya_Tan