Matthias Tschöp, MD, trained at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. After a research fellowship at Eli Lilly (Indianapolis, USA, 1999-2002), he started his own laboratory at the German Institute of Human Nutrition (Potsdam, 2002-2003). At the University of Cincinnati (USA, 2003-2011) he advanced to Research Director and Endowed Chair of Medicine. He then was jointly recruited back to Germany by Helmholtz Munich and the Technical University of Munich, where he holds an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. Today he is also CEO of Helmholtz Munich and Vice President of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centers. He holds an adjunct professorship at Yale University.

Born in China and raised in Singapore, Na Cai completed her undergraduate training at the University of Cambridge, UK, and then earned her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford at the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. Since 2019, she has been a principal investigator at Helmholtz Pioneer Campus and Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich, as well as a Junior Fellow at the Chair of Translational Genomics at TUM School of Medicine. While in Oxford, Na Cai led the data analysis efforts in an international consortium seeking to elucidate the genetic basis of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), which was published in Nature in 2015.