Julia Fischer is Professor for Primate Cognition at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and head of the Cognitive Ethology Lab at the German Primate Center. Her research interest is in the social behavior, communication, and cognition of nonhuman primates. After completing her PhD in 1996 at the FU Berlin, she carried out research at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig before being appointed professor in Göttingen.

Doris Kolesch is Professor of Theater Studies at Freie Universität Berlin and a member of the Young Academy of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Since 2011, she has served as Dean of the Department of Philosophy and Humanities at the FU Berlin, where she previously was Dean of Studies between 2009 and 2011. She studied general and comparative literature, Romance philology, philosophy, and journalism in Mainz and Paris.