Vera Meyer is a biotechnologist and professor at the Technical University of Berlin, where she heads the Department of Applied and Molecular Microbiology. In her scientific research with fungi, she combines methods from the field of synthetic biology and systems biology in order to be able to produce drugs, proteins, platform chemicals and, more recently, building materials from fungi in the sense of a sustainable bioeconomy.  In addition, Vera Meyer is active as an artist under the pseudonym V. meer. In her artistic works, she translates the transformation and metabolic potential of her research objects into mushroom sculptures whose philosophical tone is subtle but unmistakable: nothing disappears in nature, everything is transformation.

After a diploma degree at FU Berlin and a PhD thesis at the University of Cambridge, Jens Krause spent several years doing research at Mount Allison University in Canada and Princeton University in the USA before taking up a professorship at Leeds University in England. Since 2009, Jens Krause has been a professor of fish ecology at HU Berlin and at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries. He has been a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities since 2014.