Pico Caroni has been a senior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute (FMI) for Biomedical Research and a professor of neurobiology at the Biozentrum/The Center for Molecular Life Sciences at the University of Basel since 1995. He studied biochemistry at ETH Zürich and subsequently worked on regeneration in the central nervous system in Martin Schwab’s lab at the Brain Research Institute of the University of Zurich. Since 1989, Caroni has been a researcher at the FMI – first as a junior group leader – studying the plasticity of defined neuronal circuits and systems. He is interested not only in the fundamentals of learning and memory but also in the impact of gene mutations on the circuits and the resulting mental disorders.

Britta Eickholt has been Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biochemistry at the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin since 2011. She received her doctorate in 1998 at Guy's Hospital in London. In 2001, she received a lectureship at King's College London and started her own research group at the MRC Center for Developmental Neurobiology. She was appointed Professor of Molecular Neurobiology at King's College in 2010, before her move to Berlin in 2011. Her research focusses on the signaling mechanisms that regulate dynamic processes of the cytoskeleton in neuronal cells.

Carl-Henrik Heldin has, since 1992, been professor in Molecular Cell Biology at Uppsala University, Sweden. Between 1986 and 2017, he was the Branch Director of the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research in Uppsala. Professor Heldin is the chair of the Boards of the Nobel Foundation, the Science for Life Laboratory, and the European Molecular Biology Organization. His research interest is related to the mechanisms of signal transduction by growth regulatory factors, as well as their normal function and role in disease. An important goal is to explore the possible clinical utility of signal transduction antagonists.

Thomas Höfer heads the Division of Theoretical Systems Biology at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) and is Professor at the Faculty of Biosciences at Heidelberg University. Following his studies of biophysics, he obtained his PhD in applied mathematics from the University of Oxford. After postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden and at the Collège de France, he became junior professor at Humboldt University Berlin in 2002, and, in 2007, moved to Heidelberg. His research ‘puts time into the equation’ by developing data-driven mathematical models for the clonal dynamics of immune responses, stem-cell-driven tissue renewal and somatic evolution.

Chiara Romagnani pursued her medical studies at the University of Florence, Italy, before specializing as an Oncologist at the National Cancer Institute in Genova. Following the completion of her PhD in Immunology at the University of Genova, under the guidance of Lorenzo Moretta, she was granted an EMBO fellowship to train as a postdoctoral researcher at the German Rheumatism Center (DRFZ) in Berlin, Germany. She established there her research focus in innate immunity and inflammation, first as a group leader and later as a DFG-Heisenberg Professor. She has contributed to the identification of signals responsible for the differentiation and activation of Innate Lymphoid Cells (ILCs) as well as to the discovery of human NK cell clonality and memory, for which she was recently awarded an ERC Advanced Grant. Presently, she holds the position of Berlin University Alliance Joint Full Professor at the Charité University and Free University Berlin and serves as the Chair of the Institute of Medical Immunology at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Chiara Romagnani is a member of the Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences.

Martin Oestreich has been Professor of Organic Chemistry (Synthesis & Catalysis) at TU Berlin since 2011. His appoitment was supported through an Einstein professorship by the Einstein Foundation Berlin. He studied chemistry at the Universities of Düsseldorf, Manchester, and Marburg (1991–1996) and received his doctoral degree at the University of Münster (1996–1999). After a postdoctoral stint at the University of California at Irvine (1999–2001), he completed his habilitation at the University of Freiburg (2001–2005). Martin Oestreich was Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Münster from 2006 until 2011. Visiting professorships took him to Cardiff (2005), Canberra (2010), and Kyoto (2018). His research interest range from homogeneous catalysis with main-group elements to elucidation of reaction mechanisms.