Stefan Kaufmann is founding director and director of the Department of Immunology of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin and Professor for Microbiology and Immunology at the Charité University Hospital in Berlin. He received his Ph.D. in biology (“summa cum laude”) from Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz and completed his habilitation in the field of immunology and microbiology at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1981. From 1987 until 1991, he was Professor for Medical Microbiology and Immunology, and from 1991 until 1998, he was Full Professor for Immunology at Ulm University.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Simone Schürle is researching in the field of biomedical engineering and Assistant Professor for Responsive Biomedical Systems at ETH Zurich. She graduated in 2009 from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Industrial Engineering and Management with specialization in micro/nanosystems. She then joined the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) where she focused on magnetic manipulation techniques for biomedical applications. She was awarded with the ETH medal for her doctoral thesis and with fellowships from the SNSF, DAAD and the Society in Science for her postdoctoral studies at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she was researching as postdoctoral fellow from 2014-​2017. Besides activities in public outreach work and education, she is serving as Global Future Council for the World Economic Forum. She is also co-​founder of MagnebotiX, a young spin-​off from ETHZ.