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.

Hartmut Michel studied Biochemistry at the Universities of Tübingen and Munich. He completed his doctoral degree at the University of Würzburg in 1977 and habilitated in 1988 at the University of Munich. Since 1987 he is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysics at Frankfurt/Main, where he leads the Department for Molecular Membrane Biology. In 1988, Hartmut Michel was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, together with Johannes Deisenhöfer and Robert Huber, for their investigation of the molecular structure of the photosynthesis reaction center in the rhodopseudomonas viridis bacterium.

Carmen Buchrieser is currently Professor at the Institut Pasteur, Paris, France. She obtained her PhD from the University Salzburg, Austria. She is heading a research group at the Intitut Pasteur studying bacterial pathogenesis. Her major research interest is to understand how bacteria cause disease: what are the genetic factors conferring bacterial virulence, how do they evolve, what are the mechanisms by which they allow subverting host functions and more generally how do human pathogens emerge.

Prof. Dr. Michael Potente is a cardiologist and researcher. After completing his dissertation and habilitation at Goethe University Frankfurt, he became head of a research group at the Max Planck Institute for Lung and Heart Research. He is currently Professor for Translational Vascular Biomedicine at the Berlin Institute of Health and at the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin. Besides his scientific work, he also works as a clinician at the German Heart Center Berlin at the Charité. His research on cardiovascular medicine has received many prizes and awards, including Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) and the Judah Folkman Award.

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.