Martina Havenithhas been a Professor of Physical Chemistry at Ruhr University Bochum since 1998. She is the spokesperson of the Cluster of Excellence Ruhr Explores Solvation (RESOLV) and director of the Center of Molecular Spectroscopy and Simulation of Solvent Controlled Processes (ZEMOS). She has developed new infrared and terahertz laser technologies to explore fundamental questions in chemistry.

Albert Schenning studied chemistry at Radboud University Nijmegen, where he obtained his master’s degree in 1992 and his doctorate in 1996. His PhD thesis on supramolecular architectures based on porphyrin and receptor molecules was supervised by Dr. Martin Feiters and Prof. Roeland Nolte. Between June and December 1996, he was a post-doctoral fellow in the group of Prof. Bert Meijer at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), working on dendrimers. In 1997, he investigated pi-conjugated oligomers and polymers based on triacetylenes with Prof. François Diederich at the ETH in Zurich. In 2003 he was appointed assistant professor, in 2005 associate professor and in 2014 full professor of Stimuli-responsive Functional Materials and Devices at TU/e. He leads the research group  (SFD) which centers on stimuli-responsive functional materials and devices. This entails the development of polymer materials with new responsive functionalities and integrating them into devices to meet industrial and societal challenges in the fields of sustainable energy, healthcare & personal comfort.

Damien Baigl is exceptional class professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, senior member of the University Institute of France (IUF) and twice ERC awardee (starting grant in 2011–2015, advanced grant since 2023). After a PhD at College de France in Paris (2000–2003) and a post-doc at Kyoto University (2003–2005), he got a permanent position at the Department of Chemistry of ENS in 2005 where he became full professor in 2010. Curiosity-driven, he has a passion for exploration and soft matter systems. His current research interests include dynamic DNA nanotechnology, reconfigurable self-assembly, soft synthetic biology, coffee-ring effect, colloidal organization at fluid interfaces, synthetic cells, and genetic encoding of soft matter properties.

Roberto Cerbino completed his PhD in Physics at the University of Milano in 2004. After a Marie-Curie postdoctoral fellowship at University of Fribourg (2006), he returned to Italy in 2007 and held a position at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Milan. Visiting researcher at the University of Ottawa in 2010 and visiting professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in 2018, he he eventually joined the University of Vienna in 2021 as a full professor of Experimental Soft Matter Physics. Since 2023, he has served as an associate editor for the journal Soft Matter. Roberto's research focuses on the study of active and passive complex fluids, specifically exploring their structure, dynamics, rheology, and instabilities with the aid of a range of cutting-edge optical techniques and image analysis methods.

Emanuela Zaccarelli is a CNR Research Director at Institute of Complex Systems. graduated in Physics at La Sapienza in 99, PhD in Physical Chemistry 2002 at University College Dublin. I received the Soft Matter Lectureship in 2009 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2015.