Masayuki Inoue received a B.Sc. degree in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1993. In 1998, he obtained his Ph.D. from the same university, working under the supervision of Prof. Kazuo Tachibana. After spending two years with Prof. Samuel J. Danishefsky at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research (1998-2000), he joined the Graduate School of Science at Tohoku University as an assistant professor in the research group of Prof. Masahiro Hirama. At Tohoku University, he was promoted to lecturer in 2003 and then to associate professor in 2004. In 2007, he moved to the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of Tokyo as a full professor. His research interests include the synthesis, design, and study of biologically important molecules, with particular emphasis on the total synthesis of structurally complex natural products. He has been honored with Novartis Chemistry Lectureship 2008/2009, the 5th JSPS Prize (2008), the Mukaiyama Award 2014, the Swiss Chemical Society Lectureship Award 2017/2018, and the 64th Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award, Japan (2022).

Dmitry Katayev studied chemistry at D. I. Mendeleev Institute in Moscow and earned his PhD in Organic Chemistry from the group of Prof. Peter Künding at the University of Geneva (CH) in the end of 2012. Awarded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) fellowship in 2013 he moved to the group of Prof. Lukas Gooßen at TU Kaiserslautern (DE) as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2015, he joined the group of Prof. Antonio Togni at ETH Zürich (CH) under SNSF return fellowship. He was later awarded the SNSF Ambizione grant and the Holcim Stiftung and started as a group leader at ETH Zürich in mid. of 2017. As a recipient of the SNSF Eccellenza Professorial Grant, he joined the University of Fribourg (CH) as an Assistant Professor in early 2021. Since October of 2022, he is an Assistant Professor with Tenure Track in Organic Chemistry at the University of Bern (CH). His research is focused on developing innovative catalytic strategies for molecular design that are driven by sustainable energy sources and utilize readily available functional group transfer reagents.

Christof received his PhD from the ETH Zurich working in the group of Prof. Ryan Gilmour. He subsequently joined Prof. Dieter Seebach (ETH Zurich) and Prof. Steven V. Ley (University of Cambridge) as postdoctoral researcher. Christof then moved to the University of Basel and became habilitand mentored by Prof. Karl Gademann in 2013, Assistant Professor in 2016 and Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry in 2021. He is recipient of the ETH medal, a SNSF Starting Grant (equivalent to an ERC Starting Grant), the 2017 Werner Prize of the Swiss Chemical Society, the 2018 Ruzicka Prize of the ETH Zurich and an ERC Consolidator Grant.

Peter R. Schreiner is professor of organic chemistry and Liebig-Chair at the Institute of Organic Chemistry at the Justus Liebig University Giessen, Germany. He studied chemistry in his native city at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, where he received his Dr. rer. nat. (1994) in Organic Chemistry. Simultaneously, he obtained a PhD (1995) in Computational Chemistry from the University of Georgia, USA. He completed his habilitation (assistant professorship) at the University of Göttingen (1999), before becoming associate professor at the University of Georgia (Athens, USA), and head of the institute in Giessen in 2002. P. R. Schreiner is an elected member of the Leopoldina – German National Academy of Sciences, the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts, the Academy of Science and Literature (Mainz), the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He received the Dirac Medal (2003, WATOC), the Adolf-von-Baeyer Memorial Award of the German Chemical Society in 2017, the RSC Award in Physical Organic Chemistry of the RSC in 2019, the Academy Award of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Science in 2020, and the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award 2021. He has been a visiting professor at the CNRS in Bordeaux, the Technion in Haifa, the Australian National University in Canberra, and the University of Florida in Gainesville. His research interests include organic reaction dynamics and reactive intermediates, quantum mechanical tunneling as well as London dispersion interactions as probed in the realm of nanodiamonds and organocatalysis. For more information visit

Dave Nicewicz completed his Ph.D. in 2006 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Professor Jeffrey S. Johnson where he finished the total synthesis of Zaragozic Acid C. Nicewicz was then a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratories of the 2021 Chemistry Nobel Laureate, Professor David W. C. MacMillan. It was during this time that Nicewicz pioneered the use of ruthenium photoredox catalysis in combination with chiral amine organocatalysis to develop a general method for enantioselective aldehyde alkylation and more importantly, establishing photoredox catalysis as an emerging tool in organic synthesis. In 2009, Dave started as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2015, full Professor in 2018 and was named the first Royce Murray Term Professor of Chemistry at UNC Chapel Hill in 2020. Dave’s research focuses on the use of organic photoredox catalysts to discover and invent new chemical reactivity. His work has garnered awards from industry such as the Boehringer Ingelheim New Investigator Award (2013), Eli Lilly Grantee (2015) as well as The Hirata Award (Nagoya University; 2017), and the ACS Cope Scholar Award (2022). In 2020, Nicewicz co-founded LED Radiofluidics with Prof. Zibo Li (UNC Radiology) to develop new automated radiolabeling modules and to design new radiotracers/radiotherapeutics.
 https://www.nicewiczlaboratory.com/

Tanja is a Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Konstanz (Germany) since 2015. After postdoctoral studies with Prof. P. S. Baran at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla (CA, USA), she took a position as an independent researcher at the Leibniz University Hannover. Tanja was born in Salzburg, where she studied molecular biology. In 1999 she transferred to Vienna to study chemistry, earning a PhD under the supervision of Prof. J. Mulzer in 2009. For her research she was awarded numerous prizes, including the Award of Excellence of the Austrian Ministry of Science and Education, the GÖCH-Dissertationspreis (Austrian Chemical Society), the LAUDIMAXIMA-Preis of the University of Vienna). In addition, she was awarded an Erwin-Schrödinger postdoctoral fellowship of Austrian Science Foundation. Her research is focused on total synthesis of complex natural products, including sarpagin, a Rauwolfia alkaloid, and taxol derivatives. She also searches for starting molecules that can serve for multiple total syntheses of natural products, taking the synthesis pathways in nature as her model.