Born in 1940, Henning Hopf is Director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the TU Braunschweig. After studying chemistry in Goettingen and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he gained his doctorate 1967, he qualified as a professor in 1972 at the University of Karlsruhe. Three years later he was offered a chair at the University of Wuerzburg and from there followed an offer of a professorship at Braunschweig in 1979. His main areas of research concern hydrocarbon chemistry (alkines, allenes, cumulenes, aromats, cyclophanes, polyolefines, etc.) and mechanistic investigations of high-temperature reactions.

Rolf Gleiter is professor of chemistry at the Universität Heidelberg. He studied chemistry and finished his doctoral thesis under the supervision of F. Effenberger in Stuttgart in 1964. From 1965 - 1968 he did postdoctoral work in the US, one year with P. v. R. Schleyer at Princeton and two years with R. Hoffmann at Cornell. He completed his habilitation with E. Heilbronner in Basel in 1972. In 1973 he moved as full professor to TU Darmstadt. In 1979 he took his present position. R. Gleiter is interested in intra- and intermolecular bonding properties by synthesizing model systems and investigation of their interactions by physical measurements supported by quantum chemical calculations.