Lutz Tietze studied chemistry at the universities of Freiburg and Kiel, Germany, gaining his doctorate under Prof. Dr. B. Franck. He carried out research at MIT in Cambridge, USA, and at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 1975 he gained his lecturing qualification at Münster University, taking up a professorial chair at the University of Dortmund two years later. He has been Professor and Head of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the Georg-August-University in Göttingen since 1978.

Ulf Diederichsen did his thesis at the ETH in Zürich in 1993, becoming full professor in 1999 at the University of Würzburg, after carrying out research with D.P. Curran and H. Kessler. He is currently professor at the department of chemistry at the University of Göttingen.

Andreas Speicher wrote his thesis on organic synthesis in 1994 and became a member of the faculty at the University of Saarland as a lecturer in 2003 and as Akademischer Oberrat in 2005.