After his MD thesis in medical microbiology Matthias Frosch continued his career from 1986 to 1994 first as a post-doc at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biology in Tübingen and as a group leader at the Medical School Hannover where he became Professor in 1994. Since 1996 Matthias Frosch is director of the Institute for Hygiene and Microbiology at the University of Würzburg. By order of the Robert-Koch-Institute he was appointed head of the German national research center for Meningococcal Diseases in 2002.

Martin Maiden is Professor of Molecular Epidemiology, and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology, University of Oxford. After obtaining his degree at Reading University, he began his research career at the University of Cambridge where he took his PhD degree. Following a Medical Research Council Training Fellowship in the same laboratory, he moved to the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control in Hertfordshire including a sabbatical at the Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. He moved to Oxford in 1997 and is a Fellow of Hertford College. His current research focuses on antigenic diversity and its relationship to genetic diversity in populations of microorganisms, especially Neisseria meningitidis and Campylobacter jejuni.