François Diederich was born in 1952 in Luxembourg. He received his doctorate in 1979 from the University of Heidelberg and subsequently pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. After gaining his lecturing qualification at the Max-Planck-Institut fizinische Forschung, he joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA in 1985, becoming full professor in 1989. In 1992, he moved to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich as a member of the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences. Professor Diederich's research interests, documented in more than 420 publications, span medicinal chemistry, with a focus on molecular recognition studies, to advanced fullerene and acetylene-based materials with novel optoelectronic properties. He received the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max- Planck-Society (1979), the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1987), the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1992), the Otto-Bayer-Preis f?mie (1993), the Janssen Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis (2000) and the Havinga Medal (2000), the Humboldt Research Prize (2005), the Burkhard-Helferich Prize (2005), and the August-Wilhelm-von-Hofmann-Denkm 2006).

Peter J. Stang is a professor at the University of Utah. Beside many other prices he has received the 2003 American Chemical Society George A. Olah Award in Hydrocarbon Chemistry, the Robert W. Parry Teaching Award in Chemistry in 2000, and the American Chemical Soc. James Flack Norris Award in Physical-Organic Chemistry in 1998. Professor Stang is the author or co-author of 370 scientific publications, including six monographs and 24 reviews. He has been editor for JACS since 2002 and is member of the National Academy of Sciences and the board of directors of the AAAS.

Rik R. Tykwinski received his BSc from the University of Minnesota-Duluth and his PhD from the University of Utah. After postdoctoral studies at the ETH, Zurich, he joined the faculty of the University of Alberta in 1997 where he is now an Associate Professor of Chemistry. Professor Tykwinski has published over 75 research papers.