Mathias Christmann was born in Peine, located in Lower Saxony, Germany, in1972. He studied chemistry in Braunschweig (1993-19998) and Hannover (1998-2001) and obtained his doctorate under the guidance of Markus Kalesse. After a postdoctoral appointment with Craig J. Forsyth at the University o Minnesota (2001-2002), he began his independent research career associated with Dieter Enders at the RWTH Aachen in 2003. His research interests include organocatalysis and natural product synthesis.

Stefan Brase, born in Kiel, Germany in 1967, studied chemistry in Gottingen, Bangor (UK) and Marseille. He obtained his doctorate in 1995under the guidance of Armin de Meijere in Gottingen, Bangor (UK) and Marseille. He obtained his doctorate in 1995 under the guidance of Armin de Meijere in Gottingen. After postdoctoral appointments at Uppsala University (Jan Backvall) and The Scripps research Institute (K. C. Nicolaou), he began his independent research career at the RWTH Aachen associated with Dieter Enders in 1997 and finished his "Habilitation" in 2001. He became Professor at the University of Bonn that same year and Full Professor of Organic Chemistry at the technical University of Karlsruhe in 2003. His research interests include asymmetric metal-catalyzed processes and combinatorial chemistry towards the synthesis of biologically active compounds.