Prof. Dr. Tobias Erb is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for Terrestrial Microbiology and Professor at the University of Marburg.
obias Erb's research focuses on the metabolic pathways of microorganisms, especially those involved in the conversion of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2). At the interface of molecular biology, biochemistry, and synthetic biology, he studies the structure and function of microbial biocatalysts (enzymes), modifies their properties using synthetic biology methods, and constructs metabolic pathways that have not been created by natural evolution.

Sabine Flitsch is a German organic chemist and chemical biologist who holds a personal chair in Chemical Biology at the University of Manchester School of Chemistry, where she runs an active research glycobiology research group based in the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre.
Sabine graduated from University of Münster in Germany in 1982 with a first class Diploma in Chemistry. She received a Michael Wills scholarship to study for a D.Phil at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Sir Jack E. Baldwin. She then took up a DAAD Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to work with Professor H. Gobind Khorana until 1988 before returning to Oxford to take up a lectureship in Organic Chemistry for 6 years.
After joining the University of Edinburgh in 1995, Sabine was awarded the Zeneca Research Award in 1996 and the Glaxo Wellcome Award for Innovative Chemistry in 1997. She was also a BBSRC Research Development Fellow from 2001-4 and was recently awarded the Wolfson Merit Award by the Royal Society (2007-2012). In October 2004 Sabine moved to a Chair in Chemical Biology at the University of Manchester in the Department of Chemistry. In 2014 she was awarded the RSC Interdisciplinary Prize for her significant contributions in biological chemistry, in particular carbohydrate chemistry and glycobiology.

Ángel Goñi-Moreno is a researcher at the Center for Plant Biotechnology and Genomics (CBGP, UPM-INIA/CSIC), a joint center between UPM and INIA-CSIC, one of the Severo Ochoa Centers of Excellence in the country. Ángel has a Modality 1 Atracción de Talento (Talent Attraction) contract from the Community of Madrid, which allowed him to join the CBGP (UPM-INIA/CSIC) in September 2020 within the framework of the new Computational Biology and Biosystems and Genomics Program (CsBGP) initiated with the help of the Severo Ochoa Center of Excellence. Ángel is currently integrated into the new area of Synthetic Biology and Bioengineering (SynBIO2) of the CBGP (UPM-INIA/CSIC). He was previously Principal Investigator and Professor at the University of Newcastle, in the United Kingdom (2016-2020). Ángel has a PhD in Computer Engineering (UPM) and gained experience in synthetic biology, systems biology and biophysics during his postdoctoral stays at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom (2010-2013) and at the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB) of the CSIC (2013-2016). His interdisciplinary profile between computer science, engineering and biology gives a unique character to his scientific activity. He was awarded the First Grant Award from the EPSRC (United Kingdom, 2017), and he is currently leading several research projects (AEI Spanish National Plan and CAM Synergy, started in 2021). With a regular presence at seminars, congresses and thematic meetings on biocomputing, this ERC CoG project consolidates Ángel as an international benchmark in the field.

Michael Jewett is a Professor of Bioengineering at Stanford University. He received his B.S. from UCLA and PhD from Stanford University, both in Chemical Engineering. He completed postdoctoral studies at the Center for Microbial Biotechnology in Denmark and the Harvard Medical School. Jewett was also a guest professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). His research group focuses on advancing synthetic biology research to support planet and societal health, with applications in medicine, manufacturing, sustainability, and education.

Hilde Nelissen is group leader at the center for Plant Systems Biology at the VIB and Ghent University. The main focus of her research is to understand how plant organs grow, starting from the maize leaf, which offers an accessible model to study the dynamic changes in the molecular and physiological growth processes. The plants with altered growth characteristics are evaluated with a range of molecular and phenotyping technologies. The past research focused on the translatability of plant biotechnological findings from Arabidopsis to maize, while recent research aims at deepening and applying a highly conserved growth regulatory network.

Zbyněk Prokop is a professor in the Loschmidt laboratories at the Faculty of Science of Masaryk University, where he leads a research group focused on the study of the principles of protein chemistry, the mechanism and kinetics of enzyme catalysis. He received his doctorate in Environmental Chemistry at Masaryk University. He expanded his expertise during stays abroad at the University of Cambridge in Great Britain, the ETH Polytechnic in Zurich, Switzerland, the Technical University of Vienna and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.
His current activities focus on the development of enzyme technologies, the application of advanced biophysical methods for the structural and functional study of proteins, and the use of microfluidics in natural and biomedical sciences. He is the co-founder of Enantis s.r.o., a biotechnology spin-off company of Masaryk University operating in the field of protein biotechnology.

Velia Siciliano received her Bachelor degree in Health Biotechnology and her Master Degree in Medical Biotechnology from the University of Naples Federico II.
In 2012 she obtained her PhD in Human Genetics from Open University UK in a joint program with the Telethon Institute of Genetics and Medicine Naples (TIGEM), and she then moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she worked as postdoctoral fellow at the Synthetic Biology Center and Biological Engineering Department.
She was awarded with the Junior Research Fellowship from Imperial College London where she moved in 2015 to conduct her independent research in the Department of Medicine. In 2017 she won the Proof of Concept grant from SynbiCITE London and she is a partner of a H2020 consortium grant led by Prof. diBernardo (TIGEM, Naples).
Velia joined IIT in September 2017 where she leads the System and Synthetic Biology lab for biomedicine. She is also Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Medicine of Imperial College London.
In 2018 Velia won the MIT Young Innovator Award and the Galileo Galilei Award. She was also selected as one of the 150 "Unstoppable Women" for Science and Innovation.
In 2019 Velia was selected as member of the Global Young Academy.