Assistant Professor at the Department of Organic Chemistry of the University of Padova since 1983, Maurizio Prato was appointed Associate Professor of Organic Chemistry in the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of Trieste in 1992, becoming Full Professor in 2000. He did research at Yale University, New Haven, USA (1986-87), University of California, Santa Barbara, USA (1991- ninety two). He was Professeur Invité at the Departments of Chemistry of the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 2001, at the University of Namur, Belgium, in 2010 and at ISIS, University of Strasbourg, in 2014, University of Mons in 2018. He obtained an ERC grant in 2008 and one in 2020, was appointed Member of the Accademia dei Lincei in 2010, of the European Academy of Sciences in 2013, of the Academia Europaea in 2015 and of the Venetian Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts in 2018. He has published more than700 articles in high-impact international journals, for a total of over 70,000 citations and an h-index of 114 (web of science). He is Associate Editor of Scientific Reports (Nature Journals) since 2015 and of ChemSusChem (Wiley, since 2015). He is a member of the International Advisory Board of Chemical Physics Letters (Elsevier), ACS Nano (ACS from 2014). He has received numerous awards, including the Blaise Pascal Medal, from the European Academy of Sciences (2013) the Natta Gold Medal, Italian Chemical Society (2014), the European Carbon Association Award (2015), French-Italian Chemical Societies Award, (2015), ACS Nano Lectureship Award, American Chemical Society (2015), Highly Cited Researcher (Chemistry, Thomson Reuters), 2005-2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, ChemPubSoc Europe Fellow (2018), Francqui Chair, Fondation Francqui Stitching, Brussels, Belgium (2018), Smalley Award, Electrochemical Society (2019).
His research interests include the organic functionalization of carbon nanomaterials for applications in nanomedicine and materials science, the synthesis and structural determination of organic compounds with potential biological activity, new synthethic methods, organic and bioorganic reaction mechanisms.

Ute Kaiser received her Diploma and her PhD in Crystallography (Physics) from Humboldt University Berlin and her Habilitation in Experimental Physics from Jena University, Germany, in 2002. Since 2004 she is full professor at Ulm University (Physics Department) and Head of the Central Facility of Materials Science Electron Microscopy. Her research interests comprise the areas of TEM methods and instrumentation development, optimization, and applications. By means of her unique SALVE (Sub Angstroem Low Voltage Electron microscopy)instrument (www.salve-center.de), she dedicates her work to understand the interaction of the electron beam with low-dimensional specimens to unravel, modifyand calculate their crystallographic and electronic properties.

Dr. Alberto Bianco received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Padova (Italy). As a visiting scientist, he worked at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland), the University of Tübingen (Germany), as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow, the University of Padova and Kyoto University (Japan) in 2019. He is currently First Class Research Director at the CNRS in Strasbourg. His research interests focus on the design of multifunctional carbon-based nanomaterials for therapy, diagnostics and imaging. He has published more than 300 articles in high-impact international journals, for a total of over 41,500 citations and a h-index of 84 (Google Scholar). He was included in the 2015 and 2016 Thomson Reuters list of the top 200 most cited chemists.He has beenelected Fellow of the European Academy of Science in 2017and of the Academia Europaea in 2020.In 2019 he obtained the CNRS Silver Medal. Since 2011 he is Editor of the journal CARBON.

Claudia Backes is currently a junior research group leader in Applied Physical Chemistry at Heidelberg University. Claudia conducted her doctoral studies under the supervision of Prof. Andreas Hirsch and received her Ph.D with honors in 2011. After a brief time in a cluster of excellence in Erlangenas deputy executive director, she moved to Jonathan Coleman’s groups at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland in 2012 with a fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG). In 2015, Claudia returned to Germany and joined Heidelberg University. In 2016, she was awarded with the prestigious EmmyNoether funding from the DFG to establish her own research group at the Physical Chemical Institute. Since then, she won several awards for junior researchers (Hengstberger Award, Lautenschläger Award, ETH Young Materials Scientist Award). Claudia’s ~90 peer-reviewed papers are well received by the community (Web of science “Highly Cited Scientist”).Claudia is interested in unravelling fundamental properties and relationships between structure and function in 2D materials. To this end, individual layers with controlled dimensions are isolated from layered bulk crystals in the liquid phase, their size-dependent properties studied and means to modify their surface and to deposit them in a controlled manner developed.

Prof. Thygesen develops and applies first-principles methods based on density functional theory and many-body perturbation theory to describe the electronic structure of materials with a particular focus on two-dimensional (2D) materials and van der Waals heterostructures. He is also interested in data-driven approaches to materials design and the development of automatized high-throughput workflow software. Prof. Thygesen is heading the section for Computational Atomic-scale Materials Design (CAMD) at the Technical University of Denmark, where he co-develops the GPAW electronic structure code, the Atomic Simulation Environment (ASE), and the Computational Materials Repository (CMR).

Elena Besley obtained her PhD in Physics and Mathematics from St.Petersburg State University, Russia, in 2000. Currently, Elena Besleyis Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry and Head of Materials Chemistryat the University of Nottingham, UK. From 2019, she is also co-director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sustainable Hydrogen. Her research involves the development of theoretical and computational approaches to prediction of materials properties with a focus on multiscale modeling; electrostatic interactions at the nanoscale; gas storage and interactions in porous solids. Elena is a member of the expert database of Outstanding Female Scientists and Scholars, AcademiaNet,which was set up in 2010 by the Robert Bosch Stiftung, in cooperation with Spektrum der Wissenschaft (Nature Publishing Group), and launched by German Chancellor Dr. Angela Merkel.