Armin de Meijere studied chemistry at the universities of Freiburg and Gvttingen and obtained his doctorate at the latter. Following postdoctoral training under Kenneth B. Wiberg at Yale University in New Haven, USA, he returned to Gvttingen in 1971 to gain his lectureship qualification. He became Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Hamburg in 1977, and took up the same chair at the University of Gvttingen in 1989, where he is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Chemistry.
Armin de Meijere has been visiting professor at universities in the USA, Israel, Italy, France, as well as at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. He was elected a member of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1992, and in 1996 received the Alexander von Humboldt-Gay Lussac Prize of the French Ministry for Higher Education and Research. In 1997 he was elected member of the Braunschweigische Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft, and as an Honorary Professor of the St. Petersburg State University, Russia.
He is editor or member of the Editorial Board for a number of scientific journals, periodicals and books, while his own achievements have been published in over 520 publications.
Frangois 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 (UCLA). After his postdoctoral qualification at the Max-Planck-Institut f]r medizinische Forschung, he joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA in 1985 where he became a full professor four years later. In 1992, he moved to the ETH Zurich as a member of the Department ofChemistry and Applied Biosciences. Professor Diederich's research interests, documented in more than 420 publications, range from medicinal chemistry with a focus on molecular recognition studies, to advanced fullerene and acetylene-based materials with novel optoelectronic properties.