Rigoberto C. Advincula is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry of the University of Houston. He obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of the Philippines in 1987 and his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Florida seven years later.
He was Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research in 1995 and the following year a Research Fellow at the Department of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University. In 2003, Dr. Advincula was one of the recipients of the Arthur K. Doolittle Award given by the Polymer Materials Science and Engineering division of the American Chemical Society. His current research interests are in the area of organic and polymer materials as applied to nanoscale building blocks and phenomena, with applications focusing on electro-optical properties, biofunctional systems, and surface modifiers.

William J. Brittain is currently Professor at the University of Akron, Department of Polymer Science. He obtained his bachelor's degree from the University of Northern Colorado in 1977 and his PhD in Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in 1982.

Kenneth C. Caster is currently Senior Research Scientist within the Center for Biologically Inspired Materials and Materials Systems at the Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University. He obtained his bachelor's degree from Stetson University in 1979 and his PhD in Chemistry from Duke University in 1983. He was a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Florida from 1983 to 1985, thereafter he spent 18 years in industrial R&D, first at Union Carbide Corporation in new product development and catalysisresearch, followed by 9 years at Lord Corporation, as principle investigator of new materials research in the Lord Materials Division. In 1998, Dr. Caster was joint-winner of the Lord Corporation Chemical Products Division Technical Achievement Award for innovation and development of Contact Metathesis Polymerization. He has extensive experience from basic R&D to process development, and his areas of expertise include ring-opening metathesis polymerization, organophosphorus chemistry, catalysis, ligand design and synthesis, heterocyclic chemistry, and small molecule molecular modeling.

Jurgen Ruhe has been Professor for Chemistry and Physics of Interfaces at the University of Freiburg since 1999 and since 2001 he is also director of the Institute for Microsystems Technology. Prior to this, he was associate professor at the Max-Planck-Institute for Polymer Research. He has been visiting scientist at the IBM Almaden Laboratories, at the RIKEN Institute in Tokyo, Japan, the Cavendish Laboratories of Physics, Stanford University and Georgia Institute for Technology. Professor Ruhe has won the prize for Chemistry awarded by the Academy of Sciences in Gottingen (1999) and the DECHEMA award 2001. His research interests are directed towards the development of new methods for the generation of tailor-made surfaces and the use of polymers in nanosciences and microsystems technology.

Krzysztof Matyjaszewski is currently J.C. Warner University Professor of Natural Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, USA. He is also Director of Center for Macromolecular Engineering at CMU and adjunct professor at University of Pittsburgh and at Polish Academy of Sciences. He is the editor of "Progress in Polymer Science" and "Central European Journal of Chemistry." His research group is involved in several areas of macromolecular engineering, especially in synthesis of various well-defined copolymers using atom transfer radical polymerization and other controlled/living polymerization techniques. He is author of over 400 peer-reviewed publications, over 50 book chapters, 8 books and 26 US patents.

Yves Gnanou is currently the Director of the "Laboratoire de Chimie des Polym貥s Organiques" at Bordeaux University (France) and Director of Research with the "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique." He is also an adjunct professor at University of Florida (Department of Chemistry-Gainesville) and was a visiting professor at the Massachussets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA. His research interests focus on the study of the mechanism of chain polymerizations and the development of miscellaneous polymeric architectures by novel synthetic methods. He is author of more than 160 peer-reviewed publications in the field of polymer chemistry, 1 book and 16 patents.

Ludwik Leibler is currently Director of Research with the "Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique" and Professor of Soft Matter and Chemistry at Ecole de Physique et Chimie Industrielles in Paris. His background includes stints in academia, in government, and in industrial laboratories.His current projects deal with macromolecular and supramolecular systems and in particular with blends, copolymers, and networks. He authored more than 130 papers in peer-reviewed journals. In 2004, Dr. Leibler has been elected as Foreign Associate of National Academy of Engineering (USA).