Armin de Meijere studied chemistry at the universities of Freiburg and GAttingen and obtained his doctorate at the latter. Following postdoctoral training under Kenneth B. Wiberg at Yale University in New Haven, USA, he returned to GAttingen 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 GAttingen 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.
FranAois 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 fA1/4r 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 Departmentof Chemistry 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.

Born in 1940, Henning Hopf is Director of the Institute for Organic Chemistry at the TU Braunschweig. After studying chemistry in Goettingen and at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he gained his doctorate 1967, he qualified as a professor in 1972 at the University of Karlsruhe. Three years later he was offered a chair at the University of Wuerzburg and from there followed an offer of a professorship at Braunschweig in 1979. His main areas of research concern hydrocarbon chemistry (alkines, allenes, cumulenes, aromats, cyclophanes, polyolefines, etc.) and mechanistic investigations of high-temperature reactions.

Rolf Gleiter is professor of chemistry at the Universitat Heidelberg. He studied chemistry and finished his doctoral thesis under the supervision of F. Effenberger in Stuttgart in 1964. From 1965 - 1968 he did postdoctoral work in the US, one year with P. v. R. Schleyer at Princeton and two years with R. Hoffmann at Cornell. He completed his habilitation with E. Heilbronner in Basel in 1972. In 1973 he moved as full professor to TU Darmstadt. In 1979 he took his present position. R. Gleiter is interested in intra- and intermolecular bonding properties by synthesizing model systems and investigation of their interactions by physical measurements supported by quantum chemical calculations.

TSE-LOK HO is Professor of Organic Chemistry at National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan. His research interests are in organic synthesis, including total synthesis of natural products and methodology. He has written 23 books, including, most recently, Stereoselectivity in Synthesis, available from Wiley. Dr. Ho holds degrees from National Taiwan University and the University of New Brunswick, Canada.