Vincenzo Barone was born in 1952. After graduating in 1976, he continued his education at the Universities of Marseille, Grenoble, Paris, Erlangen-Nurnberg, Montreal and Berkeley. He became an Associate Professor in 1982 and a Full Professor in Physical Chemistry in 1994 at the Federico II University of Naples. Since 2008 he has served as Full Professor in Theoretical and Computational Chemistry at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa.

He is Dean of Classe di Scienze Matematiche e Naturali Director of the DreamsLab at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and fellow of the Accademia dei Lincei, Royal Society of Chemistry, International Academy of Quantum Molecular Sciences and European Academy of Sciences. He was President of the Italian Chemical Society (SCI) between 2011 and 2013, chair of CM1002- CODECS COST Action (2010-2014), and recipient of the Luigi Sacconi, Cesare Pisani, and Gian Battista Bonino medals. In 2013 he got an Ideas ERC Advanced Grant (DREAMS).

Barone has authored more than 700 papers in ISI journals and several book chapters with more than 43000 citations and an h-factor of 76; 8 papers were cited more than 1000 times. The most significant scientific contributions include fundamental developments in Density Functional Theory, solvation theory, and computational spectroscopy, together with state-of-the-art applications in materials chemistry, life sciences, nanosciences, and cultural heritage.

The scientific activity has been accompanied by intense and continuous efforts in promoting the role of chemistry in Italy, both to other disciplinary communities and concerning the more general public perception. As a more recent example of openness to different communities, mention the realization, at the Scuola Normale Superiore, of the DreamsLab Centre, the virtual reality laboratory headed by Prof. Barone, which includes a virtual "microscope" and “telescope", based on 3D Cave Automatic Virtual Environment technology, capable of enabling interactive manipulation of virtual "objects" ranging from the cosmological to the molecular scales.

Barone has been the coordinator of the Chemistry Ph.D. program at the Scuola Normale Superiore since 2009 and has supervised more than 35 Ph.D. students and over 25 post-doc researchers; many of them, including -notably- several female scientists, have brilliantly proceeded in their scientific career.

Hans-Ulrich Reissig was born in 1949. He studied chemistry at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München from 1970-1975 and after doing research under the guidance of Prof. Rolf Huisgen received his doctoral degree in 1978. After a postdoctoral stint with Prof. Edward Piers at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, he started his independent career at the University in Würzburg under the mentorship of Prof. Siegfried Hünig. He took academic positions at the universities in Darmstadt and Dresden, and from 1999-2015 at the Freie Universität Berlin. His research interests are in the field of organic synthesis, in particular in the development of new synthetic methods and their application to the synthesis of natural products and heterocycles. His contributions to samarium diiodide-promoted cyclization reactions were highlighted by one of the shortest and most efficient approaches to the legendary alkaloid strychnine.

So far he published more than 500 peer-reviewed articles and gave almost 300 invited lectures. For many years, he also served as a member of the editorial board of “Liebigs Annalen der Chemie” and of “European Journal of Organic Chemistry” and of various committees of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Since 2012 he has been a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and in 2014 he was honored with the Liebig Memorial Medal of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker. In 2017 he received the Honorary Membership of the Polish Chemical Society.