Professor Nils Metzler-Nolte completed his PhD at the University of Munich in 1994, followed by postdoctoral work at the University of Oxford with M. L. H. Green. In 2000 he was appointed at the University of Heidelberg as Associate Professor and promoted to Full Professor at Ruhr University Bochum in 2006. His research interests include model systems for bioorganometallic enzymes, medicinal organometallic chemistry, and biocompatible nanoparticles. His group runs inorganic and organometallic chemical syntheses, products characterization, and their biochemical investigations. Prof. Metzler-Nolte has been awarded among others the Award for Innovative Teaching by Ruhr University in 2010, the Julius van Haast Award of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2015 and the Award for Outstanding Achievements in Bioorganometallic Chemistry by Elsevier in 2019. He is author of more than 220 papers in international peer reviewed journals with more than 13000 citations and currently holds the position of the Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Biological Inorganic Chemistry.

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Professor Masahiro Yamashita defended his PhD at Kyushu University in 1982. After visiting several universities in Japan and United Kingdom, he took up a full professorship at Tohoku University in 2004 where he is still active as Professor Emeritus. His research target deals with the development of a “Next Generation of Multifunctional Nano-Sciences on Advanced Metal Complexes”. His work encompasses four important key areas: (1) inorganic-organic hybrid electronic states, (2) nano-size and space, (3) bottom-up and self-assembly, and (4) nonlinearity and quantum effects. Prof. Yamashita received many awards such as Award of Inoue Scientific Foundation in 2002, Award for Chemical Society of Japan for Creativity in 2005, Award for Japan Society of Coordination Chemistry in 2014 or The Chemical Society of Japan Award in 2020. He was also awarded an Honorable Doctorate from University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava, Slovakia in 2019. Prof. Yamashita is author of more than 580 original works with more than 17500 citations so far.

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Associate Professor Radovan Herchel defended his PhD at Slovak Technical University in 2005. Then, he spent one year at the University of SS. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava. Afterward, he moved to Palacký University Olomouc in the Czech Republic, where he was appointed Associate Professor at the Department of Inorganic Chemistry in 2015. Since 2018, he has worked as the head of this department. His research interests are devoted to molecular magnetism, mainly systems showing magnetic bistability, namely molecule-based magnets with long-range ordering, single-molecule magnets, and spin crossover compounds. He is also interested in applying theoretical methods in the study of reaction mechanisms and properties of coordination compounds stemming from bioinorganic chemistry. In 2013, he received the faculty medal from the Faculty of Science, P. J. Šafárik University in Košice. He is the author of more than 160 peer-reviewed articles in international journals with more than 3200 citations.

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Professor Jurek Krzystek graduated from Warsaw University with a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in chemistry in 1973 and 1974, respectively. He pursued his graduate studies in chemical physics at the Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, where he received a Ph.D. in 1983 under the supervision of the late Prof. Jerzy Prochorow. There followed two postdoctoral appointments: the first one at the 3. Physics Institute of the University of Stuttgart in Germany (advisers: Dr. Jost-Ulrich von Schütz and the late Prof. Hans-Christian Wolf) and at the Chemistry Department, University of Washington in Seattle, USA (adviser: Prof. Alvin L. Kwiram). Since 1995 Dr. Krzystek has been with the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL, part of Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA). Ever since his Ph.D. days he has specialized in spectroscopy of molecular systems, and in particular, Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR). Using the high magnetic fields generated by the NHMFL magnets, he has pursued the technique of high-frequency and -field EPR (HFEPR) as a characterization technique for various electron spin systems, including but not limited to transition metal coordination complexes, some of them acting as single-molecule or single-ion magnets. Prof. Krzystek is author of more than 180 publications with more than 7000 citations.