Eric Drockenmuller was born in 1973 in Thionville (France), and received his PhD degree in 2002 from the University of Strasbourg (France) after working on nitroxide-mediated radical polymerization. He undertook a two years postdoctoral position with Prof. C. J. Hawker (IBM Almaden Research Center, California, USA) and Prof. T. P. Russell (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, USA) working on the synthesis and functionalization of nanostructured materials. In October 2004 he was appointed assistant Professor at the University of Lyon 1 (France) and full professor in September 2011 at the same University. He is a junior member of the “Institut Universitaire de France” (IUF) since October 2010. His main interests include controlled radical polymerization techniques, step growth polymerizations, polymer functionalization and polymer materials issued from renewable resources.

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Harm-Anton Klok is Full Professor at the Institutes of Materials and Chemical Sciences and Engineering at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) (Lausanne, Switzerland). He studied chemical technology at the University of Twente (Enschede, The Netherlands) and received his Ph.D. in 1997 from the University of Ulm (Germany) after working with M. Möller. After postdoctoral research with D. N. Reinhoudt (University of Twente) and S. I. Stupp (University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, USA), he joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research (Mainz, Germany) in early 1999 as a project leader in the group of K. Müllen. In November 2002, he was appointed to the faculty of EPFL. His current research interests include peptide/protein-based materials and peptide/protein-polymer hybrids, surface-initiated polymerization and polymer brushes, controlled/”living” polymerization and macromolecular engineering as well as dendritic and hyperbranched polymers.

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Dr Rachel O’Reilly is an EPSRC career acceleration fellow in the Chemistry Department at the University of Warwick. She graduated from the University of Cambridge in 1999 and went on to complete her PhD at Imperial College, London in 2003. She then moved to the US to under the joint direction of Professors Craig J. Hawker and Karen L. Wooley. In 2004 she was awarded a research fellowship from the Royal Commission for the Exhibition for 1851 and in 2005 she took up a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. In 2009 she moved to her current position. Her research focuses on bridging the interface between creative synthetic, polymer and catalysis chemistry, to allow for the development of materials that are of significant importance in medical, materials and nanoscience applications.

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Jan. C. M. van Hest is full professor in bio-organic chemistry at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He conducted his doctoral research on molecular architectures based on dendrimers at Eindhoven University of Technology under supervision of Prof. Bert Meijer, for which the Ph.D. title was granted in 1996. As a postdoctoral researcher he investigated the possibilities of protein engineering for the preparation of materials under supervision of Prof. David Tirrell, at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. From 1997-2000 he worked for the chemical company DSM, and in 2000 he was appointed as a full professor at the Radboud University Nijmegen to set up a new group in bio-organic chemistry. His current research efforts are aimed at developing bio-inspired materials and processes in order to combine the functionality of biological systems with the flexibility and robustness of synthetic structures, using a variety of synthetic techniques, such as protein engineering, peptide synthesis and controlled polymerization methods.

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