About the Author: Armin de Meijere became Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Hamburg in 1977, and took up the same chair at the University of Gottingen in 1989. Since 2006 he is emeritus professor of the University of Gottingen.
Armin de Meijere has been visiting professor at universities in the USA, Israel, Italy, France, Spain, Japan, Taiwan, 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 was awarded the Adolf-von-Baeyer Medal by the Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker in 2005 and received the title Doctor honoris causa by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2009.
He is and has been editor or member of the Editorial Board for quite a number of scientific journals, periodicals and books, while his own achievements have been published in over 710 publications.

Stefan Brase was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1967 and studied chemistry in Gottingen, Bangor (UK) and Marseille (France). In 1995, he obtained his doctorate after working with Armin de Meijere at the University of Gottingen. After post-doctoral appointments at Uppsala University, Sweden (J.-E. Backvall) and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, USA (K. C. Nicolaou), he began his independent research career at the RWTH Aachen associated with Dieter Enders in 1997 and finished his habilitation in 2001. He became Professor at the University of Bonn that same year. Since 2003, he is Full Professor at the University of Karlsruhe - in October 2009 renamed to the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Stefan Brase has published more than 300 publications and is recipient of the ORCHEM award in 2000. His research interests include methods in drug discovery (including drug delivery), combinatorial chemistry towards the synthesis of biologically active compounds, total synthesis of natural products and nanotechnology.

Martin Oestreich (born in 1971 in Pforzheim/Germany) is currently Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Technische Universitat Berlin. He received his diploma degree with Paul Knochel (Marburg, 1996) and his doctoral degree with Dieter Hoppe (Munster, 1999). After a two-year postdoctoral stint with Larry E. Overman (Irvine, 1999-2001), he completed his habilitation with Reinhard Bruckner (Freiburg, 2001-2005) and was appointed as Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Westfalische Wilhelms-Universitat Munster (2006-2011). He also held visiting positions at Cardiff University in Wales (2005) and at The Australian National University in Canberra (2010).