JANINE COSSY graduated from the University of Reims working under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Pierre Pète. After a postdoctoral stay with Prof. Barry Trost (1980-1982) at the University of Wisconsin, she returned to Reims where she became Director of Research of the CNRS in 1990. The same year, she moved to Paris to become Professor of Organic Chemistry at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI ParisTech). She has published over 380 articles and filed thirteen patents in the field of synthetic organic chemistry and natural product synthesis. She is Associate Editor at Organic Letters since 2005.

STELLIOS ARSENIYADIS was born in Greece in 1975. He studied chemistry at the Université Paris XI and received his PhD in 2002 from the Université Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg, France) working under the guidance of Dr. Charles Mioskowski. In 2001, he joined Rhodia ChiRex (Boston, USA) for an eighteen-month internship in collaboration with Prof. Stephen L. Buchwald (MIT, USA). He then spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London (UK) working under the supervision of Prof. Alan C. Spivey, after which he joined Prof. K. C. Nicolaou's group at The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, USA) for an additional postdoc. In 2005, he was appointed by the CNRS as Chargé de Recherche in Prof. Janine Cossy's group. His research interests include the development of new synthetic tools and their application to the total synthesis of complex natural products.