Erwan Poupon is a pharmacist, he obtained his PhD in organic chemistry under the supervision of Dr. Nicole Kunesch and Prof. Henri-Philippe Husson in 2000 at Paris-Descartes University. He was subsequently a post-doctoral fellow at the University of California at San Diego working with Prof. Emmanuel Theodorakis. He then joined the faculty at the School of Pharmacy of Paris-Sud University where he is now Professor of pharmacognosy and natural product chemistry. His fields of interest relate to the chemistry of natural products, including biomimetic synthesis and chemical biology.

Bastien Nay obtained his diploma of Pharmacy in 1998 and his PhD in organic chemistry in 2000 under the guidance of Prof. Joseph Vercauteren at the School of Pharmacy of Bordeaux, France. He then joined Prof. J. Stephen Clark's group as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Nottingham, UK. In 2003 he was appointed research scientist at the CNRS, now working and teaching at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where he is managing the natural product chemistry team. His research interests non only concern the synthetic strategies towards natural products, but also their origin and raion d'etre.