Peter J. Stang is a German American chemist and Distinguished Professor of chemistry at the University of Utah. He has also been the editor of the Journal of the American Chemical Society. He is the author of more than 450 scientific publications and several books.

Francois Diederich was born in 1952 in Luxembourg. He received his doctorate in 1979 from the University of Heidelberg and pursued postdoctoral studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. After his postdoctoral qualification at the Max-Planck-Institut fur medizinische Forschung, he joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCLA in 1985 where he became a full professor four years later. In 1992, he moved to the ETH Zurich as a member of the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences. Professor Diederich's research interests, documented in more than 420 publications, range from medicinal chemistry with a focus on molecular recognition studies, to advanced fullerene and acetylene-based materials with novel optoelectronic properties.