Bernard Valeur received his engineering diploma from the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de Paris (E.S.P.C.I.) and his PhD degree from the Université Pierre-et-Marie-Curie (Paris, France), followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA). After being an associate professor at E.S.P.C.I, he became full professor of physical chemistry at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Paris) in 1979, where he is emeritus professor since 2008. Professor Valeur is a member of the laboratory Photophysique et Photochimie Supramoléculaires et Macromoléculaires at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan since 1996. From 1995 to 2000 he served as an elected member of the French Comité National de la Recherche Scientifique. He is the winner of the 2012 Gregorio Weber Award for Excellence in Fluorescence Theory and Applications and author of over 170 articles or book chapters, five books, and the editor of one book. In addition, he is a member of several editorial boards.

Mário Nuno Berberan-Santos graduated in chemical engineering from Instituto Superior Técnico (IST, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal). After a brief stay at the National Research Council of Canada (Ottawa), he received his PhD in chemistry from IST in 1989. He was a post-doctoral fellow with Bernard Valeur at Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers (Paris, France), and at Laboratoire pour l’Utilisation du Rayonnement Electromagnétique (Univ. Paris-Sud, Or- say, France). He is full professor of Physical Chemistry at IST, and was invited full professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Cachan (France). He is a member of several editorial advisory boards and is president of the Portuguese Chemical Society (2010–2012). He has authored over 180 publications, including 150 papers in scientific journals, several book chapters, and was the editor of one book.