Stephane La Barre is a senior research scientist at the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. He obtained his MSc. Degree from Auckland University, New Zealand, and his PhD at James Cook University, Townsville, Australia, before entering CNRS in 1984. His multi-disciplinary career includes marine chemical ecology, natural products chemistry of terrestrial and marine organisms and polymer chemistry. Stephane La Barre is currently the coordinator of the research cluster BioChiMar (Marine Biodiversity and Chemodiversity), and he is developing research on new analytical tools to evaluate and predict environmental changes on coral reefs diversity, both biological and chemical.

Jean-Michel Kornprobst is emeritus professor at the University of Nantes, France. He is engineer in chemistry (Montpellier) and got his PhD at the University of Lyon in 1969. Assistant-professor at the University Paris 7 from 1970 to 1973, he became professor of organic chemistry at the University of Dakar, Senegal and worked on marine natural products from 1974 to 1990 and he created a scuba diving school at Dakar in 1984. He joined the University of Nantes in 1990 and became emeritus professor in 2003. He was responsible for two research programs on manapros at the University of Doha, Qatar, and Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He published more than 100 publications and 3 books. He has recently been an invited professor at the Universities of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, Campinas, Brazil, and Blida, Algeria and he is currently external member of the scientific advisory board of the marine Biotechnology Research Center (MRBC) of Rimouski, Quebec, Canada.