Professor Werner Buckel (1920-2003) became a professor at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1960 after receiving his PhD at the University of Erlangen. Except for three years which he spent establishing the Institute for Superconductivity at the Research Center in Jülich, Germany, he remained at the Technical University of Karlsruhe until his retirement in 1985. Among other honorary positions, Professor Buckel held the chair of the president of the German Physical Society and the European Physical Society and was a member of the Heidelberg Academy of the Sciences and the Leibnitz Society, Berlin. He died in February 2003.

Professor Reinhold Kleiner, born 1962, studied general physics at the Technical University of Munich, and there received his PhD in 1992 with a thesis on intrinsic Josephson efects in high temperature superconductors. After spending two years at the University of California at Berkeley, he returned to become assistant professor at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany. In 2000, Reinhold Kleiner accepted a position as a full professor for experimental solid-state physics at the physics institute of the University of Tübingen, Germany. His research interests include superconductivity and magnetism, with a focus on Josephson effects and superconducting quantum interferometry.