Markus Reiher obtained his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry in 1998, working in the group of Juergen Hinze at the University of Bielefeld on relativistic atomic structure theory. He completed his habilitation on transition-metal catalysis and vibrational spectroscopy at the University of Erlangen in the group of Bernd Artur Hess in 2002. During that time he had the opportunity to return to relativistic theories when working with Bernd Hess and Alex Wolf. From 2003 to 2005, Markus Reiher was Privatdozent at the University of Bonn and then moved to the University of Jena as Professor for Physical Chemistry in 2005. Since the beginning of 2006 he has been Professor for Theoretical Chemistry at ETH Zurich. Markus Reiher's research interests in molecular physics and chemistry are broad and diverse.

Alexander Wolf studied physics at the University of Erlangen and at Imperial College, London. In 2004, he completed his PhD in Theoretical Chemistry in the group of Bernd Artur Hess in Erlangen. His thesis elaborated on the generalized Douglas-Kroll-Hess transformation and efficient decoupling schemes for the Dirac Hamiltonian. As a postdoc he continued to work on these topics in the group of Markus Reiher at the universities of Bonn (2004) and Jena (2005). Since 2006 he has been engaged in financial risk management for various consultancies and is currently working in the area of structuring and modeling of life insurance products. On a regular basis he has been using his spare time to delve into his old passion, relativistic quantum mechanics and quantum chemistry.