Chuanbing Tang is Associate Professor and College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of South Carolina. He received his B.S. degree in Polymer Science from Nanjing University and Ph.D. in Chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University under the direction of Krzysztof Matyjaszewski and Tomasz Kowalewski. He was also a postdoctoral researcher with Craig Hawker and Edward Kramer at the University of California at Santa Barbara. His research interests include organic polymer synthesis, sustainable polymers from renewable natural resources, metal-containing polymers, and polymers for biomedical application. He has been recognized with a few awards including South Carolina Governor?s Young Scientist Award, NSF Career Award, Thieme Chemistry Journal Award and USC Distinguished Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. He has also been named a Breakthrough Rising Star at the University of South Carolina and an ACS PMSE Young Investigator. He has published over 100 papers and 10 patents.

Chang Y. Ryu is Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and Director of New York State Center for Polymer Synthesis at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). He completed his B.S. and M.S. in Chemical Technology at Seoul National University and received his Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering at the University of Minnesota under the direction of Tim Lodge. He served as a postdoctoral researcher with Ed Kramer and Glenn Fredrickson in the Materials Research Laboratory at the University of California at Santa Barbara and started his faculty position at RPI in 2000. He has been awarded the IUPAC Young Observer Award (2007), NSF CAREER Award (2005), and the Arthur K. Doolittle Award from the ACS Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering (1998). His research focuses on macromolecular separation and adsorption, block copolymer self-assembly, and photopolymerization as well as structure-property-relationships of polymeric materials.