Chad A. Mirkin is the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry and the Director of the Institute for Nanotechnology and the Center for Nanofabrication and Molecular Self-Assembly at Northwestern University in Evanston. Professor Mirkin holds a B.S. degree from Dickinson College (1986) and a Ph.D. degree in chemistry from The Pennsylvania State University (1989). He was a NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before becoming a chemistry professor at Northwestern University in 1991.
Professor Mirkin is known for his development of nanoparticle-based biodetection schemes and his invention of Dip-Pen Nanolithography. He is the founder of two companies, Nanosphere and NanoInk, which are commercializing nanotechnology applications in the life science and semiconductor industries.

Christof M. Niemeyer is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Dortmund (Germany) where he holds the chair of Biological and Chemical Microstructuring. He studied chemistry at the University of Marburg and did his Ph.D. thesis at the Max-Planck-Institut für Kohlenforschung in Mülheim/Ruhr under the supervision of Manfred Reetz. After a postdoctorate with Charles Cantor at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology in Boston (USA) he went back to Germany, where he worked with Dietmar Blohm at the University of Bremen to complete his habilitation before moving to Dortmund as a full Professor in 2002. He is interested in semisynthetic DNA-protein and DNA-nanoparticle conjugates and their applications in life sciences, catalysis and molecular nanotechnology.