Maksym Kovalenko has been a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at ETH Zurich since July 2011 and Associate professor from January 2017. His group is also partially hosted by EMPA (Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology) to support his highly interdisciplinary research program. He completed graduate studies at Johannes Kepler University Linz (Austria, 2004-2007, with Prof. Wolfgang Heiss), followed by postdoctoral training at the University of Chicago (USA, 2008-2011, with Prof. Dmitri Talapin). His present scientific focus is on the development of new synthesis methods for inorganic nanomaterials, their surface chemistry engineering, and assembly into macroscopically large solids. His ultimate, practical goal is to provide novel inorganic materials for rechargeable Li-ion batteries, photovoltaics, and optoelectronics. He is the recipient of an ERC Starting Grant 2012, Ruzicka Preis 2013 and Werner Prize 2016

Ulrike Woggon studied Physics at the Friedrich-Schiller University Jena and the Humboldt-University in Berlin, Germany. In 1985 she received her PhD in Experimental Physics from the Humboldt-University in Berlin. In 1992 she was awarded with a grant for habilitation by the German National Science Foundation (DFG) and went to the group of Prof. Klingshirn were she conducted research on semiconductor quantum dots using various methods of ultrafast laser spectroscopy and nonlinear optics. In 1995 she got the habilitation from the University of Kaiserslautern with a thesis on "Optical Properties of Semiconductor Quantum Dots" which has been published as a monograph in Springer Tracts in Modern Physics in 1996. From 1993 to 1997 she was in charge of a research group on optical spectroscopy of II-VI quantum dots at the Institute of Applied Physics at the University of Karlsruhe. In 1997 she became a full-time Professor at the Department of Physics in Dortmund, heading a group of about 10 members working on problems of quantum coherence in semiconductor nanostructures, photonic structures and microsphere cavities, single-dot spectroscopy at nanocrystals and quantum dots and quantum-dot based devices. In 2008, she became a Professor at the Institute of Optics and Atomics Physics of the Technical University Berlin (TU). Ulrike Woggon has published more than 190 peer-reviewed journal papers and several book chapters. Her current research interests are focused on ultrafast spectroscopy of semiconductor quantum dots, on nanophotonics, in particular semiconductor nanostructures of mixed 0D-2D dimensionality, and nanoplasmonics with hybrid materials. She is a member and Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), a member of the Material Research Society (MRS), and the German Physical Society (DPG). For OSA she was one of the Program Chairs of the International Quantum Electronics Conference (IQEC), San Francisco 2004 and served several times as committee member in the QELS subcommittee "Nanooptics and Nanoplasmonics" in 2000 (San Francisco), 2001 (Baltimore), 2006 (Long Beach), and 2008 (San Jose).