Petr Beier studied MSc at the University of Pardubice, Czech Republic and PhD at St. Andrews University under the supervision of Prof. David O’Hagan, UK (2001–2004). Following the postdoctoral stay with Prof. G. K. Surya Prakash at the Loker Hydrocarbon Research Institute and University of Southern California, USA (2005-2006) he joined the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry in Prague as a group leader. He is the recipient of the Alfred Bader Prize in organic chemistry (2013) and the Royal Chemical Society Fluorine Prize (2017). His research interests are an organic synthesis of main group elements, organofluorine chemistry, methodology development and studies of reaction mechanisms, asymmetric synthesis and biocatalysis.

Thomas Braun studied chemistry at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (1993) and received his PhD under the supervision of Helmut Werner (1997). After postdoctoral work with Pierre Dixneuf (Rennes, 1995) and Robin Perutz (York, 1997-2000), he obtained his habilitation with Peter Jutzi as a mentor at the University of Bielefeld (2003). In 2007, he was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Thomas Braun received the Wöhler Award for Young Scientists (2006), the RSC Fluorine Chemistry Prize (2007), the Fluorine Publication Prize of the Fluorine Subject Group of the German Chemical Society (2015) and Xingda Lecture, Beijing University (2015). From 2010-2012 he served as the chair of the GDCh Fluorine Chemistry division and was from 2009-2018 vice-chair of the DFG Research Training Group GRK 1582 “Fluorine as the Key Element”. From 2010-2012 he was head of the Department of Chemistry at the Humboldt-Universität. His major interests are in fluorine chemistry as well as organometallic and coordination chemistry with an emphasis on the catalytic activation of small molecules. Recently he also turned his attention to heterogeneous catalysis.

Originally a native of Poland graduated from the University of Technology in Łódź as a chemical engineer. He obtained his PhD in 1994 at the Centre of Molecular and Macromolecular Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Łódź, Poland in the field of organophosphorus chemistry (with A. Skowrońska, Department of Heteroorganic Compounds). Subsequently, he relocated to the University of Utah (Salt Lake City, USA) where he pursued research in the field of organometallic chemistry as a research associate under the tutelage of Professor John A. Gladysz. There he gained first-hand insights into the editorial processes from the Associate Editor of Chemical Reviews. In 1999 he was appointed as an Assistant Professor at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan. Subsequently promoted to Associate Professor, and (full) Professor in 2013, he is currently Chair-elect of the Department of Chemistry. He is also affiliated with the Center of Biomedical Research. Dembinski’s research contributions include the area of electrophilic cyclization reactions, the Mitsunobu reaction, fluorous chemistry, organometallic chemistry, nucleoside chemistry, and heterocyclic chemistry. His publications have been cited about 2,000 times. His research has been supported by the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the American Chemical Society – Petroleum Research Fund, amongst others. He has been visiting professor at Wayne State University (Detroit). Currently, Dembinski is visiting the University of Wrocław, Poland, where he is also teaching as a Fulbright scholar. His awards include Oakland University Faculty Recognition (twice) and the Scientific Secretary of the Polish Academy of Sciences Award. He is a member of the American Chemical Society, and he also serves as an Associate Editor of the journal Molecules.

Jörg Feldmann is a founder of the Trace Element Speciation Laboratory (TESLA) at the University of Aberdeen moved in 2020 to the Karl-Franzens-University in Graz. He has done pioneering work to develop elemental speciation and elemental bioimaging methodologies for solving pertinent problems in the environmental and biosciences and in particular creating the foundation for the introduction of new legislation for food contaminants. His work is hypothesis-driven to follow the biotransformation of metals (As, Se, Zn, Cd, Hg) and non-metals (S, I, F) in biological and environmental sciences by using novel elemental speciation methods and bioimaging methods. Prof. Jörg Feldman’s interest is the generation of volatile metal(loid) compounds, and their precursor and metabolite compounds in the environment, especially arsenic speciation in the plant/soil interface and in the marine food chain. The use of HPLC-ICPMS/ESI-MS has been used to identify novel organoarsenicals, while isotopic tracer experiments were used for the dynamic bioimaging using LA-ICP-MS. 
As a Chair in Environmental Analytical Chemistry at the University of Aberdeen, he has developed a field kit that can detect the carcinogenic form of arsenic in rice, without electricity and within an hour. This had a real impact on food safety worldwide, enabling farmers in the developing world to comply with recently introduced World Health Organisation legislation, without needing access to sophisticated analytical systems. Furthermore, he has developed visualisation methods which can locate essential and toxic metals in very small concentrations in organs of animals that suffer from bacterial or fungal infections. This has helped to understand how a mammalian body fights against these infections without the use of antibiotics. The latter may be used in the future to fight antibiotic resistance. 
In 2016, Prof. Jörg Feldmann won the prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry Prize for his work at the interface between chemistry and other disciplines.
Prof. Jörg Feldmann collaborates with a large number of research groups in the UK (Belfast, Cambridge, Liverpool, LGC, etc.), Europe (e.g. Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Island, Ireland, Spain and Sweden) and worldwide (e.g. Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Japan, Nigeria, Malawi, Mexico, Pakistan and the USA).

Jinbo Hu was born in 1973 in Zhejiang, China. After he completed his B.S. degree (1994) from Hangzhou University (now called Zhejiang University) and M.S. degree (1997) from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he did his PhD work from 1997 to 2002 at the University of Southern California (USC) under the guidance of Professors G. K. S. Prakash and G. A. Olah. After his postdoctoral work at USC, he joined the faculty of the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIOC, CAS) in early 2005, where he is currently a full professor and the Head of the CAS Key Laboratory of Organofluorine Chemistry. His research interests include organic fluorine chemistry and fluorinated materials. Jinbo has achieved several ground-breaking fluorination methods which are state-of-the-art in synthetic organofluorine chemistry, e.g, the selective deoxyfluorination of electron-rich alcohols with 3,3-difluoro-1,2-diarylcy-clopropenes (CpFluors), the organocatalyzed Balz-Schiemann fluorination, or the rapid deoxyfluorination ofalcohols with N-tosyl-4-chlorobenzenesulfonimidoylfluoride (SulfoxFluor).  He is the recipient of the RSC Fluorine Prize 2009, Tan Kah-Kee Young Scientists’ Award 2012, the Novartis Chemistry Lectureship Award 2015/2016, the 2022 ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry, and many others.

Ivan S. Kondratov graduated from the University of Kyiv (Ukraine) in 2004 with a Master’s Diploma and got his PhD degree from the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry and Petrochemistry, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine under the supervision of Dr Igor I. Gerus in 2008. He continued his academic career at this Institute and became a Senior Researcher in 2011. In 2011 he started working for Enamine (Kyiv, Ukraine), where he is a Principal Scientist of Medicinal Chemistry currently. He collaborated with Prof. Dr Günter Haufe (University of Münster, Germany). He is the author of 25 original papers mostly in the field of organofluorine chemistry.

Jaroslav Kvíčala studied organic chemistry at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague where he received his PhD in 1987 under the supervision of Prof. Palleta for work on chemistry fluorinated propenes and their derivatives. In 1992 he spent two months at ENSCM Montpellier. In the years 1993-1995, he worked at Swansea University of Wales. From 2003 to 2004 he spend at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he worked with Prof. Joseph Michl. In 2006 he received the Habilitation for work on fluorinated building blocks in organic chemistry and he became Assistant Professor in Organic Chemistry. In 2015 he became a Professor of Organic Chemistry. He is the author of almost 80 original papers mostly in the field of organic chemistry.

Claire Rees, a R&D Manager at Koura – part of Orbia’s Fluorinated Solutions business group, is a highly skilled and successful research chemist with a 15-year proven track record of project managing, leading, and developing multidisciplinary teams of research chemists within the chemicals industry to deliver against targets within time and budget. She is part of a key team that works on future products and application development, significantly expanding the company's capabilities in the area of fluorination catalyst science. As a named inventor on 10 patents with experience in intellectual property, Dr Claire Rees has extensive expertise in catalysis and inorganic chemistry delivering innovative, sustainable and commercially viable solutions. She is also an outdoor adventure enthusiast with a passion for baking and is proud to have won a few Koura baking competitions.

Gerd-Volker Röschenthaler studied chemistry at the University of Saarland, Saarbrücken (Germany). He received his PhD in inorganic chemistry in 1971 from the same University under the supervision of Professor Fritz Seel. In 1972 he moved to the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany) for six years to carry out postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Professor Reinhard Schmutzler. In 1978 he took the position of Professor at the University of Bremen (Germany) and in 2009 at the Constructor University Bremen leading the group of “Organofluorine and Organophosphorus Chemistry”. He has wide-ranging research interests in the synthesis of perfluoroalkylated hypervalent derivatives of phosphorus, sulfur and silicon, the development of fluorinating- and polyfluoroalkylating reagents as well as fluorinated building blocks to modify biological and pharmacologically active compounds. In 2012 he was awarded the Honorary Fellowship of the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion), Haifa (Israel), where he served as a member of the Board of Governors of the same institution. Prof. Dr Gerd-Volker Röschenthaler was honoured with the Medal of Merit of the Adam Mickiewicz University in 2017.

Norio Shibata was born in Osaka (Japan) in 1965. He studied chemistry at the Osaka University of Pharmaceutical Sciences (1988). He received a PhD (1993) in pharmaceutical sciences from Osaka University under the direction of Professor Yasuyuki Kita. He worked at Dyson Perrins Laboratory (Professor Sir Jack. E. Baldwin), Oxford University (JSPS fellow, 1994−1996), Sagami Chemical Research Institute (Dr Shiro Terashima, 1996), after which he was a lecturer at Toyama Medical & Pharmaceutical University (1997−2003), and an associate professor at the Nagoya Institute of Technology (2003−2008). He also acted as a visiting professor (2008, 2012) at the University of Rouen. He has wide-ranging research interests in Fluorine chemistry, including the synthesis of organofluorine compounds; asymmetric catalysis; design of drugs and functional materials. He was awarded the ‘RSC Fluorine Prize’ (2005, UK), ‘The Pharmaceutical Society of Japan Award for Divisional Scientific Promotions’ (2010, Japan), ‘Prizes for Science and Technology, The Commendation for Science and Technology by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’ (2014, Japan), ‘CSJ Award for Creative Work in Chemical Society of Japan’ (2015, Japan), ‘Chinese Chemical Society, W.-Y. Huang Fluorine Prize’ (2015, China), ‘ACS Award for Creative Work in Fluorine Chemistry’ (2019, US) and ‘The 18th Green and Sustainable Chemistry Awards by the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’ (2019, Japan).

Jean-Marc Vincent studied chemistry, then accomplished his Ph. D. thesis work under the guidance of Professor Marc Fontecave and dr Stéphane Ménage at the Université Joseph Fourier in  Grenoble (France) in 1995. In 1996 he moved to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory where he carried out the position of postdoctoral researcher. Next in 1997, he become a research specialist at the Institute of Molecular Sciences (ISM)  in the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) and then in 2005 did a habilitation at the University of Bordeaux. In 2008, he become the Head of the group of Organic Nanostructures and then in 2010 the Research Director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).
His research interest is connected with coordination and supramolecular chemistry, especially in perfluorinated phases as well as photo-induced reactions or catalysis for applications in the synthesis of natural products and their derivatives, and the synthesis of polymers.