Chris Slootweg was born in Haarlem (The Netherlands) in 1978 and received his undergraduate education from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2001. After earning his Ph.D. in 2005 under the supervision of Prof. Koop Lammertsma, he pursued postdoctoral studies at the ETH Zürich with Peter Chen. In 2006, he returned to VU to initiate his independent career. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014 and moved to the University of Amsterdam in 2016. The mission of his laboratory is to educate students at the intersection of fundamental physical organic chemistry, main group chemistry and circular chemistry. Andrew Jupp studied chemistry at the University of Oxford (UK) where he obtained his PhD in 2016 under the supervision of Prof. Jose Goicoechea for a study on phosphorus-containing analogues of the cyanate anion and urea. He was awarded the Reaxys PhD Prize in 2015. He subsequently carried out a Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto (Canada) under the guidance of Prof. Doug Stephan, to research the properties and reactivity of frustrated Lewis pairs and main-group Lewis acids. In 2018, he became a NWO VENI laureate, working under the mentorship of Prof. Chris Slootweg at the University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) on the formation and reactivity of radicals in main-group systems. In 2020, he launched his independent career at the University of Birmingham (UK) working on the sustainable synthesis of nitrogen-containing compounds.
