Alfred J. Meixner is a professor of physical chemistry and the director of the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. He studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), where he received his PhD in 1988 and earned his habilitation in Physics from the University of Basel in 1996. His research interests are in optical single molecule spectroscopy, confocal and near-field optical laser-microscopy and optical nanospectroscopy. Monika Fleischer is a professor of physics at the Institute for Applied Physics at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, where she studied physics and received her PhD in 2006. She held an invited professorship at the University of Technology of Troyes and serves on the board of directors of the Tübingen Center for Light-Matter-Interaction, Sensors and Analytics (LISA+). Her research focuses on plasmonic nanostructures, nanofabrication, and optical spectroscopy of hybrid nanosystems. Dieter P. Kern is an emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Applied Physics of the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. He studied physics at the University of Tübingen, where he received his PhD in 1978. He then spent 15 years at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center working on exploratory devices and nanofabrication. In 1993 he initiated the Nanostructures and Nanofabrication chair in Tübingen with emphasis on interdisciplinary applications of nanostructure physics and technology. Christiane Höppener received her PhD degree in physics in 2004 at the University of Münster, where she headed the NanoBioPhotonics group established in 2010. After joining the Institute of Optics at the University of Rochester from 2005 to 2010, she received a research award of the state North Rhine-Westphalia. In 2017 she joined the Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technologies in Jena, where she continues her research in the fields of nano-optics and plasmonics with special focus on TERS. Sebastian Mackowski is a professor of physics at the Institute of Physics, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, where he leads the Nanophotonics Group and heads the Center of Excellence From fundamental optics to applied biophotonics. He earned his PhD in physics in 2002 in the Institute of Physics Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. His research covers plasmonics, organic and carbon materials, artificial photosynthesis, with the common denominator being fluorescence nanospectroscopy. Pierre-Michel Adam has obtained his PhD in Physics in 1995 at the Université de Bourgogne. He then joined the Université de Technologie de Troyes where he is a professor of physics since 2003. His fields of research are nano-optics and nano-spectroscopy, linear and non-linear plasmonics, and surface-enhanced Raman scattering. Raul D. Rodriguez has been a Full Professor at Tomsk Polytechnic University since 2017. He received a PhD in Physics and Chemistry of Nanomaterials with highest honors at the Institut des NanoSciences de Paris, Pierre et Marie Curie University (Sorbonne Universités) in 2009. His research focuses on developing new nanoscale characterization techniques and materials for technological advancements in flexible electronics, biomedicine, optoelectronics, energy, and safety. Pietro G. Gucciardi is Research Director at the Istituto per i Processi Chimico-Fisici of the National Council for Research, in Messina, Italy. He studied Physics at the University of Pisa and received his PhD from the University of Florence in 2001. In 2006 he initiated the Optical Nanotechnologies lab working on exploratory experimental techniques in nano-optics, plasmon-enhanced spectroscopies (SERS/TERS), spectroscopic optical tweezers and 2D materials exfoliation for sensing applications.
