Gerard van Koten is emeritus distinguished professor at Utrecht University. He has been involved in the early development of organometallics with the pincer platform with the NCN-bonding motive (first 1976), PCP and SCS. He explored their use as homogeneous catalysts either as such or immobilized on dendrimers (1994) or covalently attached to enzymes (2005), as sensoring materials (SO2 (2000) or I2 (1986)), and as photoactive materials (2000). Particular interest has been directed to study (reversible) C-C bond formation and bond cleavage (1978) processes on the pincer-metal platform. Karl Kirchner is presently Professor of Organometallic Chemistry at the Technical University of Vienna (TU Wien). His expertise is centered around the theme ligand design, synthesis of well-defined non-precious transition metal complexes and their applications in homogeneous catalysis. He obtained his PhD in 1987 from TU Wien with Prof. R. Schmid. After two postdoctoralstays at Washington State University with Prof. J. P. Hunt (1988, 1989) and Nobel laurate Prof. H. Taube at Stanford University (1990), he returned to TU Wien completing his Habilitation in 1994.Marc-Etienne Moret obtained a PhD degree from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ) with Prof. P. Chen in 2009. In 2010, he moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) for postdoctoral research in the group of Prof. J. C. Peters on the activation of N2 by synthetic iron complexes. Since 2012, he is assistant professor in the group of Organic Chemistry and Catalysis at Utrecht University (UU). His research interests revolve around the design of novel ligands for small-molecule activation and catalysis using first-row transition metals.
