Oguz Okay is currently a full Professor of Physical Chemistry at Istanbul Technical University and a principal member of The Turkish Academy of Sciences (TUBA). He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical Engineering from the University of Istanbul in 1977, and a Ph.D. in Polymer Chemistry in 1981 at Vienna Technical University, Austria. He was visiting professor at the University of Stuttgart, Technical University of Dresden, University of Colorado, Boulder, Technical University of Clausthal, and Helmholtz Zentrum Berlin. He is the recipient of several awards including Georg-Forster Research Award from Germany (2015), the Turkish Scientific and Technological Research Council (TUBITAK) Science Award (2005), and Turkish Chemical Society Honorary Member Award (2006). He is an editorial board member of the Turkish Journal of Chemistry (Tübitak), Reactive and Functional Polymers (Elsevier), and one of the series editors of Advances in Polymer Science (Springer). His researchexpertise include design/synthesis of soft and smart polymeric materials. He has 5 patents and has published around 200 scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals. His H-index is 56 with over 10.000 citations.Costantino Creton is currently a C.N.R.S. Research Director at the ESPCI Paris-PSL and the VP research of the same institution. He graduated in Materials Science from the EPFL in Switzerland in 1985. before obtaining his Ph.D at Cornell University in 1991. After a post-doc at the IBM Almaden Research Center (USA), he joined the ESPCI Paris first as a post-doctoral associate in 1993 and, since 1994 as a C.N.R.S. permanent researcher. He was promoted to CNRS research director (equivalent to Professor) in 2001 in the Laboratory of Soft Matter Science and Engineering. His research interests focus on the deformation and fracture of soft polymer materials in the bulk and at interfaces. He has received several prizes and awards including the Adhesion Society’s prize for Excellence in Adhesion Science in 2013. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society, distinguished Professor of the Unviersity of Hokkaido in Japan and received an ERC Advanced Grant in 2016 to work on fracture of soft materials.He has published more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals cited more than 11000 times, and has given more than 110 invited and plenary lectures at international conferences.
