Magnus Berggren received his MSc in Physics in 1991 and graduated as PhD (Thesis: Organic Light Emitting Diodes) in Applied Physics in 1996, both degrees from Linköping University. He then joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ in the USA, for a one-year post doc period focusing on the development of organic lasers and novel optical resonator structures. 

In 1997 he teamed up with Opticom ASA, from Norway, and former colleagues of Linköping University to establish the company Thin Film Electronics AB (ThinFilm). From 1997 to 1999 he served Thin Film as its founding managing director and initiated the development of printed electronic memories based on ferroelectric polymers. 

After this, he returned to Linköping University and also to a part time manager at RISE Acreo. In 1999, he initiated the research and development of paper electronics, in part supported by several paper- and packaging companies. Since 2002, he is the professor in Organic Electronics at Linköping University and the director of the Laboratory of Organic Electronics, today including close to 90 researchers. 

Magnus Berggren is one of the pioneers of the Organic Bioelectronics and Electronic Plants research areas and currently he is the acting director of the Strategic Research Area (SFO) of Advanced Functional Materials (AFM) at LiU. In 2012 Magnus Berggren was elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 2014 he received the Marcus Wallenberg Price. He is also the co-founder of 7 companies: ThinFilm, Invisense, DP Patterning, Consensum Prodcution, OBOE IPR, OBOE Players and Ligna Energy.

Education

2000: Ph.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Medical School. Supervisor: Prof. Wolf Singer, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany.

1998: M.D. from Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Medical School, Frankfurt, Germany.

Professional experience
Since 2009: Director of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience in Cooperation with Max Planck Society, Frankfurt, Germany. 

Since 2008: Scientific Member of the Max Planck Society. Since 2008 Professor of Systems Neuroscience, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

2001 - 2009: Principal Investigator, F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.

1999 - 2001: Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Dr. Robert Desimone, Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

1998 - 1999: Postdoctoral Research Fellow with Prof. Wolf Singer, Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Department of Neurophysiology, Frankfurt, Germany.

1998 - 1999: Residency at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University, Frankfurt, Medical School, Department of Psychiatry, Frankfurt, Germany.

Róisín M. Owens is Professor of Bioelectronics at the Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology in the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Newnham College. She received her BA in Natural Sciences (Mod. Biochemistry) at Trinity College Dublin, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Southampton University. She carried out two postdoc fellowships at Cornell University, on host-pathogen interactions of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in the dept. of Microbiology and Immunology with Prof. David Russell, and on rhinovirus therapeutics in the dept. of Biomedical Engineering with Prof. Moonsoo Jin. From 2009-2017 she was a group leader in the dept. of bioelectronics at Ecole des Mines de St. Etienne, on the microelectronics campus in Provence. Her current research centers on application of organic electronic materials for monitoring biological systems in vitro, with a specific interest in enhancing the biological complexity and adapting the electronics to be fit for purpose. She has received several awards including the European Research Council starting (2011), proof of concept grant (2014) and consolidator (2016) grants, a Marie Curie fellowship, and an EMBO fellowship. She currently serves as co-I and co-director for the EPSRC CDT in Sensor Technologies, renewed in 2019. She is a 2019 laureate of the Suffrage Science award. From 2014-2020, she was principle editor for biomaterials for MRS communications (Cambridge University Press), and she serves on the advisory board of Advanced BioSystems and Journal of Applied Polymer Science (Wiley). In 2020 she became Scientific Editor for Materials Horizons (RSC). She is author of 100+ publications and 2 patents and her work has been cited more than 6000 times.

Eleni Stavrinidou is an Associate Professor and leader of the Electronic Plants group at Linköping University. She received a PhD in Microelectronics from EMSE (France) in 2014. She then did her postdoctoral training at Linköping University (Sweden) during which she was awarded a Marie Curie fellowship. In 2017 Eleni Stavrinidou became Assistant Professor in Organic Electronics at Linköping University and established the Electronic Plants group. She received several grants including a Swedish Research Council Starting Grant and she is the Coordinator of the HyPhOE-FET-OPEN project. In 2019 she received the L’ORÉAL-UNESCO For Women in Science prize in Sweden. In 2020 she  became Associate Professor and Docent in Applied Physics. The same year she was awarded the Future Research Leaders grant of the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research. Her research interests focus on organic electronics for plant monitoring and  optimization, energy applications and bio-hybrid systems.

Thomas Stieglitz was born in Goslar in 1965. He received a Diploma degree in electrical Engineering from Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe (now: KIT), Germany, in 1993, and a PhD and habilitation degree in 1998 and 2003 from the University of Saarland, Germany, respectively. In 1993, he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Biomedical Engineering in St. Ingbert, Germany, where he established the Neural Prosthetics Group. Since 2004, he is a full professor for Biomedical Microtechnology at the Albert-Ludwig-University Freiburg, Germany, in the Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK) at the Faculty of Engineering and serves as deputy spokesperson of the Cluster BrainLinks-BrainTools, board member of the Intelligent Machine Brain Interfacing Technology (IMBIT) Center and spokesperson of the profile neuroscience / neurotechnology of the university. His research interests include neural interfaces and implants, biocompatible assembling and packaging and brain machine interfaces. Dr. Stieglitz has co-authored about 170 peer reviewed journal publications, 330 conference proceedings and holds 25 patents. He is co-founder and scientific consultant of CorTec GmbH and neuroloop GmbH, two spin-off companies which focus on neural implant technology and neuromodulation, respectively. Dr. Stieglitz is Fellow of the IEEE and serves the EMBS in the neuroethics group and the technical committee of neural engineering, the German Biomedical Engineering Society (DGBMT im VDE) where he is chair of the Neural Prostheses and Intelligent Implants section, the Materials Research Society. He is also founding member of the International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society (IFESS).

Darren is an Associate Professor and the Director of Research at the School of Pharmacy, University of Auckland. His main research drive is the use of materials to communicate with and influence the body through microelectrode arrays and the intelligent delivery of drugs.

The team’s research has demonstrated the ability of conducting polymer coatings to improve the performance of sensing and stimulating bio-electrodes. Darren has expertise in releasing different drugs in a controlled fashion from a range of injectable and implantable platforms. His translational and multidisciplinary research aims to address currently unmet health demands. The technologies my team design and test are used in implantable medical devices to answer fundamental research questions and to treat spinal cord injury. In the future these implants could be used for diagnostic purposes and as a platform for novel treatment strategies in tissues responsive to chemical and electrical cues.

As an academic pharmacist he work with scientists, health professionals and patients. Darren has built productive collaborations across different disciplines around the world. He is committed to achieving real world translation of research to make a difference to people’s lives.