Cherie R. Kagan is the Stephen J. Angello Professor of Electrical and Systems Engineering, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania. Kagan graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 with a BSE in Materials Science and Engineering and a BA Mathematics. She earned her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996 working with Moungi G. Bawendi. In 1996, she went to Bell Labs as a postdoctoral fellow and in 1998, she joined IBM’s T. J. Watson Research Center, where she most recently managed the “Molecular Assemblies and Devices Group.” In 2007, she joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania. Kagan is an Associate Editor of ACS Nano and serves on the editorial boards of Nano Letters and NanoToday. The Kagan group’s research interests are in the chemical and physical properties of nanostructured and organic materials and in integrating these materials in electronic, optoelectronic, optical, thermoelectric and bioelectronic devices. The group combines the flexibility of chemistry and bottom-up assembly with top-down fabrication techniques to design novel materials and devices. The group explores the structure and function of these materials and devices using spatially- and temporally-resolved optical spectroscopies, AC and DC electrical techniques, electrochemistry, scanning probe and electron microscopies and analytical measurements. Kagan is co-director of The Penn Center for Energy Innovation and serves on the World Economic Forum, Global Agenda Council on Nanotechnology; on the Department of Energy, Basic Energy Sciences Materials Council; and on the advisory board of the US Summer Schools in Condensed Matter and Materials Physics. She served on the Materials Research Society’s Board of Directors from 2007-2009 and the editorial board of the ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces from 2008-2011

Victor I. Klimov is a Fellow of Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Director of the Center for Advanced Solar Photophysics of the U.S. Department of Energy. He received his M.S. (1978), Ph.D. (1981), and D.Sc. (1993) degrees from Moscow State University. He is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the Optical Society of America, and a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award. His research interests include optical spectroscopy of semiconductor and metal nanostructures, carrier relaxation processes, strongly confined multiexcitons, energy and charge transfer, and fundamental aspects of photovoltaics.

Maria Antonietta Loi studied physics at the University of Cagliari in Italy where she received the PhD in 2001. In the same year she joined the Linz Institute for Organic Solar cells, of the University of Linz, Austria as a post doctoral fellow. Later she worked as researcher at the Institute for Nanostructured Materials of the Italian National Research Council in Bologna Italy. In 2006 she became assistant professor and Rosalind Franklin Fellow at the Zernike Institute for Advanced Materials of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is now full professor in the same institution and chair of the Photophysics and OptoElectronics group. She has published more than 130 peer review articles in photophysics and optoelectronics of nanomaterials. In 2012 she has received an ERC starting grant.

I obtained my PhD degree in applied physics at Ghent University in 2009, studying near-infrared lead salt quantum dots. This was followed by a postdoc on quantum dot emission dynamics at Ghent University in collaboration with the IBM Zurich research lab. In 2012 I joined the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, where I led the Nanocrystal Photonics Lab in the Nanochemistry Department. In 2017 I returned to Ghent University as associate professor, focusing mostly on 2D and strained nanocrystals. The research in our group ranges from the synthesis of novel fluorescent nanocrystals to optical spectroscopy and photonic applications.

Since 2010, Richard D. Schaller has held a joint appointment as both a research scientist in the Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Lab and as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University. Schaller’s research focuses on spectroscopy and physical chemistry of semiconductor nanomaterials From 2002 to 2010, Schaller was a Reines Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow and then a permanent technical staff member at Los Alamos National Lab with Dr. Victor Klimov. Schaller obtained his PhD in physical chemistry from UC Berkeley in 2002 with Prof. Richard Saykally in nonlinear optics and near-field optics. In 2012, he was selected by the National Academy of Sciences as a Kavli Fellow participant.

Haizheng Zhong is a professor of photonic materials in the school of materials science and Engineering at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT). He obtained his B.E. degree in 2003 from Jilin University, and then undertook his Ph.D. studies at the Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ICCAS) from 2003 to 2008. During 2017/04-2017/10, he spent 6 months in UCLA as a visiting student. After that, he worked as  postdoc in  the University of Toronto during 2008–2010. He joined School of Materials Science & Engineering at Beijing Institute of Technology (BIT) as an associate professor in 2010 and was promoted to full professor in 2013. His current research interests are in the area of colloidal quantum dots for photonics and optoelectronics. His recent awards include Xu-Rong Xu Luminescence Best Paper Award (2013), the National Science Foundation for Excellent Young Scholars (2017), Beijing Science and Technology Award (2018, 2/10), 2019 IDW best paper award. Since 2019, he serves as senior editor for The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters and moved to executive editor in 2020.