Raffaella Buonsanti obtained her PhD in Nanochemistry in 2010 at the National Nanotechnology Laboratory, University of Salento. Then, she moved to the US where she spent over five years at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, first as a postdoc and project scientist at the Molecular Foundry and after as a tenure-track staff scientist in the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis. In October 2015 she started as a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering at EPFL. She is passionate about materials chemistry, nanocrystals, understanding nucleation and growth mechanisms, energy, chemical transformations.

Dr. Andreas Riedinger received his Diploma in chemistry from the Philipps-University Marburg. He did his thesis on the synthesis and functionalization of gold nanoparticles with analyte-sensitive fluorophores with Prof. Wolfgang Parak (Physics Department, Philipps-University Marburg), where he first came in touch with nanotechnology. He then moved to the Italian Institute of Technology (Genoa, Italy) where he did his PhD in Nanoscience in the group of Prof. Liberato Manna and Dr. Teresa Pellegrino. Central points of his dissertation were the synthesis und functionalization of magnetic, plasmonic and fluorescent nanocrystals with stimuli-responsive molecules and polymers, and the measurement of nanometric temperature profiles around magnetic nanocrystals under alternating magnetic field excitation. Later he joined the Optical Materials Engineering Laboratory of Prof. David J. Norris at the ETH Zürich (Switzerland) as a postdoc, working on the synthesis and doping of colloidal nanocrystals and the formation mechanisms of quasi-2D nanocrystals. In 2017 he joined the MPIP as group leader in the physical chemistry of polymers department.

Alexander S. Urban studied Physics at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany) obtaining an equivalent to an M.Sc. degree (German: Dipl. Phys.) at the University of Karlsruhe (Germany) in 2006. During his studies he spent a year at Heriot Watt University (UK), where he obtained an M.Phys. in Optoelectronics and Lasers in 2005. He then joined the Photonics and Optoelectronics Chair of Jochen Feldmann at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich (Germany) in 2007 where he worked on the optothermal manipulation of plasmonic nanoparticles, earning his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 2010. He expanded his expertise in the fields of plasmonics and nanophotonics in the group of Naomi J. Halas at the Laboratory for Nanophotonics at Rice University (Houston, TX, USA), beginning in 2011. He returned to the LMU in 2014 to become a junior group leader with Jochen Feldmann, where he led the research thrusts on optical spectroscopy, focusing on hybrid nanomaterials such as halide perovskite nanocrystals and carbon dots. In 2017 he was awarded a prestigious Starting Grant from the European Research Council and shortly after that in 2018 he received a call as a Full Professor of Physics (W2) at the LMU.  Here, he now leads his own research group working on nanospectroscopy in novel hybrid nanomaterials.