Dr. Caroline Ajo-Franklin is Professor in the Department of BioSciences at Rice University. Her scientific training started in Chemistry; she earned a B.S. in Chemistry at Emory University in 1997 and received her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University in 2004. She then trained as postdoctoral fellow in Synthetic Biology with Pam Silver at Harvard Medical School, and moved to Lawrence Berkeley Lab in 2007 to start her independent research career, and then in 2019, she moved to Rice University as a Professor with appointments in BioSciences, Bioengineering and the Systems, Synthetic, and Physical Biology Program. During her career, has built a strongly interdisciplinary research program focused on molecular-level understanding and engineering of the interface between living organisms and non-living materials.

She obtained a PhD degree in Azerbaijan. She has spent two years in the Institute of Plant Biology, Szeged, Hungary as UNESCO and ITC fellow. She has joined the Molecular Plant Biology unit at the University of Turku as a postdoctoral research fellow in 2002. Currently she is acting as a PI of the 'Photosynthetic microbes' team. Since 2017 she is  Associated Professor of Molecular Plant Biology. She mainly focuses on cyanobacterial / algal research and the alternative electron-transport routes, which are heavily involved in regulation of photosynthesis via maintaining redox homeostasis in cells. She is a co-chair of the Nordic Center of Excellence “Towards Versatility of Aquatic Production Platforms: Unlocking the Value of Nordic Bioresources” (NordAqua, www.nordaqua.fi) funded by NordForsk (2017-2022) and a chair of the Biocity Turku Research Programme “Advanced Bioresources and Smart Bioproducts – Towards Sustainable Bioeconomy” (SmartBio, www.smartbio.fi).

Julea Butt is Professor of Biophysical Chemistry at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. She graduated from Oxford University in 1989 with a degree in Chemistry, pursued research for her PhD at the University of California, Irvine, USA and post-doctoral research at the National Institutes of Health, USA and Wageningen University, Netherlands. In 1997 she joined the University of East Anglia as a Wellcome Trust Career Development Fellow and was subsequently appointed as a lecturer (2001), reader (2004) and professor (2010). Throughout her career Julea has pursued multi-disciplinary studies for molecular level understanding of the functional properties of electron transfer proteins, both the fundamentals and the opportunities for solar conversion. She collaborates with research teams across the UK and internationally and in 2015 was awarded a Royal Society Senior Research Fellowship.

I am currently an Full Professor at the University of Bonn (Germany), Department of Chemistry. My overarching motivation is to discover and implement the chemistry necessary to transition to a sustainable energy-based society. Specifically, I am developing materials to convert electrical energy to fuels and chemicals.

I am Professor of Microbiology at Queen Mary, University of London, UK. My research interests are on the cell biology of cyanobacteria, including photosynthesis, membrane biogenesis, light perception and signal transduction, motility and multicellularity.

Nicolas Plumeré started his undergraduate studies at the University of Strasbourg, France, and after two years switched to Glasgow, UK, where he graduated with a honours degree in Chemistry in 2004 with a first class distinction. He continued his studies as a PhD student at the University of Tübingen, Germany, where he obtained his PhD with Summa cum Laude in 2009. After a short fellowship position as researcher at the company NECi, in the USA, Nicolas Plumeré became a group leader at the Center for Electrochemical Sciences, Faculty for Chemistry and Biochemistry, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany in 2010. Here, he has built up his own research group and was promoted to a tenured professorship in analytical chemistry in 2017. He was awarded the prestigious ERC Starting Grant in 2016, followed by an ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant in 2018. He currently serves as one of the PIs of the Excellence Cluster RESOLV from the German Research Foundation that started in 2019. He is strongly invested in his scientific community notably by acting on the council of the Bioelectrochemical Society and as an advisory board member of Chemical Science, the flagship journal of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was awarded the 2019 Luigi Galvani prize (which is awarded biannually to a scientist under the age of 45 who has shown excellence in the field of bioelectrochemistry). In 2018, he co-founded the company Silverbear specialized in point-of-use sensing for smart agriculture.

The Plumeré lab at the Ruhr-University Bochum has specialized in interfacing biocatalytic systems and electrodes for application in energ conversion and energy conversion schemes.. The expertise of the group includes organic chemistry for synthesis of redox interfaces, electrochemistry for quantification of electron transfer pathways, mathematical modeling for predicting photocurrent and electrochemical microarrays for biomolecule screening. Notable achievements include electrochemical sensing for aplications in precision agriculture and electrocatalytic processes for biophotovoltaics and biofuel cells