James Durrant is Professor of Photochemistry in the Department of Chemistry, Imperial College London and Ser Cymru Solar Professor, University of Swansea. His research addresses the photochemistry of new materials for solar energy conversion targeting both solar cells (photovoltaics) and solar to fuel (i.e.: artificial photosynthesis. It is based around employing transient optical and optoelectronic techniques to address materials function, and thereby elucidate design principles which enable technological development. His group is currently addressing the development and functional characterisation of organic and perovskite solar cells and photoelectrodes for solar fuel generation. More widely, he leads Imperial's Centre for Processable Electronics, founded the UK�s Solar Fuels Network and led the Welsh government funded S�r Cymru Solar initiative. He has published over 500 research papers and 5 patents, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society

Ivan Kassal is an Associate Professor in the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney. He graduated from Stanford University in 2006 and completed his PhD in Chemical Physics at Harvard University in 2010. He is a theorist working at the intersection of quantum science, chemistry, biophysics, and materials science. He pioneered some of the first applications of quantum computers to chemistry, showing they could dramatically accelerate difficult chemical calculations. He has also unravelled ways that photosynthetic organisms use quantum effects to improve their light harvesting, and is using those lessons to better understand next-generation materials, especially organic solar cells. He is a recipient of a DECRA fellowship, a Westpac fellowship, and the Le Fèvre Medal of the Australian Academy of Science for “outstanding basic research in chemistry”.

Prof. Dieter Neher studied physics at the University of Mainz. In 1990 he gained his PhD with Prof. G. Wegner. From 1990-1992 he was a research associate at the Optical Sciences Centre, Tucson, Arizona and at the Centre for Research in Electrooptics and Lasers, Orlando, Florida with Prof. G. Stegeman. 1992 he joined again Prof. G. Wegner at the MPI-P, heading the group Electrooptical Phenomena in Polymers. Following his habilitation in November 1998, he became Professor of Soft Matter Physics at the Institute for Physics and Astronomy at the University of Potsdam. Current research interests are electrical, optical and optoelectronic processes in conjugated materials.