Abdou Rachid Thiam holds an engineering degree in Physics from ESPCI Paris and UPMC, where he developed microfluidic tools to study the stability and behavior of emulsions, uncovering fundamental physical mechanisms underlying droplet fusion and coalescence. During his postdoctoral research at Yale University, he applied biophysical approaches to reconstitute vesicular trafficking mechanisms, discovering how the COPI machinery regulates lipid droplet tension and proteome dynamics.

Alexander Scheffold studied Chemistry in Freiburg and Cologne from 1986-1992, Diploma thesis at Miltenyi Biotec. In 1997 he received his PhD at the University of Cologne with Andreas Radbruch. From 1997 to 2007 he established his own lab at the DRFZ Berlin focussing on the T cell-mediated regulation of inflammatory disease. From 2007-2011 he was heading a research group at Miltenyi Biotech developing T cell therapies. From 2012-2018 he was assistant professor of cellular immunology at the Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Raphaël Rodriguez is a Research Director at the CNRS and a Principal Investigator at Institut Curie where he holds the Skłodowska-Curie Chair of Chemical Biology. He acquired the knowledge of chemistry and biology in the United Kingdom under the mentorships of Sirs J. E. Baldwin, S. Balasubramanian and S. P. Jackson (2004-2012). He then established his lab in France to investigate the molecular bases of cancer metastasis and inflammation. He discovered the central role of metals as regulators of cell identity and elucidated basic cellular mechanisms of ferroptosis.

Nicolas Chevrier, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and serves as Scientific Director at the CNRS-UChicago International Research Center for Fundamental Discovery. He received his BS in Biochemistry from the Université de Bourgogne, an MS in Biochemistry and Immunology from the Université de la Méditérranée, and completed his PhD in Immunology at Harvard Medical School in 2012.