Originally from Venice (Italy) Licia Verde studied physics as an undergraduate at the Università degli Studi di Padova. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh (UK) sponsored by a Marie Curie grant from the EU, and then moved to a research assistant position at Princeton University and at Rutgers University (USA). At Princeton she held a Chandra postdoctoral fellowship and a Spitzer postdoctoral fellowship and she entered the WMAP science team. She spent 4 years as faculty at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). In September 2007, she moved to Barcelona as an ICREA Research Professor. Verde has received the 2012 Gruber prize in Cosmology, the Narcis Monturiol medal 2017,  the 2018 Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics,  the  premi Nacional de Recerca 2018, and the European Astroniomical Society Lodewijk Woltjier Lecture 2019. 

Anton Vidal graduated in Chemistry at the “Institut Químic de Sarrià” in 1987 and completed his PhD at the same institution in 1992 with Prof. P. Victory. Throughout the two post-doctoral appointments that followed (at the University of Cambridge with Prof. J.K.M. Sanders and the University of Barcelona with Prof. M.A. Pericàs) he studied topical and diverse areas of chemistry such as Supramolecular Chemistry and aspects of Enantioselective Catalysis. He had the opportunity to complement his academic background with the industrial experience gained during his tenure in a number of research departments at Bayer-AG (Leverkusen). Following the appointment as ICREA Research Professor (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies) he started his independent research activities as a Group Leader at the ICIQ in September 2003. In October 2019, he moved as Research Professor to the Department of Inorganic and Organic Chemistry at the University of Barcelona.

M. Ángeles Serrano is an ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Condensed Matter Physics of the University of Barcelona (UB). She obtained her Ph.D. in Physics at UB with a thesis about gravitational wave detection, and a master in mathematics for finance from the Centre de Recerca Matemàtica CRM. After four years in the private sector as IT consultant and mutual fund manager, she returned to academia in 2004 to work in the field of complex networks. She completed her postdoctoral research at Indiana University (USA), the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) and IFISC Institute (Spain). She came back to Barcelona in 2009, when she was awarded a Ramón y Cajal Fellowship at UB. M. Ángeles obtained the Outstanding Referee Award of the American Physical Society. She is a founding member of Complexitat, the Catalan network for the study of complex systems, and a promoter member of UBICS, the Universitat de Barcelona Institute of Complex Systems.