Francesc Illas (1954) obtained his chemistry degree and Ph. D at the Universitat de Barcelona where he became Full Professor of Physical Chemistry in 1992. He visited different research centres (IBM Almaden Research Center and Los Alamos National Laboratory)  and has been invited professor at Universita’ della Calabria  and Université Pierre et Marie Curie. He received the Distinguished Professor Mention for the Research Promotion awarded by the Generalitat de Catalunya in 2001, the Bruker Physical Chemistry Research Award of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry in 2004 and the ICREA Academia Award in 2009 and again in 2015. In 2009 was elected Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he joined the Editorial Board of Surface Science and of Theoretical Chemistry Accounts. In 2017 he was elected member of Academia Europeae. He published over 600 papers which received more than 22000 citations (WoS h-index = 73; Google Scholar h-index = 80). 

Marta Cascante is Full Professor at the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at University of Barcelona (UB) and leader of the Integrative Systems Biology, Metabolomics and Cancer team. She holds a degree in chemistry and a PhD in biochemistry from UB, where she was distinguished with the Outstanding Graduate and Thesis Awards. She has authored over 270 publications, two of them cited in Stryer biochemistry textbook and supervised over 30 PhDs. She is partner of three European translational research projects (H2020) in the field of systems medicine and metabolomics and coordinator of several Spanish funded research projects. She is member of the editorial advisory boards of Metabolomics and BMC Syst. Biol. She served in the scientific committee of numerous international conferences. Marta Cascante has been distinguished with Icrea Academia Prize 2010 & 2015, the Narcís Monturiol Medal 2015 and the Antoni Caparros Prize 2016 for scientific and knowledge transfer merits

Jaume Casademunt (1962) got a degree in Physics in 1985 with honors, and a PhD in Physics in 1988, as MEC fellow, at the University of Barcelona. In 1989-91 got a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Pittsburgh, and in 1991-93 was a research associate at Supercomputer C. Res. I. (Tallahassee). He became associate professor at the UB in 1993, and full professor in 2017. He has been invited as visitor at I. Curie (Paris), Max Planck PKS I. (Dresden), and PBT/TU Berlin. In 2016 he was appointed International Visiting Chair at the Lab of Excellence CelTisPhyBio (I. Curie/ESPCI). His contributions span the area of nonequilibrium physics, recently focused in biophysics. He is recognized for pioneering a nonlinear physics approach to biological problems. He has led international projects and served in international funding agencies and top journals (APS outstanding referee). Member of the Editorial Board of the new open access journal ‘Biophysica’.

Isabel Cacho is Associated Professor at the University of Barcelona since 2008. She graduated in Geology in 1992 and earned her PhD in 2000 at the UB. She was affiliated to the Godwin Laboratory from the University of Cambridge as a post-doctoral researcher from 2000 to 2003 and a fellow of the US-COMER Foundation during 2003-2004, associated to Columbia University. She has published over 80 research papers with more than 4500 citations. She has also been member of several national and international research committees. In 2016 she was granted with a prestigious ERC-consolidator grant. In 2018 she implemented in the UB a new and unique infrastructure in the state for the analysis of radiogenic and other rare isotopes, currently it is open to several scientific applications.