Professor Betley completed his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 2005 under the instruction of Professor Jonas Peters. After graduating from Caltech, he was an NIH NRSA postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for 2 years working with Professor Daniel Nocera. He started his academic career in 2007, when he accepted a faculty appointment at Harvard University. He is now the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor of Chemistry. His main research program is in the field of synthetic inorganic chemistry to design new complexes capable of activating unreactive chemical bonds. His lab has made progress in the fields of organometallic and polynuclear coordination chemistry, giving rise to structurally and electronically well-defined species possessing redox-flexibility that perform multi-electron transformations. Reaction chemistry is tailored through ligand design to affect metal-based properties, allowing us to elucidate both structure/function and electronic structure/function relationships. The synthesis of these materials has allowed us to understand their redox behavior and target small molecule activation pathways reminiscent of naturally occurring enzymatic function: ranging from C–H bond functionalization catalysis to small molecule activation pertinent to energy storage. Throughout the years, he has won many early career awards including the NSF Career Award (2010), the AFOSR Young Investigator Program (2011), the DOE Early Career Research Program (2012) and the Henry and Camille Dreyfus Teacher Scholar Award (2013). Most recently in 2013, he was the recipient of the National Fresenius Award and of the NAS Award for Initiatives in Research in area of Catalysis.

Dr. Christian Bruneau graduated as Engineer in Chemistry from Institut National Supérieur de Chimie Industrielle de Rouen in 1974 and received his Ph.D. from École Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Rennes in 1979 in the field of organic and environmental chemistry. He also obtained his habilitation from Université de Rennes in 1991. He took a CNRS researcher position at the National School of Chemistry in Rennes in 1980. Since 1986, he has been developing his research activities at Université de Rennes 1 in the field of molecular organometallic catalysis. He is strongly involved in ruthenium-catalyzed selective transformations of alkynes, alkenes and enynes, cycloisomerization, rearrangement, and addition reactions, including olefin metathesis, allylation, sp² C-H bonds and inert sp³ C-H bond involving catalytic hydrogen transfer sequences, asymmetric catalysis, and bio-resources transformations. He is developing a topic on enantioselective reactions, mainly hydrogenation and allylic substitution with transition metal catalysts. From 2000 to 2011, he was the head of the research unit "UMR-6509 Catalysis and Organometallics" in Rennes.

Dr. Tim Cernak received his Ph.D. from McGill University and was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University before joining Merck Research Labs, Rahway in 2009. As part of the Rahway Discovery Chemistry team, he pursued novel treatments for diabetes and hypertension. He is mainly interested in technology enablement with a focus on applications of catalysis, parallel synthesis, and C-H activation in medicinal chemistry. In 2014, He joined Merck Boston where he is an Associate Principal Scientist with the Automation and Capabilities Enhancement group. In addition, he is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Science Foundation Center in Selective C-H Functionalization.

Dr. Thomas J. Colacot received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from IIT Madras in 1989, following a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Kerala in 1981 and 1983, respectively. After his doctoral and post-doctoral studies in the US, Dr. Colacot went on to pursue an education in management, acquiring an MBA from Pennsylvania State University in 2005, while working at Johnson Matthey. Before joining Johnson Matthey in 1995, Dr. Colacot had also worked as a Research Associate at Southern Methodist University (TX, USA) on a project funded by Advanced Technology Program, as an Assistant Professor at Florida A&M University, and as a Post-Doctoral/Teaching Fellow at University of Alabama. Having climbed up the ranks from Development Associate, Dr. Colacot is currently Johnson Matthey Technical Fellow for Global R&D Manager in Homogeneous Catalysis.
As a researcher, Dr. Colacot has focused on many areas of homogenous catalysis, particularly becoming proficient in palladium-catalyzed cross-coupling. He also has extensive experience in organometallic and organic syntheses, and in process chemistry. His work is reflected in several patents to his name, more than one hundred peer-reviewed publications, and numerous invited lectures and seminars spanning India, USA, China, and Europe. His recently edited book: New Trends in Cross Coupling: Theory and Applications by the Royal Society of Chemistry is widely used in academia and industry. Through his work, Dr. Colacot is credited with being a leading influence in developing exceptional catalytic systems for the advancement of metal-catalyzed synthetic organic chemistry for real world applications such as drug development, OLED's/liquid crystals and agriculture. His emphasis in designing catalysts and catalytic processes has been on their applicability in industrial settings, particularly pertaining to agriculture, electronics and medicine.
Dr. Colacot's contributions to the field have resulted in many awards and accolades, amongst them the prestigious Royal Society of Chemistry 2012 Applied Catalysis Award and Medal, the Chemical Research Society of India (2016 CRSI) Medal, and election to Fellowship of the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK. He is the first Indian to be awarded the American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Industrial Chemistry in 2015. He also received the 2015 IPMI Henry Alfred Award (2015) from the International Precious Metal Institute. Most recently Dr.Thomas Colacot was selected for the 2016 Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras.

Robert Crabtree is a British-American chemist born in 1948. He was educated at New College, Oxford with Professor Malcolm Green, earning a B.A. degree in 1970. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Sussex in 1973, studying under Professor Joseph Chatt. He spent four years in Paris in Professor Hugh Felkin's laboratory at the Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles at Gif-sur-Yvette, near Paris. He was a postdoctoral fellow (1973-1975) and then attaché de recherche (1975-1977). In 1977, he took an assistant professorship in Inorganic Chemistry at Yale University. He served as associate professor from 1982-1985, and as full professor from 1985 until today, where he is also the Whitehead Professor of Chemistry. He is particularly known for his work on "Crabtree's catalyst" for hydrogenations, and his textbook on organometallic chemistry. His research focuses on the design and synthesis of inorganic, coordination or organometallic molecules with unusual structures and properties. These are typically catalytic properties for atom economic (green) transformations, bioinorganic relevance or utility in alternative energy strategies, such as solar energy and hydrogen storage. IN recognition of his teaching and scientific achievements, he has received over the years the A.P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (1981), the Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1982), the Organometallic Chemistry Prize both from the American Chemical Society (1991) and the Royal society of Chemistry (1993), the ISI Highly Cited Author Award (2000) and an ACS Green Chemistry Award (2009).

Henri Doucet received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1994 working under the joint supervision of Pierre H. Dixneuf and Christian Bruneau at Université de Rennes 1. After postdoctoral appointments at Oxford University in the group of John M. Brown during two years (1995-1997) and Nagoya University with Ryoji Noyori during one year (1997-1998), he joined Université de Marseille as Assistant Professor. In 2006, he moved back to his alma mater, Université de Rennes 1 as a CNRS Full Professor in the Catalysis and Organometallics laboratory. The author of 206 research publications and 2 patents, he focuses on the development of sustainable procedures based on C-H bond activation, activation of organic chlorides or bromides and use of relatively non-toxic reactants. We also study ultra-low catalyst loading reactions employing environmentally attractive and industrially viable reaction conditions. His research interests include organic synthesis by metal-catalyzed processes, selective C-H functionalization of (hetero)arenes, ligands synthesis and green chemistry. In 2016, he co-edited with Professor Dixneuf the 2-volume book entitled "C-H bond activation and catalytic functionalization" in the Series Topics in Organometallic Chemistry (Volumes 55 and 56) by Springer.

Rudi Fasan was born in Italy and studied Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Padua, where he received his undergraduate degree (B.S.) with the highest honors in 1999. After serving mandatory military service in Italy and Romania (2000-2001), he joined the group of Professor John Robinson at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) as a graduate student, working on the design and synthesis of beta-hairpin protein epitope mimetics. Upon completion of his Ph.D. in 2005, he joined Professor Frances Arnold's group at the California Institute of Technology as a Swiss National Science Foundation postdoctoral fellow, working on the directed evolution of P450 enzymes for alkane oxidation. He began his independent career as a member of the Department of Chemistry of the University of Rochester in the summer of 2008 and was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 2014. His current research focuses on the design, development, and investigation of novel chemo-biosynthetic and chemo-enzymatic strategies for the discovery of biologically active molecules. Through these methodologies, he develops novel chemical agents useful for probing cell signaling pathways and controlling biomolecular interactions implicated in cancer, malaria, and other diseases. All his projects involve the synergistic integration of rational design, chemical synthesis, protein chemistry, molecular biology, and molecular evolution methods toward the development of enabling molecular discovery platforms of practical and broad utility. His awards as independent investigator include the Provost Multidisciplinary Research Award (2011) and Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award for Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry (2014).

Frédéric-Georges Fontaine obtained his Ph.D. in 2002 from Université de Montréal and was awarded the Academic Gold Medal of the Governor General of Canada for his work on hydrosilane polymerization using nickel(II) complexes, under the supervision of Prof. Zargarian. He did an 18-month postdoctoral stay at UC Berkeley under the supervision of T. Don Tilley as an NSERC postdoctoral fellow before joining the Department of Chemistry of Université Laval in 2004 as Assistant Professor. He rose to the rank of tenure in 2009 and has been Full Professor since 2013. His research group is interested in the synthesis of group XIII ambiphilic molecules either as ligands for transition metals or as catalysts in "frustrated Lewis pair" chemistry. His most notable contributions are in the development of highly active metal-free catalysts for the reduction of carbon dioxide and for the borylation of heteroarenes. He has published more than 65 papers in high-impact journals like Science, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Angewandte Chemie and Chemical Communications.

John Hartwig was born outside of Chicago in 1964 and raised in upstate New York. He received his B.A. degree in 1986 from Princeton University and his Ph.D. degree in 1990 from the University of California, Berkeley under the collaborative direction of Robert Bergman and Richard Andersen. After an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship with Stephen Lippard, he began an appointment at Yale University in 1992, where he was an Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, and full Professor. In 2004, he was named the Irénée P. duPont Professor of Chemistry. Following a brief stay at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as theKenneth L. Rinehart Jr. Professor of Chemistry from 2006 to 2011, he finally moved to his current position of the Henry Rapoport Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the discovery and understanding of new reactions catalyzed by transition metal complexes. He has developed a selective catalytic functionalization of alkanes, a method for formation of arylamines and aryl ethers from aryl halides or sulfonates, a method for the direct conversion of carbonyl compounds to alpha-aryl carbonyl derivatives, a system for the catalytic addition of amines to vinylarenes and dienes, and highly selective catalysts for the regio and enantioselective amination of allylic carbonates. With each system, his group has conducted extensive mechanistic investigations. He has revealed several new classes of reductive eliminations, has isolated discrete compounds that functionalize alkanes, and has reported unusual three-coordinate arylpalladium complexes that are intermediates in cross coupling. A prolific author over 350 papers, book chapters and patents and a sought-after lecturer of over 500 invitations worldwide, he has received numerous honors in recognition of his outstanding achievements in the field of synthetic organic chemistry. These include the Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Awards (1992), the DuPont Young Professor Award (1993), NSF Young Investigator Award (1994), a Union Carbide Innovative Recognition Award (1995, 1996), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (1996), the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (1997), the Eli Lilly Grantee Award (1997), the Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (1997), the Leo Hendrick Baekeland Award (2003), the Thieme-IUPAC Prize (2004), the ACS Award in Organometallic Chemistry (2006), the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (2007), the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award in Organic Synthesis (2007), the Mukaiyama Award (2008), the Paul N. Rylander Award (2008), the IACS Award (2008), the RSC Joseph Chatt Award (2009), the Mitsui Chemicals Catalysis Science Award (2009), the NIH MERIT Award (2009), the GlaxoSmithKline Scholars Award (2010), the Einstein Fellowship (2011), the Herbert C. Brown Award for Creative Research in Synthetic Methods (2013), the Nagoya Gold Medal Award (2014), the Sierra Nevada Section of the ACS Distinguished Chemist Award (2014), the Janssen Pharmaceutica Prize for Creativity in Organic Synthesis (2014), the Organometallics Senior Fellowship (2014), and the J. Willard Gibbs Medal Award (2015). He has also been a Member of the National Academy of Sciences since 2012.

C. Oliver Kappe is Professor of Chemistry at the University of Graz, Austria and Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He received his diploma (1989) and his doctoral (1992) degrees in organic chemistry from the University of Graz where he worked with Professor Gert Kollenz on cycloaddition and rearrangement reactions of acylketenes. After periods of postdoctoral research work on reactive intermediates and matrix isolation spectroscopy with Professor Curt Wentrup at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia (1993-1994) and on synthetic methodology/alkaloid synthesis with Professor Albert Padwa at Emory University (1994-1996), he moved back to the University of Graz in 1996 to start his independent academic career. He obtained his Habilitation in 1998 and was appointed Associate Professor in 1999. Since 2011, he holds the position of Professor of Technology of Organic Synthesis (Organische Synthesetechnologie) at the Institute of Chemistry at the University of Graz. He has also spent time as visiting scientist/professor at the Scripps Research Institute (Professor K. Barry Sharpless, 2003), the Toyko Institute of Technology (Professor T. Takahashi, 2008), the University of Sassari (2008), the Sanford-Burnham Institute for Medical Research (2010) and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (since 2013). The co-author of ca. 350 publications, his main research interests have in the past focused on multicomponent reactions, combinatorial chemistry and the synthesis of biologically active heterocycles. More recently his research group has been involved with enabling and process intensification technologies, including microwave and continuous flow chemistry. For his innovative work in microwave chemistry, he received the 2004 Prous Science Award from the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry and the 2010 Houska Prize in addition to a number of other awards. In addition to his daily responsibilities in Graz, he is currently Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Flow Chemistry and a board member of the Flow Chemistry Society.

Born in Japan in 1965, Fumitoshi Kakiuchi was educated in chemistry under the tutelage of Prof. Shinji Murai at Osaka University, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1993. Soon after, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor at Osaka University. He did his postdoctoral training with Prof. Eric Jacobsen at Harvard University from 1996 to 1997. In 2000, he was promoted to an Associate Professor at Osaka University. In 2005, he moved to Keio University as Full Professor. His research interests include the development of new transition metal-catalyzed reactions. Over the years, he has received the Incentive Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry from Japan (2002), the Commendation for Science and Technology by MEXT: Young Scientist's Prize (2005) and the Mukaiyama Award (2011).

Mark Lautens was born in Hamilton, Ontario. He attended the University of Guelph where he graduated with distinction in 1981. He entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he obtained a Ph.D. with Professor Barry Trost in 1985. He then moved to Harvard University where he completed a 2-year postdoctoral training with Professor David Evans, working toward the synthesis of bryostatin, a potent anti-cancer agent. He joined the University of Toronto in 1987 as an NSERC University Research Fellow and was promoted to Full Professor in 1995. Since 1998, he has held the AstraZeneca Chair in Organic Synthesis. From 2003 to 2013, he was also the holder of an NSERC/Merck Frosst Industrial Research Chair on New Medicinal Agents via Catalytic Reactions. In 2012, he was promoted to University Professor, the highest rank awarded at the University of Toronto and, in 2013, was appointed as J. Bryan Jones Distinguished Professor. He is recognized as one of the top organic chemists of his generation. His specialty is transition-metal catalyzed organic reactions that allow the rapid formation of complex pharmaceuticals and intermediate compounds from simple starting materials. His scientific contributions are focused on finding new ways to prepare medicinally important molecules in an efficient and environmentally sustainable manner and to seek new reactivity patterns that expand on the chemist's toolbox in organic synthesis. To date, he has published well over 300 articles (cited more than 10,000 times), reviews and book chapters on new catalytic reactions to make key structural components of pharmaceutical compounds and bioactive molecules. Over the years, he received many highly competitive honors, including the top organic chemistry awards from the Canadian Society for Chemistry (2004 R. U. Lemieux Award and 2006 Alfred Bader Award). From Canada, he also received the NSERC E. W. R. Steacie Award (1994), the Medal from the Canadian Institute of Chemistry (2013) and the Killam Research Fellowship (2013). From the USA, he received the Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (1991), an Eli Lilly Grantee (first non American) and the ACS Arthur C. Cope Award (2006). He was also recognized in Europe with the Solvias Prize (2002), the Alexander von Humboldt Senior Scientist Award (2009) and the 2011 Pedler Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry (first Canadian awardee). In 2001 he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada and became Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK) in 2011. In 2014, he was elected Officer of the Order of Canada, the highest national honor for a citizen.

Christine Luscombe grew up in Kobe, Japan. After receiving her Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge in 2000, she worked with Professors Andrew Holmes and Wilhelm Huck in the Melville Laboratory of Polymer Synthesis at the University of Cambridge, where her research focused on surface modifications using supercritical carbon dioxide for her Ph.D. She received the Syngenta Award for best organic chemistry project for her Ph.D. In January 2004, she joined the group of Professor Jean Fréchet for her postdoctoral, studies where she began her research on semiconducting polymers for organic photovoltaics. During that time, she was the recipient of the Lindemann Fellowship as well as the Trinity College Junior Research Fellowship (University of Cambridge). In September 2006, she joined the Materials Science and Engineering Department at the University of Washington in Seattle. She received a number of young faculty awards, including the NSF CAREER Award (2008-2013), the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2008) and the Sloan Research Fellowship (2010). Her current research focuses on the synthesis of semiconducting polymers for energy applications. She served on the Editorial Advisory Board for Macromolecules and ACS Macro Letters and is currently serving on the Editorial Advisory Boards for Polymer International, Advanced Electronic Materials, and the Journal of Applied Physics. She is also an Associate Editor for the Journal of Materials Chemistry A, is serving on the IUPAC Polymer Education and Polymer Terminology Subcommittees and is the Vice President of the IUPAC Polymer Division..

Professor Mo Movassaghi carried out his undergraduate research with Professor Paul A. Bartlett at UC Berkeley where he received his B.S. in chemistry with honors in 1995. He then carried out his graduate studies with Professor Andrew G. Myers and completed his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 2001 as a Roche Predoctoral Fellow. After a Damon-Runyon Cancer Research Foundation postdoctoral fellowship with Professor Eric N. Jacobsen at Harvard, he joined the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, where his research group focuses on the total synthesis of complex alkaloids in concert with the discovery and development of new reactions for organic synthesis. The Movassaghi group's investigations have been recognized by the Amgen New Faculty Award (2003), the Dale F. and Betty A. Frey Scholar Award of the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation (2004), the Firmenich Career Development Professorship (2004), the NSF CAREER Award (2006), the Beckman Young Investigator Award (2006), the Merck Academic Development Program Awards (2006, 2007), the GlaxoSmithKline Chemistry Scholar Award (2007), the US National Committee/IUPAC Young Observer Fellowship Award (2007), the Amgen Young Investigator Award (2007), the AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award (2007), the Lilly Grantee Award (2007), the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2008), the ACS Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award (2009), the Roche Excellence in Organic Chemistry Award (2009), the Bristol-Myers Squibb Unrestricted Grant in Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award (2009), the ACS Elias J. Corey Award for Outstanding Original Contribution in Organic Synthesis by a Young Investigator (2010), the Sociedade Brasileira de Quimica and American Chemical Society–Young Talents in Science Award (2011), and the Yoshimasa Hirata Memorial Gold Medal (2011).

Shun-Ichi Murahashi received his B.A. degree, M.B. degree, and Ph.D. degree from Osaka University in 1967 under the guidance of Professor Ichiro Moritani. He spent two years (1968-1970) as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University with Professor Ronald Breslow. He was then appointed as Assistant professor in 1963 at the Department of Chemistry (Faculty of Engineering Science) of the Osaka University. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1972 and to Full Professor in 1979. In 2001, He became the Emeritus Professor of Osaka University and then moved to Okayama University of Science, where he stayed until 2014. Prof. Murahashi holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Rennes (France). He succeeded in the first detection of low temperature UV (1963) and flash photolysis (1968) of aryl carbenes. His research focuses on the discovery of new reactions catalyzed by transition metal complexes and organocatalysts. He has developed a method for palladium-catalyzed reactions, which includes alkyl exchange reaction of tertiary amines, cross coupling reaction of organolithium compounds, allylic amination, azidation, carbonylation, asymmetric oxypalladation, a method for C-H functionalization of substrates alpha to heteroatom with transition metal catalysts, and a method for non-salt process with low-valent acid-base ambiphilic catalysts. He discovered many catalytic oxidation reactions with peroxides or molecular oxygen under mild conditions inspired by Cytochrome P450 and flavoenzyme, a method for ruthenium-catalyzed selective oxidation reactions of amines, amides, beta-lactams, phenols, alkenes, and non-activated hydrocarbons, a method for oxidative cyanation of tertiary amines with molecular oxygen (Cross Dehydrogenative Coupling), a method for aerobic flavin-catalyzed oxidation, which includes oxidations of amines to nitrones, asymmetric oxidation of sulfides, and asymmetric Bayer-Villiger reaction. He has published over 400 papers and book chapters. He has received numerous awards in recognition of his outstanding achievement in the fields of organic and organometallic chemistry. These include the Award for Young Chemists of the Chemical Society of Japan (1970), the Merck-Schuchardt Award (1996), the Chemical Society of Japan Award (1997), the Humboldt Research Award (2000), the Minakata-Avogadro Award (2003), and the Special Award in Synthetic Organic Chemistry Japan (2005). He also received the Japan Academy Prize (2010) and the Order of the Sacred Treasure Gold Rays with Neck-Ribbon (2013). He is also a member of Science Council of Japan and was President of the Chemical Society of Japan in 2000.

Magnus Rueping studied at the Technical University of Berlin, Trinity College Dublin and ETH Zürich, where he completed his diploma thesis under the direction of Professor Dieter Seebach. He stayed in the Seebach group and obtained his Ph.D. from the ETH in 2002 working on the synthesis, the structural and the biological aspects of oligo(hydroxybutanoates) and of beta and gamma-peptides. He then moved to Harvard University to work with Professor David Evans on enantioselective transition-metal catalysis. In August 2004, he was directly appointed to a C3-professorship, the Degussa Endowed Professorship of Synthetic Organic Chemistry at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt. After four years in Frankfurt, he received several offers of academic positions and decided to accept a Chair and Full Professorship of Organic Chemistry at RWTH Aachen University. Since 2015, he is also Full Professor at the Catalysis Center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. His group's current research interests include enantioselective organocatalysis, metal- and biocatalysis, new reaction methodology and technology, new materials as well as photochemistry and flow chemistry. Having reached 175 publications, he has received many awards over the years, including the ORCHEM Prize of the German Chemical Society (2008), the Academy Prize of the Academy of Sciences, Göttingen (2008), the EUCHEMS Junior Scientist Grant (2009), the ESOC 2009 Talented Organic Chemist Award (2009), the Novartis Young Early Career Award (2009), the AstraZeneca Research Award in Organic Chemistry (2010). In 2014, he was named the ISI Highly Cited Researcher, top 1% cited publications in the research field.

Zhang-Jie Shi was born in Anhui (China) in 1974. He obtained his B.Sc. from the East China Normal University in 1996 and his Ph.D. in 2001 from the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Professor Shengming Ma. He then moved to Harvard University to undertake a one-year NIH postdoctoral fellowship with Gregory L. Verdine. From 2002–2004 he was a research associate at the University of Chicago with Chuan He. In 2004, he joined the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering of Peking University, where he was promoted to a full Professor in 2008 and appointed to the Cheng Kong Scholar Professorship in 2012. His research focuses on the development of efficient and economic synthetic methodologies as well as the understanding of the intrinsic properties of the inert bonds to meet the requirement of green and sustainable development. His current work is directed towards the transformations of "inert" chemical bonds, including C-O, C-H and C-Cs. He has recently described a new approach to Suzuki–Miyaura coupling, directed rhodium catalysis and rhodium-catalyzed cross-coupling reactions. So far, he has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, which have been cited over 7,100 times by others. As such, he was assigned as a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher in 2014. Over the years, he has received numerous international honors for his seminal contributions to the fields of organometallic chemistry and catalysis. These include the Mr. and Mrs. Sun Chan Memorial Award (2014), the Chief Scientist for "973" Project from MOST (2014), the Second Rank Award of National Natural Sciences (2013, 2007, 2006), the OMCOS Award (2013), the Wuxi Apptec Excellence Chemistry Award for Life Sciences (2012), the Lilly Excellence Chemistry Award (2012), the ACP Lectureship Award (2012), the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award where he was the inaugural Asian recipient (2011), the CCS-RSC Excellent Young Chemist Award (2011), the Distinguished Young Investigator Foundation (NSFC, 2009), the New Star on Creative Research of Beijing City (2009), the P&G Excellent Teaching Award (2008), the CAPA Distinguished Professor Award (2008), the First Rank Fok Ying Tung Education Foundation Award (2008), the CCS-John Wiley Excellent Chemistry Award (2008), the Distinguished Young Chemist Award of Chinese Chemical Society (2007), the Synlett/Synthesis Journal Award (2006) and The First Rank Award of Science and Technology of Shanghai City (2005). Today, he is serving as an Editorial Board member of Organic Chemistry Frontiers.

Doug Stephan FRSC, FRS, obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario, in 1980. After NATO postdoctoral studies with R. H. Holm at Harvard in 1980-1982, he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Windsor, ultimately being appointed Full Professor in 1992. In 2008, he took up a Canada Research Chair and Professorship at the University of Toronto. Author of >410 scientific articles and over 80 patents, his research exploits fundamental studies to target innovative technologies for transition metal and main group catalysis. His most notable work has included catalysts for polymerization, hydrogenation and metathesis, as well as "Frustrated Lewis Pairs" and "electrophilic phosphonium cations." He has won a number of national and international awards and been named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC, 2005) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of the UK (FRS, 2013) as well as corresponding member of the NRW Society for Arts and Sciences in Germany (2014). He was also named to the Thompson-Reuters highly cited list in 2014 and 2105 and to the list of the 2015 "Most Influential Scientific Minds."

Kian Tan obtained his B.S. degree in 1999 from the University of Virginia and Ph.D. degree in 2004 from the University of California at Berkeley under the joint supervision of Professors Robert Bergman and Jonathan Ellman. He continued his scientific development as an NIH postdoctoral fellow in the laboratories of Professor Eric Jacobsen at Harvard University from 2004-2006. After his post-doctoral studies, he initiated an independent academic career at Boston College where he investigated the use of reversible covalent bonding as a means of enhancing reactivity and selectivity for metal and non-metal catalysts. In 2012, he moved to the Novartis Institutes of Biomedical Research (NIBR) to lead the Chemical Technology-Synthesis group. The group focuses on developing and implementing new methodology and technology to accelerate drug discovery through synthesis. Over the course of his career, he has been the recipient of several honors and awards, including the Kavli Fellowship (2012), an NSF CAREER Award (2012), and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (2011).

M. Christina White was born in Athens, Greece where she lived until the age of five. She received her undergraduate degree in biochemistry at Smith College, where she worked with Professor Stuart Rosenfeld in the area of host-guest chemistry. After a brief stint in the biology graduate program at Johns Hopkins University working with Professor Christian Anfinsen, she began her doctoral studies in chemistry under the direction of Professor Gary Posner. During that time, she initiated the hybrid Vitamin D3 analog program in his group. In 1999, she joined Professor Eric Jacobsen's labs at Harvard University as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. During this time, she developed the first synthetically useful methane monooxygenase (MMO) mimic system for catalytic epoxidations with hydrogen peroxide. Christina began her independent career as a member of the chemistry faculty at Harvard University in July of 2002. She joined the department of chemistry at the University of Illinois in the summer of 2005, where she is currently a Professor of Chemistry. Her group's research interests center around the development of highly selective C—H functionalization methods for streamlining the process of complex molecule synthesis. She has received numerous awards including the Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award (2002), the NSF CAREER Award (2006), Fellow of the UIUC Center for Advanced Study (2006), the Eli Lilly Grantee Award (2007), the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), the BMS Unrestricted "Freedom to Discover" Grant (2008), the Pfizer Award for Creativity in Organic Chemistry (2008), Amgen Young Investigator Award (2008), Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals New Investigator Award (2008), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2008), AstraZeneca Excellence in Chemistry Award (2008), Abbott Young Investigator Award (2008), Sanofi Aventis "Visions in Chemistry" (2008), Roche Excellence in Chemistry Award (2009),Cope Scholar Award (2009), Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012), the Royal Society of Chemistry, Merck Award (2013), and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2014).

Jin-Quan Yu received his B.Sc. in Chemistry from East China Normal University. He obtained his M.Sc. from the Guangzhou Institute of Chemistry and his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Following time as a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge, he joined the laboratory of Nobel Prize Laureate E. J. Corey at Harvard University as a postdoctoral fellow. He then began his independent career at the University of Cambridge (2003–2004) before moving to Brandeis University (2004–2007) and finally to the Scripps Research Institute, where he is currently Frank and Bertha Hupp Professor of Chemistry. His research program centers around the discovery of catalytic carbon-carbon and carbon-heteroatom bond forming reactions. To achieve this goal, he has become an expert in the various fields of C-H activation, sustainable catalysis, organometallic chemistry, asymmetric catalysis and ligand design. As he is working to synthesize strains of amino acids for medical use, he collaborates extensively with computational groups via NSF center (Professor Jamal Musaev/Emory University, Professor Ken Houk/ UCLA), as well as pharmaceutical and agrochemical industry (BMS and Syngenta) and Aldrich. Throughout the years, he has received numerous awards, including (to name but a few) the ACS Elias J. Corey Award (2014), the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences (2013), the Mukaiyama Award (2012), the Bristol-Myers Squibb Award (2012), the ACS Cope Scholar Award (2012), the Novartis Early Career Award in Organic Chemistry (2011), the Distinguished Faculty Award of Chinese-American Chemistry and Chemical Biology Professors Association (2009), the Eli Lilly Grantee Award (2008), the Amgen Young Investigator Award (2008), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), the Journal Award for Synlett and Synthesis (2006) and the Camille and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award (2004). He is also a Fellow of American Association for the Advancement of Science (2012) and of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2012