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Silvia Arber is a Swiss neuroscientist holding a Full Professor position at the Biozentrum of the University of Basel and a Senior Group leader appointment at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research (FMI), in Basel, Switzerland.

She is recognized for her work on the organization and function of neuronal circuits controlling movement. Silvia Arber received her PhD from the University of Basel (1996) and carried out her postdoctoral work at Columbia University in New York (1996-2000). She received numerous prizes and honors, including most recently the Brain Prize from the Lundbeck Foundation (2022), and being elected international member of the National Academy of Sciences (USA).

Stanislas Lyonnet is Professor of Genetics at Paris Descartes University since 1995, and a clinical geneticist at Hôpital Necker-Enfants Malades. As the principal investigator of an INSERM group (Genetics and embryology of malformations), founding member of the Imagine Institute, he has conducted several studies aiming to localize and identify the genes involved in inborn errors of development. He is the author or co-author of 350 publications in peer-reviewed journals.

He is responsible for the European Master of Genetics (Paris Descartes-Paris Diderot), and served as a member of the INSERM Scientific Advisory Board. He was responsible for launching the Rare Diseases Research Program of the French National Agency for Research (ANR). He is a section editor of the European Journal of Human Genetics, and a member of the editorial board of Human Molecular Genetics.

Stanislas Lyonnet was awarded the Jean Hamburger prize in 2006, the INSERM Research Prize in 2009, and the Collery Prize (National Academy of Medicine) in 2012. He was elected President of the European Society of Human Genetics in 2013.

Dr Detlef Weigel is a world-renowned plant biologist and currently director of the Department of Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen.

Working with the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana, Dr Weigel has made seminal contributions to our understanding of the onset of flowering, but also flower development itself, notably with the discovery of the flower regulator LEAFY and the flower inducer FT. Furthermore, Dr Weigel demonstrated the importance of microRNAs for plant development notably by isolating the first microRNA mutant in Arabidopsis.

More recently, Dr Weigel has pioneered the use of massively parallel sequencing (Illumina) to study genetic variation in the model organism Arabidopsis thaliana and to address more general plant evolution issues. Dr Weigel's group built the first haplotype map outside mammals and generated comprehensive whole-genome databases for numerous Arabidopsis accessions (e.g. the 1001 Genomes project). This notably allowed the research community to conduct genome-wide association studies (GWAS). More recently, Dr Weigel's group has become interested in how epistatic interactions lead to plant autoimmune responses (hybrid necrosis).