 Harald Kolmar, PhD is Full Professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, where he heads the Department of Macromolecular Biochemistry. He holds a PhD in Biochemistry from the Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen. After postdoctoral studies on protein degradation at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, he obtained a group leader position at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. In 2005, he moved to Technische Universität Darmstadt. His current scientific interests mainly focus on protein engineering and design, aimed at isolating biological macromolecules with prescribed functions via rational design or high throughput screening of combinatorial peptide, microbody and enzyme libraries.
Rolf D. Schmid, PhD is Full Professor and Director of the Institute for Technical Biochemistry at the University of Stuttgart and chairman of the IUPAC Commission of Biotechnology. After postdoctoral studies in France and the USA, he joined the research laboratories of Henkel KGaA in Düsseldorf in 1972 where he became Director of the Biotechnology Laboratories. In 1987, he moved to the 'Gesellschaft für Biotechnologische Forschung' (GBF) in Braunschweig where he headed the Division of Enzyme Technology and Natural Products Research. Dr Schmid holds an MBA from the University of Reutlingen and is founder of consulting company Bio4Business. He has conducted research at the National Institute for Standards and Technology, Gaithersburg, USA, The University of Tokyo, Japan, the Max-Planck Institut für molekulare Anthropologie, Leipzig and the TsinghuaUniversity, Beijing, China and has published numerous Books and articles. Dr Schmid holds more than 70 patents and patent applications. 
Arne Skerra is Full Professor at the Technische Universität München, where he heads the Institute of Biological Chemistry since 1998. He holds a Diplom degree in chemistry from the Technische Universität Darmstadt and a PhD in Biochemistry from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. After post-doctoral studies at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and a group leader position at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysics in Frankfurt/M. he became Associate Professor for Protein Chemistry at the TU Darmstadt. Arne Skerra made several important developments to the field of protein engineering, for example with methods for the biosynthesis of functional antibody fragments in E. coli and the Strep-tagâ technology for the quick purification of recombinant proteins. Furthermore, he is founder of Pieris AG, a biotech company that develops and commercializes Anticalinsâ as a novel class of biopharmaceuticals. Arne Skerra received several fellowships and awards. Currently, he is Speaker of the study group on "Protein Engineering and Design" of the Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (GBM) and he is Chairman of the section "Biochemistry" in the Society of German Chemists (GDCh).
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