Georg Häcker holds the chair of Medical Microbiology at Freiburg University and heads the Department of Microbiology and Hygiene at the University Medical Centre. He studied medicine in Ulm, Germany, where he qualified as a medical doctor and received an MD degree in 1991. Following clinical training at the Technical University Munich he did a post-doc at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia, where he was first introduced to cell death research. Upon his return to Munich he started his own research lab at the Technical University and completed the specialist training in medical microbiology and the habilitation in medical microbiology and immunology. He was made associate professor at the Technical University Munich in 2000 and moved to Freiburg in 2009. His scientific interests focus on cell death signaling and connected signaling pathways and their roles in responding to microbial infection and in the defence against infectious disease. Model systems in his research include neutrophils, T cells, cell death signaling in normal and malignant cells and a number of models of infection in cell culture and in mice.

Dr. Christoph Borner is Professor in Medical Cell Research at the Institute of Molecular Medicine at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany. He studied biology and received his PhD degree in 1988 at the University of Basle, Switzerland. This was followed by five years of postdoctoral training in cancer and apoptosis research at Columbia University, New York and University of Lausanne, Switzerland, respectively. He joined the Institute of Biochemistry of the University of Fribourg, Switzerland as Assistant Professor where he obtained his habilitation in biochemistry in 1998. Since 2000 he has been Associate Professor and since 2006 Full Professor of the above institute in Freiburg, Germany. Since 2006 he is also the director of the Spemann Graduate School of Biology and Medicine (SGBM), an institution funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Excellence Initiative. His research focuses on the mechanism of apoptosis, in particular how death stimuli impinge on the family of Bcl-2 proteins, which act as life-or-death decision devices on the mitochondrial membrane. He has been using proteomics and cellular approaches to identify and characterize new Bcl-2 binding partners, to unravel novel components of caspase-independent death signaling and to study how viruses and fungal toxins kill human cells by apoptosis. Moreover, he applies systems and synthetic biology techniques to understand the apoptotic/mitogenic switch of Fas signaling and the mechanisms of mitochondrial outer membrane permeabilization (MOMP).