Dr. Sergio Papa is a professor of Biochemistry at the University of Bari, where he contributed to establish the Department of Medical Biochemistry and the Institute of Biomembranes and Bioenergetics of the Italian Research Council. He is MD and LD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. His research concerned various aspects of mitochondrial bioenergetics: substrate metabolism, mechanism of oxidative phosphorylation, allosteric mechanism of redox proton pumps, mitochondrial extension of the cAMP cascade, and mitochondrial diseases. He contributed to establish and run the International Bari Conferences on Bioenergetics, held regularly from 1965 up to now, and is a recipient of the Italian National Prize “Guido Dorso” for the Section Research 1984; Mendel Medal of Czech Academy of Sciences 1988; Professor Honoris Causa Lomonosov State University, Moscow; and Professor Honoris Causa, Moron University Argentina.

Dr. Maurizio Brunori (MD and Docent in Biochemistry) is Emeritus at the Department of Biochemical Sciences, Sapienza University of Rome, where he was offered the Chair of “Chemistry and Biochemistry” of the Faculty of Medicine, in 1974. Brunori is member of several Academies, such as the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), the Accademia Europea, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (USA), Honorary Member of the ASBMB and Fellow of the American Biophysical Society. Among several recognitions, he was the winner of the Premio Nazionale del Presidente della Repubblica awarded by the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, and Officier de l'Ordre National du Mérite du Président de la République Française.

Brunori made numerous seminal contributions to the biochemistry and biophysics of proteins, with investigations on the structure–function relationships, molecular evolution and patho-physiology of metalloproteins involved in the transport and metabolism of oxygen/nitric oxide, and in electron transfer and energy transduction. Initially he worked very extensively on the allosteric properties and the evolution of hemoglobins and unveiled the molecular basis of physiological adaptation to evolutionary pressure for oxygen delivery. Over the last period, he focused his attention (i) on the structural dynamics of proteins as followed by time resolved Laue crystallography and transient spectroscopy; and (ii) on the mechanism of protein folding and the structure of intermediates and transition states. His attention for biomedicine emerged continuously during his whole career, ever since his early work on hemoglobin.