Johannes Lercher studied Chemistry at the Technische Universität Wien, graduating in 1978. He completed doctoral studies with Prof. Heinrich Noller in 1980. 1982, he spent at Yale University working with Prof. Gary Haller. After returning to the TU Wien he was Assistant and Associate Professor up to 1993. During the following five years (1993-1998) he was Professor of Chemical Technology at the University of Twente, Netherlands. In 1998 he was appointed as Professor of Chemistry at the Technische Universität München as. Since 2011 he is also the Director of the Institute of Integrated Catalysis and Battelle Fellow at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Xiaodong Zou is a full professor and deputy head of the Department of Materials and Environmental Chemistry, Stockholm University. She received her B.Sc. in Physics at Peking University in 1984, and Ph.D. in structural chemistry at Stockholm University in 1995. After a one-year postdoc at Lund University in Sweden, she joined the faculty at Stockholm University in 1996 as an assistant professor, and became professor in structural chemistry 2005. Xiaodong Zou has made important contributions in the development of electron crystallographic methods. Her group has developed several image and diffraction-based methods and software for accurate atomic structure determination of unknown crystals, and solved many complex structures, especially porous materials such as zeolites and metal-organic frameworks. She is the founder of the Berzelii Center EXSELENT on Porous Materials.