Yan Xia received his B.Sc. from Peking University (2002), M.Sc. from McMaster University (2005), and Ph.D. from Caltech (2010). Following his PhD, he worked at Dow chemical company for 1.5 years and then postdoc at MIT. He joined the chemistry faculty at Stanford in 2013 and was promoted to associate professor in 2020. His research interest lies in the design, synthesis, and manipulation of organic materials and polymers, driven by new synthetic capability, rational molecular design, and curiosity. Masahiko Yamaguchi received his PhD degree (1982) from The University of Tokyo under the guidance of Professor T. Mukaiyama. He joined Kyushu Institute of Technology in 1982 as assistant professor and was promoted to associate professor in 1985. From 1987 to 1988, he worked as a post doctorate fellow at Yale university with Professor S. Danishefsky. He moved to Department of Chemistry, Tohoku University in 1991. In 1997, he was appointed as full professor in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences of Tohoku University. He received the Chemical Society of Japan Award for Young Chemists in 1986, the Synthetic Organic Chemistry Award, Japan in 2007, and the Chemical Society of Japan Award in 2016. Since 2020, he is Emeritus Professor of Tohoku University. Tien-Yau Luh obtained his Ph.D. degree from the University of Chicago and did his postdoc at the University of Minnesota. He began his academic career at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1976, moved to National Taiwan University in 1988, retired in 2016 and reappointed as Distinguished Chair Professor. He has authored 300 publications, received numerous awards in Taiwan and a JSPS fellow in Japan, served as a member of Advisory Boards of several prestigious chemistry journals such as Chem Commun., Chem Eur. J., Tetrahedron, Tetrahedron Lett. etc.
