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Anastasia S. Politou is an Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry at the Ioannina University, Faculty of Medicine and an affiliated faculty member of FORTH-IMBB-BR. She holds a B.Sc. in Chemistry from the University of Athens, Greece and M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Chemistry from New York University, USA. She worked as a post-doctoral fellow in the Structural Biology and Biocomputing Program of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) from 1991 to 1996. From 1996 to 1999 she was a Visiting Associate Professor in the Chemistry Dept., University of Crete and in 2000 a Senior Research Fellow, Medical Research Council, National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London, UK. Since 2001 she has been a faculty member of the University of Ioannina. A.S. Politou has published 44 research articles (over 2500 citations, h-index:28). Her group is active in the areas of Structural Biology and Biophysics, Computational/Structural Epigenetics and Transcriptomics. The group has been extensively involved in modeling and structural analysis of protein complexes, in bioinformatics analysis of DNA and protein sequences and in the analysis and evaluation of high-throughput gene expression data. Ongoing research focuses on different aspects of epigenetic regulation and aims at characterizing the structural determinants and dynamics of chromatin-related proteins and protein complexes. Over the years, Anastasia Politou has established and managed several tools and facilities that have been widely used by several teams in Greece and abroad. These include the establishment and management of the first High Resolution NMR facility in Greece (University of Crete) and of the Circular Dichroism and Fluorescence Spectroscopy facility at the University of Ioannina and IMBB-BR, which are included in the National Research Infrastructure Program INSPIRED. She is also the coordinator of the Ioannina team in the national (ELIXIR-GR) and the European consortium (ELIXIR-EU) that supports the biological data and management infrastructure ELIXIR.

G. Kontopidis holds a BSc in Chemistry from the University of Ioannina (1991) and MPhil in Biotechnology from Strathclyde University and a PhD in Structural Biochemistry from the University of Edinburgh (2000). He has worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh (1999-2001) and at as research scientist in the biotechnology company Cyclacel Pharmaceuticals in Dundee UK (2001-2006). He jointed at 2006 the Department of Veterinary Medicine of the University of Thessaly as Assistant, later Associate and recent Professor and Director of Laboratory of Biochemistry in the same Department. His Research interests focus on the discovery of drugs for proteins targets that are involved in pathological conditions such as immunosuppression, cancer, Rheumatoid Arthritis. Proteins targets includes so far CDK2, CDK4, Aurora, PCNA, B-Raf (anti-cancer), TNF-α (Rheumatoid Atheritis), RANKL (Rheumatoid Atheritis). The publication of new putative drug for PCNA was the cover of the journal of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which due to its impact became a press release for the University of Edinburgh, UK. Dr Kontopidis' impact in the field of drug discovery was recognized in 2008 with the award of the Bodosaki Prize in Biomedicine and by the Ministry of Education with the Award of Academic and Scientific Excellence in the field of "Targeting Drugs" In 2012.Dr Kontopidis has contributed to 51 peer-reviewed journal articles, 8 review and preview articles and more than 45 conference papers with and an impact of 26 h-index and over 2300 self excluded citations. He has coordinated 5 research national and international funded projects.