Jakob Reichel is a member of the Laboratoire Kastler Brossel of the Ecole Normale Superieure (E.N.S.)
and professor of physics at the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris. After studies in Bonn and Munich, he entered the field of ultracold atoms with a PhD at the E.N.S. in Paris. He then joined the team of T. W. Hansch in Munich and started developing what is now known as atom chips. Having obtained a European Young Investigator Award (EURYI) and a Chaire d'Excellence of the French Government, he crossed borders once again and took up his current position in Paris in 2004. His group currently explores the applications of atom chips in quantum information and precision metrology.

Vladan Vuletic received his Ph.D. degree in physics from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munich. While a postdoctoral researcher with the Max-Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, Professor Vuletic accepted a Lynen Fellowship at Stanford University in 1997. In 2000, he was appointed an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at Stanford and in 2003 accepted an Assistant Professorship in Physics at MIT. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2004. Recent awards include a 2003 to 2004 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and the Lester Wolfe Career Development Chair at MIT.