Verena Ibl obtained her Diploma and Doctoral degrees from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna. After her Post-Doc training, she established her independent group 2016 at the University of Vienna. 2020, she received her Venia Docendi in Plant Cell Biology. Since March 2024, Verena is Professor at University of Applied Sciences (HTW Dresden) for Botany / Ecophysiology of Plants.

Dr. Michael Katzberg did his PhD studies in the field of biotechnological production of pharmaceutical chiral intermediates and received his PhD from the Technical University Dresden, Germany after a short term stay at Lunds University, Sweden in 2009. Before joining thyssenkrupp he worked as a biotech group leader at University of Mining and Technology Freiberg, Germany. His fields of study were mainly second generation biofuels as well as process development for biotechnologically produced chiral intermediates. He Joined thyssenkrupp in Leuna in 2012 with the start-up of the biotech demo plant there and since then is heading the laboratory and small pilot plant, in which development of thyssenkrupps own biotech processes and projects of most of its customers started (tech transfer, scale-up studies) before they were scaled-up to the demo plant scale.

Joanna Dauner has been a professor of Fundamentals of Design and a research fellow in the School of Design since 2021. Her research and practice focus on materiality and interaction. For her, material plays an active and formative role in the design process, and she is particularly fascinated by dynamic and programmable materials and structures. In her teaching, she takes a participatory-constructivist approach: she gives students the opportunity to actively shape their own learning processes and to independently acquire and expand their knowledge.