David Dean is a professor of physics at the Laboratoire d'Ondes et Matiere d'Aquitaine at the Universite de Bordeaux, France. He is also the president of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Institute Henri Poincare, Paris, and in 2006, he was part of the junior promotion of the Institut Universitaire de France. His research interests include the statistical mechanics of soft matter, disordered systems, and stochastic processes.

Jure Dobnikar is a senior scientist at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge, UK, and Jöef Stefan Institute Ljubljana, Slovenia. His current research includes nanoparticle organization in polymer layers, self-assembly and non-equilibrium dynamics of magnetic colloids, the role of multivalent binding in cellular immune response, and modeling of bacterial motility.

Ali Naji is an associate professor of physics at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM), Tehran. His research interests include Coulomb fluids and highly charged soft and biological matter such as charged polymers, membranes and colloids, electrostatics of DNA complexes, diffusion processes on ruffled biological membranes, and Casimir effect in disordered systems.

Rudolf Podgornik is a professor of physics at the Department of Physics, University of Ljubljana; scientific councillor at the Theoretical Physics Department, Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana; and an adjunct professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, USA. His main scientific interests are Coulomb systems, soft matter, macromolecular physics, and biophysics.