Professor Kazutoshi Mori was born on July 7th in 1958 in Kurashiki, Okayama, Japan. He graduated from the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Kyoto University in 1981, and then from the Graduate School of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Kyoto University in 1985, and obtained his PhD there. Professor Mori biochemistry in the lab of Dr. Ikuo Yamashina, under the mentorship of Dr. Toshisuke Kawasaki. He was Instructor in the laboratory of Dr. Kyozo Hayashi at Gifu Pharmaceutical University in Gifu, Japan from 1985 to 1989. From 1989 to 1993, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Drs. Mary-Jane Gething and Joe Sambrook at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. He was appointed Deputy Research Manager from 1993 to 1996 and then Research Manager from 1996 to 1999 at the Heat Shock Protein (HSP) Research Institute directed by Dr. Takashi Yura in Kyoto, Japan. He was then appointed Associate Professor in the laboratory of Dr. Manabu Negishi in the Graduate School of Biostudies at Kyoto University from 1999 to 2003. Professor Mori was later appointed Professor at the Department of Biophysics in the Graduate School of Science at Kyoto University in 2003. He received Wiley Prize in 2005, Canada Gairdner International Award in 2009, Medal with Purple Ribbon from the Emperor in 2010, Uehara Prize in 2012 and Asahi Prize in 2014.

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Professor Peter Walter was born in 1954 in Berlin, Germany and is currently a Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, USA. He graduated from the Free University of Berlin in 1976, received his Masters of Science in Organic Chemistry from Vanderbilt University in 1977. In 1981 he obtained his PhD in Biochemistry at The Rockefeller University. In 1983, Peter joined the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California at San Francisco, and served as Department Chair from 2001 until 2008. He is the current President-Elect of the American Society of Cell Biology. Awards he has received include: the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, the Passano Award, the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the Stein & Moore Award, the Gairdner Award, the E.B. Wilson Medal, the Otto Warburg Medal, the Jung Prize, and the Ehrlich and Darmstaedter Prize. He is a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina.