Alfred J. Meixner is a professor of physical chemistry and the director of the Institute of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. He studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), where he received his PhD in 1988 and earned his habilitation in Physics from the University of Basel in 1996. His research interests are in optical single molecule spectroscopy, confocal and near-field optical laser-microscopy and optical nanospectroscopy. Monika Fleischer is a professor of physics at the Institute for Applied Physics at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen, where she studied physics and received her PhD in 2006. She held an invited professorship at the University of Technology of Troyes and serves on the board of directors of the Tübingen Center for Light-Matter-Interaction, Sensors and Analytics (LISA+). Her research focuses on plasmonic nanostructures, nanofabrication, and optical spectroscopy of hybrid nanosystems. Dieter P.

Kern is an emeritus professor of physics at the Institute for Applied Physics of the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen. He studied physics at the University of Tübingen, where he received his PhD in 1978. He then spent 15 years at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center working on exploratory devices and nanofabrication. In 1993 he initiated the Nanostructures and Nanofabrication chair in Tübingen with emphasis on interdisciplinary applications of nanostructure physics and technology. Antonio Cricenti is a Research Director at the Institute of structure of matter (ISM), National Research Council (CNR). He studied physics at the University of Rome "La Sapienza" graduating in 1983.

He was visiting researcher at the University of Linkoping, Sweden, at IBM, Ruschlikon and Lausanne Polytechnique, Switzerland and Adjunct Professor at the University of Nashville, TN, USA. He works on Surface Science and has developed Scanning Probe Microscopy applied to early diagnosis of cancer. Ulrich Hohenester is a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Graz, Austria. In 1997 he received his PhD from the University of Graz and spent several years as a Postdoc in Modena. He works on the theoretical description of nanoscale light-matter interactions with a strong focus on plasmonics and nanophotonics. Manuela Scarselli is an associate professor of experimental solid-state physics at the university "Tor Vergata". She studied physics at the university "Sapienza" of Rome where she graduated in 1991. Her research interests focus on scanning probe microscopies mainly applied for the characterization of nano-systems and fabrication of pure and hybrid carbon-based nanomaterials for nanotechnological applications.