Russel J. Reiter is Professor of Cell Biology in the Department of Cell Systems and Anatomy at the UT Health, San Antonio, Texas, USA. In addition to his Ph.D. , Dr. Reiter has received four honorary M.D. degrees and one honorary D.Sc. degree from international universities. His research relates to the multiple receptor-independent and receptor-dependent actions of melatonin in humans, animals and plants. He has trained 25 Ph.D. students and 148 postdoctoral fellows. Dr. Reiter has received many awards for his research including the A. Ross McIntyre Gold Metal (USA), US Senior Scientist Award (Germany), Lizoni Lincee Award (Italy), Inaugural Aaron B. Lerner Pioneer Award (USA), Chulabhorn Royal Academy Medal (Thailand), etc. He has published numerous research papers, reviews and chapters and he has written or edited 25 books. Based on Google Scholar, his papers have been cited in the scientific literature more than 197,000 times and his h-index is 215. Thomson Reuters/Clarivate Analytics has identified Dr. Reiter as a Highly Cited Scientist (top 1%) and listed him as one of the World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds in 2014. Dr. Reiter has been an invited speaker at more than 350 international meetings and symposia. He is the Co-Editor of Melatonin Research and he is the founder and past Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Pineal Research which had an impact factor of 15.271 when he relinquished that editorship position.

Jia-Kuo Yu received his Ph.D. degree at Peking University and is a professor and director at the Peking University Institute of Sports Medicine. He is also the director of the Knee Surgery Department within Sports Medicine of Peking University 3rd Hospital and is a medical specialist for national sports teams preparing for every Summer Olympic Games and the Winter Olympic Games. He is the founder of the Geriatric Sports Medicine Association of the Chinese Society of Gerontology and Geriatrics and now was its founding Chairman. He is also the vice-chairman of the Chinese Society of Sports Medicine of the Chinese Medical Association

Ms. Rasika S. Murkar has Master of Science degree in Medical Systems engineering from the Otto-von Guericke University (M.Sc., 2021; Germany) and in biomedical engineering from University of Mumbai (B.E., 2016; India). She has worked as research assistant and lead the project “Standardization and development of in-vitro foreign body reaction assay” at CFTE during her Master studies. She pursues her doctorate in the field of tissue engineering under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Heike Walles at CFTE. Along with the interdisciplinary main project “Generation of deep lung airway models for aerosol generation and particle encapsulation (DFG project)” in conjunction with department of physics and fluid dynamics she also supports partner projects “TIME RESOLVED RAMAN AND METABOLIC IMAGING SPECTROSCOPY UNIT (acronym: TIRAMISU) (BMBF project)”. She has contributed actively in 2 publications namely “Establishment of a Human Immunocompetent 3D Tissue Model to Enable the Long-Term Examination of Biofilm–Tissue Interactions”, (first author) Bioengineering 2024 and “Biological Models of the Lower Human Airways—Challenges and Special Requirements of Human 3D Barrier Models for Biomedical Research”, (second author) Pharmaceutics 2021