Bio
Thomas Strunskus is an experienced resesearcher at the Chair for Multicomponent Materials at the Institute for Materials Science at Kiel University, Germany. He received his Ph.D. 1993 from the University of Heidelberg, Germany working on Metal/Polymer Interfaces. 1994 he joined the group of Prof. Franz Faupel in Kiel and was involved in many research projects of the group.. From 2001 to 2006 he was active in the Physical Chemistry group at Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. He has published more than 150 peer reviewd publications. His work focusses mainly on surface and interface studies of organic materials as well as on vapor phase deposition of polymers. He is also very active in synchrotron based x-ray spectroscopy.

Bio
Karen K. Gleason is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineering. During her career on the MIT faculty, Prof. Gleason has served as Executive Officer of the Chemical Engineering Department, Associate Director for the Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies, Associate Dean of Engineering for Research, and Associate Provost. She has authored >350 publications and holds >40 issued U.S. patents. She co-founded GVD Corporation and DropWise Technology Corporation. Her research focused on novel chemical vapor deposition methods for organic surface modification and device fabrication.

Bio
Anna Maria Coclite is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Solid State Physics of the Graz University of Technology, from January 2018, after being assistant professor at the same institution from 2013. From 2010 to 2013, she has been postdoctoral associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Professor Karen Gleason. She received her Ph.D. degree in Chemical Science from the University of Bari, Italy in 2010. Anna Maria Coclite has published more than 65 peer-reviewed publications, 16 of those as a first author; and she has over 1000 citations according to Google Scholar. She is the Leader of the “Advanced Material Science” inter-faculty Field of Expertise at TU Graz since 2020. Her research interests focus on materials science and advanced methods for thin film growth, including thin film technologies, nanomaterials, and surface chemistry. Her research has been funded by various programs, including the Marie Curie-Skłodowska Actions research fellowship. In 2016, she won the European Research Council (ERC) Starting grant of 1.5 million euro to fund her research on “Smart Core-shell sensor arrays for artificial skins”. She is the first woman winning an ERC starting grant in the TU Graz and the first one receiving it in Physics.

Bio
Stefan Schröder pursued his Ph.D. studies on initiated chemical vapor deposition of new electronic and multifunctional polymer thin films at Kiel University, Germany under the supervision of Prof. Faupel including a research stay in Prof. Gleason's group. After finishing his Ph.D. in 2021, he then continued as a subgroup leader for functional CVD Polymers at the Chair for Multicomponent Materials (Prof. Faupel) in Kiel. His research interests include chemical vapor depostion, polymer thin films and ab initio calculations.