Tom Brown was formerly Professor of Chemistry at Edinburgh University and Southampton University and is currently Professor of Nucleic Acid Chemistry at Oxford University. He is a member of the Departments of Chemistry and Oncology. His research interests centre on DNA sequence recognition and applications of oligonucleotide chemistry in biology and medicine. He is the co-founder of three Biotech companies (Oswel, ATDBio and Primer Design) and has published over 350 research papers and patents. He has received several awards including the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) Josef Loschmidt prize, the RSC award for Nucleic Acid Chemistry and the RSC prize for Interdisciplinary Research. He was Chemistry World entrepreneur of the year for 2014 and BBSRC Commercial Innovator of the Year and overall Innovator of the Year for 2016. Recently he was presented with a lifetime award for external engagement and promoting impact by Oxford University. Tom is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is President of the Chemistry Biology Interface Division of the RSC and Editor-in-Chief of the RSC Book series on Chemical Biology. He is currently Associate Head of the Chemistry Department at Oxford with responsibility for Research.

After completing a degree in Chemistry at the Aristotelian University of Thessaloniki (Greece), Achilles Kapanidis obtained a Master’s in Food Science and a Doctorate in Biological Chemistry, both at Rutgers University (New Jersey, USA). After holding research scientist positions in single-molecule biophysics at Berkeley and UCLA, he started a research group as a senior lecturer at Oxford University in 2005, and became of Professor of Biological Physics in 2013; Prof Kapanidis has also been a fellow of the European Research Council since 2011, and in 2016 became a Wellcome Trust Investigator.
Prof Kapanidis is currently leading a group of physical and biological scientists, known as the “Gene Machines” group. The group studies biological machinery involved in gene expression, maintenance, and regulation, focusing mainly on gene transcription and DNA repair. The main tool of the group is single-molecule fluorescence microscopy, a technique that measures nanometre distances and molecular interactions in real time; we also use the same method to perform super-resolution imaging and single-molecule tracking inside living cells. The work of the group is multidisciplinary, combining optics/photonics, imaging, biochemistry, molecular biology, modelling, and signal processing.
Prof Kapanidis has also been pursuing compact single-molecule imaging since 2006, a project that culminated with the development of the NanoImager microscope, which is being commercialized by Oxford Nanoimaging, an Oxford University spin-out company.

Ritesh Singhania is a Skoll scholar and MBA student at Oxford University: Said Business School. A first-generation college graduate, Ritesh leveraged his mechanical engineering background to develop a process to recycle scrapped railway track into spades, and set up a manufacturing unit. He also led the operation of the world's first pine needles-fed power plant, impacting more than 50,000 lives. Ritesh also received an International Development and Design Fellowship from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.