Martin Reinhart studied with internationally renowned sound artist Bernhard Leitner at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Written diploma in art history with Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat. Graduation with distinction as a trained and certified academic art teacher. Training as a film technician in Munich and Hollywood. Since the mid 1990s work as a filmmaker, photo and film historian and as media planner for exhibitions and museums. Extensive teaching and lecturing activities at home and abroad. 2000–03 curator of photography and film at the Technical Museum Vienna (TMW). Establishment and management of Westlicht Photographica Auction (2002-2010), founder and co-owner of the camera company Indiecam Gmbh, Vienna and Hollywood (2004–12), Since 2012 managing director of Blank Mind Productions Gmbh in Vienna. In recent years, intensive work on the organization of new knowledge systems in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna and the Royal College of Art London. In this context he headed the two-year project »Data Loam« – an artistic research project funded by the Austrian Science Fund. Sine 2021 Martin is senior lecturerer for the Art & Science department at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Jörg studied physics in Germany and Brazil and obtained a PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Colloids and Interfaces in 2010. He worked as a postdoc in the group of Albert-László Barabási at Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School in Boston, before starting his own research group at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine in Vienna in 2015. In 2020 he became full professor at the University of Vienna where he holds a shared appointment at the Center for Molecular Biology (Max Perutz Labs) and the Faculty of Mathematics. His interdisciplinary team combines backgrounds ranging from biology and bioinformatics to medicine, physics, mathematics & arts. The broad ambition of his group is to use tools and concepts from network theory to elucidate the complex machinery of interacting molecules that constitutes the basis of (patho-)physiological states. Major areas of interest are network-based approaches to rare diseases, understanding the basic principles of how perturbations of biological systems influence each other, and developing novel Virtual Reality (VR) based technologies for analyzing large genomic data.

Dorotea Fracchiolla is an Italian Biotechnologist with a lifelong passion for science communication. Born in Bari, she studied at the University of the Sacred Heart in Rome until 2010 and continued her studies at the University of Bari “A. Moro” where she graduated in Medical Biotechnology in 2012. She joined the University of Vienna in 2013 to work on Autophagy in the laboratory of Prof. Sascha Martens at the Max Perutz Labs, and received a PhD in Molecular Biology in 2017. While working as a Postdoctoral fellow, in 2020 she started her job as a freelancer Scientific Illustrator under the name of Art&Science. Since then, she has been collaborating with scientists from all over the world such as Europe, the United States and Australia, helping them to illustrate their science. Dorotea’s illustrations have been selected as covers for the Journals Autophagy and Molecular Cell. In January 2023 she opened a personal art exhibition titled “Autophagic Landscapes” at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna where, together with her friend and colleague Ayelen Valko, she presented to the public a collection of illustrations inspired by the cellular process of autophagy and beyond. Dorotea is also Program Manager of mito911, an international team of researchers working on unraveling the molecular mechanisms of Parkinson’s Disease, with the support of the Michael J. Fox Foundation and the Aligning Science Across Parkinson’s initiative. Keeping her daily life rooted in basic science, nowadays Dorotea continues cultivating her passion for science communication by producing new illustrations and running theme related workshops.

Dr. Martina Fröschl studied media technique & media design and wrote her thesis about computer-animated scientific visualizations of tomographic scanned microscopic organic entities. The depiction of realities and biological phenomena has ever since driven her creations. She contributed to various documentary and fictional productions for TV and cinema as visual effects and CG-artist.

Her recent computer animations are based on scientific imaging data like µCT, MRI, SEM and light microscopy in collaboration with imaging experts and biologists. Currently, she is a senior researcher and digital artist at the Science Visualization Lab Angewandte at the Department of Digital Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.

Dr. Ortrun Mittelsten Scheid joined the Gregor Mendel Institute of Molecular Plant Biology (GMI) as a Senior Group Leader in 2004 after a successful career in Switzerland. She served as the Interim Science Director of the GMI from 2007 to 2009. Her academic qualifications include a Diploma (equivalent to MSc) in Biology from the University of Hamburg, Germany, in 1981, and a PhD from the same university in 1985. She received professional training as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Cell Biology in Ladenburg, Germany, from 1985 to 1987, under the supervision of Prof. Hans-Georg Schweiger. She also worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Plant Sciences at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland, from 1988 to 1992, in the laboratory of Prof. Ingo Potrykus. From 1992 to 2003, she served as a Research Associate at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland, under the supervision of Prof. Jerzy Paszkowski. Dr. Mittelsten Scheid has received several awards and fellowships, including a PhD Fellowship from the German Merit Foundation from 1981 to 1983 and a fellowship from the German Research Council (DFG) from 1988 to 1990. She obtained habilitation degrees in Botany from the University of Basel, Switzerland, in 2000, and in Genetics from the University of Vienna, Austria, in 2006. She became a member of the Epigenome Network of Excellence (NET) in 2006 and was awarded the Erwin Schrödinger-Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in 2016. Dr. Mittelsten Scheid has served in various editorial and advisory roles, including as a reporter for the Board of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) from 2008 to 2020, on the Editorial Board of Plant Cell from 2010 to 2020, on the ERC Panel for Consolidator Grants from 2014 to 2020, on the Editorial Board of PLoS Genetics since 2015, and on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research since 2017.