Robin Offord (b. 1940) taught and researched at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, U.K. from 1962-1980, collaborating with, among others, the Nobel Prize winners Frederick Sanger, César Milstein, Dorothy Hodgkin and Aaron Klug. In 1980 he became a Departmental Director at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, and later served as President of the School of Basic Medicine there. Martin Rodbell (Nobel Prize 1994) was a visiting member of his group for two years in the early 1980s. He became an Emeritus Professor in October 2005. He shared the 2002 “Man of the Year, Switzerland” award of the Swiss financial newspaper L’agefi and in 2005 received the American Peptide Society’s Makineni Award. In 2008 he shared the 'Personality of the Year - Society' award of the newspaper 'Tribune de Genève'.

Oliver Hartley (b. 1968), obtained his Ph.D at Cambridge, U.K, in 1997 in the group of Sir Gregory Winter. He has also researched into lysosomal storage disorders of children at the Institute of Child Health, London and in molecular biology at Glaxo-Welcome. He has been at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva, since 1997. He is Principal Investigator under a number of competitively-won grants from agencies such as the US National Institutes of Health, the Swiss National Science Foundation and several private foundations in the US and Switzerland.

Amos Bairoch (b. 1957) was one of the founder members of the Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics in 1998, and leads a group of approx 80 people there. In 2005 he was also appointed a Departmental Director at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Geneva. He received the 1993 Friedrich Miescher Award from the Swiss Society of Biochemistry; the 1995 Helmut Horten Foundation Incentive Award; the 2004 Pehr Edman award and the 2004 European Latsis Prize.