Dr. Shabir Hussain Wani received his PhD in Genetics and Plant Breeding on Development of Transgenic Rice for Drought and Salt Tolerance from Punjab Agricultural University. He has published more than 130 peer-reviewed papers and edited 20 books on plant stress physiology, including 10 with Springer. He is on Editorial Boards of Plant Cell Tissue and Organ Culture, Frontiers in Plant Science and Frontiers in Genetics. He is currently an Assistant Professor (Senior Scale), Genetics and Plant Breeding, at the Mountain Research Centre for Field Crops of the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural, Sciences and Technology of Kashmir in India.

Dr.  Goetz Hensel is a the Head of the Centre for Plant Genome Engineering at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany. Before, he was a Senior Researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Germany. He is on the Editorial Boards of BMC Plant Biology, Frontiers in Plant Science, Plant Cell Tissue and Organ Culture, and the Journal of Applied Genetics. He is member of the Management Board of the Society for Plant Biotechnology, Germany. He serves in the EFB Plant, Agriculture and Food Division Board and the German Joint Synthetic Biology Working Group. He was involved in the improvement of methods of Agrobacterium-mediated gene transfer to cereals and in a new principle of RNA-mediated downregulation of genes called host-induced gene silencing (HIGS). He recently focused his research on designer endonuclease-mediated gene targeting (TALEN, CRISPR/Cas9), molecular farming and genes involved in the spike architecture and domestication of barley. He has published over 100 articles in this field.