Eiji Hara received his PhD from the Tokyo University of Science in 1993 and moved to the University of California (Berkeley, USA) as a postdoctoral fellow. He then joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund laboratory (London, UK) as a postdoctoral fellow in 1995 and became a group leader at the Paterson Institute for Cancer Research (Manchester, UK) in 1998. In 2003, he returned to Japan as a professor at the University of Tokushima, and in 2015 he became a professor at Osaka University. He has been consistently conducting research on cellular aging since he was a graduate student.

Hideki Katagiri currently serves as Professor of the Department of Metabolism and Diabetes at Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, and also as the Vice Dean of Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine. He earned both his MD and PhD from the University of Tokyo. He has served in leadership roles in the several national projects, such as the COE, CREST, AMED Aging, and Moonshot programs. Professor Katagiri's wide-ranging research interests are based on "inter-organ communication systems" maintaining metabolic homeostasis at the whole-body level. His ultimate goal is the development of strategies for curing metabolic and age-related disorders and slowing the aging processes.