Prof. Zdenek Slanina received his doctorate from the Academy of Sciences of
the former Czechoslovakia in 1975 and worked there until 1991. He has been active
in the computational chemistry of fullerenes since their discovery, creating
several models that have been widely adopted by his peers. He has worked in
well-known research institutions such as Hokkaido University, Max Planck
Institute for Chemistry, University of Arizona, Institute for Molecular Science,
University of Tsukuba, and Huazhong University of Science and Technology.
Prof. Takeshi Akasaka is a Professor Emeritus of Chemistry at the Center for Tsukuba Advanced Research Alliance and the Graduate School of Pure and Applied Sciences, University of Tsukuba, Japan. He left in 1974 from the Department of Chemistry, Graduate School of Science, Tokyo University of Education, Tokyo, Japan. From 1979 to 1981, he conducted postdoctoral research at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the United States. In 2014, he received The Chemical Society of Japan Award. His current research focuses on the development of fullerenes, metallofullerenes, endofullerenes, and carbon nanotubes with novel properties. He has a keen interest in molecular structures and their associated properties.
