George Thompson, male, professor, graduated from the University of Nottingham with a BSc in metallurgy; he received a PhD from Nottingham for research in physical metallurgy.  After subsequent postdoctoral studies, he was employed by Howson-Algraphy Ltd, manufacturer of lithographic printing plates.  After a six-year period in industry, he joined the academic staff of the Corrosion and Protection Centre at UMIST, with successive promotions to Professor of Corrosion Science and Engineering in 1990.  He has been Head of the Corrosion and Protection Centre on three occasions, and is now a Deputy Head of the School of Materials in The University of Manchester, which formed from the merger of the Victoria University of Manchester and UMIST in 2004.
Professor Thompson’s research lie in the field of materials/properties/performance relationships; he has published almost 700 hundred papers on his research activities and, he has been elected to Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and appointed to Officer of the Order of the British Empire for research activities of relevance to the defence industries.

Panayota Vassiliou (1953- ), female, professor, received her BSc in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1975, her MSc in Chemical Engineering from the National Technical University, Athens in 1977, her doctorate in Engineering from the National Technical University, Athens in 1981. Presently she is a professor in the Department Of Chemical Engineering, NTUA. She has experience in degradation of materials and protection and in the conservation of ancient monuments. She has carried out 15 regional and international programmes in her consulting activities recently.
Professor Vassiliou has published four books, 50 papers in the field of surface technology and materials degradation in the last 15 years, and presented 90 papers in international conferences. She is a member of the associations as follows: Chemical Engineers of Greece/ the Technical Chamber of Greece/ the European Federation of Corrosion/ the International Corrosion Council, and also is Fellow of the National Association of Relay Manufactures of USA. She has excellent languages skills in Greek, English, and French.

Shoshana Tamir (1952- ), female, senior research engineer, is the head of Corrosion, Surface Treatment, and Laser Technology Lab in the Israel Institute of Metals, Technion University Israel. She got her B.Sc from the faculty of Chemical Engineering in 1979, M.SC on 1983, and D.Sc also from the Technion in the faculty of Materials Engineering in 1993. For more than 20 years she is doing joint research with Israeli industry in the field of corrosion , coating and surface treatment. She has experience of many years in failure analysis by corrosion and in conducting research for development of new coatings for Cr (VI) and Cd. In addition, the laser technology lab which aims to develop new thin films and nanostructures for electro-optical devices and sensors, by using laser deposition methods was established 15 years ago, among the researches there are PLD of CNTs and SiNW.
Senior Lecture Tamir’s research lies in the field of corrosion/electrochemistry/laser technology. She published 19 papers in professional journals, presented 25 papers in international conferences and completed 26 research reports in the last eight years.