Sándor Fekete studied mathematics and physics at the University of Cologne, before getting his Ph.D. in Combinatorics and Optimization from the University of Waterloo, Canada (1992). After spending a year as postdoc at SUNY Stony Brook, he returned to Cologne, where he got his habilation in mathematics (1998) and joined the optimization group at TU Berlin. In 2001 he became a professor of mathematics at TU Braunschweig; since 2007 he holds a newly founded chair on algorithmics in the Computer Science Department in Braunschweig. Sándor has published over 160 papers with more than 180 coauthors; his interests range all the way from theoretical foundations of algorithms and optimization to applications areas.

Uwe Kornak is Professor for molecular pathomechanisms of rare diseases at Charité, University Hospital, Berlin. His group applies next-generation sequencing to screen patients that are affected by unknown Mendelian disorders for disease causing mutations. Over the recent years he identified several new disease genes in connective tissue and bone disorders, aging, cell biology, ion homeostasis. Uwe represents a typical user of GeneTalk and is involved in the development of new features from a user's perspective. With his profound knowledge in functional analysis and in vivo models he also advises the growth strategy of GeneTalk's expert network.

Stefan Mundlos is head of the Institute of Medical Genetics and Human Genetics at Charité, University Hospital, Berlin. He is also head of the research group "Development & Disease" at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics, Berlin. The focus of his research interest is the molecular basis by which form an structure of the skeleton are regulated during vertebrate development. He combines research on human genetic disorders with gene function analysis in vitro and in animal models. For the identification of new human gene mutations he uses a wide range of next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques.

Peter N. Robinson is professor for medical genomics at the Charité, Berlin and heads NGS diagnostics at Labor Berlin. In his research group for computational biology he applies mathematical and bioinformatic models to understand biology and hereditary disease. He is initiator and coordinator of the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) that provides a standardized vocabulary of phenotypic abnormalities encountered in human disease. The HPO is now widely used for clinical diagnostics in human genetics and bioinformatics research on the relationships between human phenotype abnormalities and cellular and biochamical networks.

Bernd Timmermann is head of the sequencing core facility of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin. His laboratory is involved in many large-scale sequencing projects. His laboratory has years of experience in next-generation sequencing and contributed to the 1000 genomes project. With his longstanding expertise in high-throughput sequencing techniques Bernd Timmermann also advices the German Ethics Council on technical matters.