E.J. Corey has been a Professor at Harvard University since 1959. He was educated at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1945-1950) and served as a faculty member at the University of Illinois from 1951 to 1959. He is the 1990 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry. He has received many international awards including the U.S. National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Wolf Prize and the Priestley Medal of the American Chemical Society, and many honorary degrees including DSc degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. Professor Corey is the author of more than 1,000 publications and is one of the most cited authors in science. Among his previous books are The Logic of Chemical Synthesis (1989), Molecules and Medicine (2007) and Enantioselective Chemical Synthesis (2010).

Yong-Jin Wu is a medicinal chemist in the pharmaceutical industry with over 25 years of industry experience. He received his B.Sc. in chemistry from Hunan Normal University (Changsha, China) in 1983 and his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1991 under Professor Jean Burnell. Subsequently, he undertook postdoctoral training in natural product synthesis with Professor Derrick Clive at the University of Alberta (1991-1992) and Professor E. J. Corey at Harvard University (1992-1995). He started his career as a medicinal chemist at Pfizer Central Research in Groton, CT in 1995 and joined Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) in Wallingford, CT in 1999. He has been working at BMS ever since and currently is at the Cambridge, MA facility where his investigations focus on the discovery of novel kinase inhibitors for immunology, rheumatology and oncology indications.