Contributors to the emerging investigators issue 2018.

Randolph S. Ashton is an Assistant Professor at UW–Madison’s Biomedical Engineering Department and Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. He earned his BS and PhD in chemical engineering from Hampton University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, respectively, and performed postdoctoral studies at UC Berkeley. His lab melds advanced biomaterial design and neural stem cell biology to develop novel approaches for engineering ‘next-generation’ tissue models of the human central nervous system. He is the recipient of a Burroughs Wellcome Fund IRSA, was named a 2013 Rising Star by the Biomedical Engineering Society’s CMBE-SIG, and his research is also funded by the NIH and EPA. Subhendu Sekhar Bag was born at Tikarpara, Bankura, West Bengal, India and received his MSc (1st class) and PhD degrees in chemistry from IIT Kharagpur, in 1998 and 2005, respectively. After postdoctoral research (JST and JSPS) he started his independent career at the Department of Chemistry, IIT Guwahati, India, in 2008 and became an Associate Professor in 2013. He served as a Lead Guest Editor of Journal of Nucleic Acids and is serving as an editorial board member of Biological and Biomedical Reports, STM Journals, and World Research Journal of Chemistry. His research group is actively involved in designing unnaturalfluorescent nucleobase pairs which could drive the synthesis of unnatural proteins containing their designer amino acids. ‘‘Click-chemistry’’ is being utilized as a key step for synthesis in this research. Pablo Barrio studied chemistry at the University of Oviedo, obtaining his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Barluenga. Later, he joined the Carreira group at ETH and then the Fustero group at the University of Valencia. He is focused on two topics: the asymmetric synthesis of benzo-fused carboand heterocycles and the chiral Brønsted acid catalysed allylboration reaction. He is also interested in the use of terphenyls in medicinal chemistry. In addition, he has carried out stays at Trinity College (Dublin), MPI (Muelheim) and Gakushuin University (Tokyo); part of this work was carried out at the latter. DOI: 10.1039/c5cc90119g