Laszlo Solymar was born in 1930 in Budapest. He is Emeritus Professor of Applied Electromagnetism at the University of Oxford and Visiting Professor and Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College, London. He graduated from the Technical University of Budapest in 1952 and received the equivalent of a Ph.D in 1956 from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 1956 he settled in England where he worked first in industry and later at the University of Oxford. He did research on antennas, microwaves, superconductors, holographic gratings, photorefractive materials, and metamaterials. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Paris, Copenhagen, Osnabrück, Berlin, Madrid and Budapest. He published 8 books and over 250 papers. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1995. He received the Faraday Medal of the Institution of Electrical Engineers in 1992. Ekaterina Shamonina was born in 1970 in Tver, Russia. She is Professor of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. She graduated in 1993 in Physics at the Moscow State University and received her doctorate in 1998 from the University of Osnabrück, Germany. In 2000 she was awarded the Emmy Noether Fellowship from the German Research Council. She spent the first leg of the fellowship (20002002) at the University of Oxford. After a further six months at Imperial College, London she returned to the University of Osnabrück where she built up a research group working on Metamaterials. She completed her habilitation in Theoretical Physics in 2006, was appointed a Professor in Advanced Optical Technologies at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (20082011) and a Leverhulme Reader in Metamaterials at Imperial College London (20112013). Her main research areas apart from metamaterials have been amorphous semiconductors, photorefractive materials, antennas and plasmonics.