Ikaros Bigi was born in Munich, Germany. Following undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the Universities of Munich, Oxford and Stanford, he has taught and researched at the Max-Planck Institute for Physics, CERN, RWTH Aachen, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Oregon, SLAC and the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. He is a former scholarship student of the Maximilianeum Foundation and Scholarship Foundation of the German People, and has been appointed both a Heisenberg Fellow and a Max-Kade Fellow.
Ichiro Sanda was born in Tokyo, and at the age of 14 accompanied his father who was transferred to the United States on business. After a bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Illinois and a PhD from Princeton University, New Jersey, he taught and researched at Columbia University, New York, Fermilab and Rockefeller University, New York. In 1992, after 34 years in the US, he went to Japan as a professor of physics at Nagoya University, Japan. He is now the chairman of the physics department. He is a winner of the 10th Inoue Prize (1993) and the 43rd Nishina Memorial Prize (1997). Both prizes have been awarded for his work in CP violation, and on B physics.