Christos Aneziris has been a professor of Ceramics at the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany since 2001. His major field of research includes fundamental and applied aspects of modern refractories in advanced metallurgy processing routes. His current research spans the areas of iron and steel clean technology and casting up to advanced casting of non ferrous low and high temperature materials, refractories in energy applications as well as non conventional processing routes of metal and ceramic matrix fine- and coarse-grain composite materials, and porous materials. He is speaker of the collaborative research center of the German Research Foundation (DFG) “Multifunctional Filter systems; a contribution to Zero Defect materials”, deputy speaker of the collaborative research center “TRIP – Matrix – Composites” and speaker of the Priority Program “Refractory Initiation for Reduction of Emissions”. Christos Aneziris has been a full member of the Saxon Academy ofSciences and Humanities in Leipzig since 2009 and the German Academy of Technical Science (ACATECH) since 2011. Since 2012 he is a member of the review board of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the field of “Ceramic and Metallic Sintered Materials” and since 2014 member of the board of the “Federation of International Refractory Research and Education - FIRRE”. He has been serving as a member of the board of the German Ceramic Society since 2003 and in 2017 he was elected Fellow of the European Ceramic Society. In 2018 he became member of the World Academy of Ceramics and distinguished life member of the UNITECR organization. Horst Biermann has been head of the Institute of Materials Engineering at the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg, Germany, as University Professor for Materials Engineering since 2000. There, he was Dean of the Faculty of Materials Science and Technology for 10 years. He studied Materials Science at the University of Erlangen-Nurembergand received his doctorate and habilitation. His fields of work include plasticity and fatigue as well as surface engineering with about 350 publications as author or co-author. Since 2008 he has been speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 799 "TRIP-Matrix-Composite - Design of tough, transformation-reinforced composites and structures based on Fe-ZrO2" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In his career to date, he has received several awards, including the Gerhard-Hess Prize of the German Research Foundation in 1997 and the "Breakthrough" Prize of the German Society for Materials Science in 2012. Since 2012 he has been a full member of the Academy of Sciences and Literature, Mainz, and since 2015 a full member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig.