Gunther Rudiger is Professor at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, and lectured at the University of Potsdam. He has also worked at the University of Gottingen and is a former Visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. For the successful collaboration with the Helmholtz-Center Dresden-Rossendorf regarding the magnetorotational instability experiment PROMISE he was awarded the 2008 Science Prize of the Donor Federation of German Science. Rainer Hollerbach received his Ph.D. from the University of California, San Diego. He is currently Visiting Professor in the Institute of Geophysics at ETH Zurich, as part of the European Research Council project ?Magnetostrophic Flow in Experiments and the Core of the Earth'. He is permanently based in the Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leeds, England.

He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the UK Institute of Physics. Leonid L. Kitchatinov received his Ph.D. from the Ioffe Physical Technical Institute, St Petersburg. He is permanently affiliated to the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Irkutsk, and to the Pulkovo Observatory, St Petersburg. He has repeatedly worked at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam, supported by both the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as a Research Fellow for a year. He has also worked at the University of St Andrews, UK.