Leif E. Asp
(Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden)

Dr Leif Asp holds the chair as professor in lightweight composite materials and structures at the Division of Material and Computational Mechanics at the Department of Industrial and Materials Science at Chalmers University of technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Dr Asp received his PhD in Polymer engineering at Lulea University of Technology, Sweden, in 1995 and joined the Swedish Aeronautical Research Institute (FFA) in Stockholm. In 2000 he founded the Swedish Institute of Composites’ (SICOMP) office in the greater Gothenburg region and in 2011 he was appointed head of research for the institute. During this period, he held positions as adjunct professor at Lulea university of technology and Chalmers university of technology, as well as President for the European Society of Composites (ESCM). In 2015 Dr Asp joined Chalmers as full professor. Dr Asp served as President of the International Committee on Composite Materials (ICCM) during the period 2017-2019. In year 2014 Dr Asp was appointed fellow of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences.
Dr Asp’s research is focused on efficient design methodologies for carbon fibre composite transport applications. The research relies on more than twenty-five years’ experience in damage tolerance modelling, design and certification methods for aircraft composite structures.
Since 2007, Professor Asp leads research activities on multifunctional composites. In particular, the research group performs research on structural battery composites, a material that can simultaneously store electrical energy and carry mechanical loads. The work comprises material development and characterization, ranging from mechanical and electrochemical characterization of constituents to cells and multi-cell structures.

Jose Bico
(ESPCI-Paris, France)

José Bico obtained his PhD in Physical Chemistry in Paris, France, in 2000. His PhD project under the supervision of David Quéré was on capillary phenomena and super-hydrophobicity. He then visited the Hatsopoulos Microfluidics Laboratory at MIT, where he worked on non-Newtonian interfacial flows under the mentorship of Gareth McKinley. He joined ESPCI in 2003 as a faculty. Fruitful interactions with colleagues from Mechanics raised his interest in the deformation of solid substrates by capillary forces, the propagation of fractures in thin film or wrinkling. While maintaining a strong activity on interfacial flows, his current projects in collaboration with Benoît Roman and Étienne Reyssat also include “soft mechanics” such as morphable structures. His approach is based on table-top model experiments and a description of the phenomena in terms of physical mechanisms. José is involved in local outreach events such as experimental conferences or science festivals for general public. He is the co-author of Hidden Wonders, MIT Press 2021, a collection of observations from our everday’s life presented in simple terms.

Keiji Numata
(Kyoto University and RIKEN, Japan)

Giuseppe Puglisi
(Bari Polytechnique, Italy)

Short BIO Giuseppe Puglisi
Giuseppe Puglisi is full professor of Mathematical Physics at Bari Polytechnique where he is dean deputy of the Dep. of Civil, Landscape, Environmental and Chem Eng. After graduating as a Structural Engineer at Bari Polytechnique, he took his PhD in Materials and Structural Engineering at the Trento University with a thesis on innovative and smart materials at the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Dept. of the University of Minnesota. After several periods as visiting researcher in prestigious European and American universities he became researcher and then associate professor of Continuum Mechanics and Structural Engineering at Bari Polytechnique. He is member of the Society of Natural Philosophy (SNP), of the International Society for the Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics (ISIMM), and of the Italian Group of Mathematical Physics (GNFM). He authored seventy papers in leading journals in the field. He is Editor for Frontiers: Mechanics of Materials, Frontiers: Soft Matter, Frontiers: Gels and has been guest Editor of Special issuses in the field of Soft and rubber Mechanics in prestigious journals. He has been invited by the Royal Society of London to write a review on his research activity on soft matter. His research topics are in Continuum Mechanics and Materials Science with particular interests in soft rubberlike and biological materials and active and smart materials.

Pedro M. Reis
(EPFL, Switzerland)

Pedro Miguel Reis is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. Prof. Reis received a B.Sc. in Physics from the University of Manchester, UK (1999), a Certificate of Advanced Studies in Mathematics (Part III Maths) from St. John’s College and DAMTP, University of Cambridge (2000) and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Manchester (2004). He was a postdoc at the City College of New York (2004-2005) and at the CNRS/ESPCI in Paris (2005-2007). He joined MIT in 2007 as an Instructor in Applied Mathematics. In 2010 he moved to MIT’s School of Engineering, with dual appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Civil & Environmental Engineering, first as the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor and, since the summer of 2014 as Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor. In October 2013, the Popular Science magazine named Prof. Reis to its 2013 “Brilliant 10” list of young stars in Science and Technology. In 2021, he was the President of the Society of Engineering Science. Prof. Reis has also received the 2014 CAREER Award (NSF), the 2016 Thomas J.R. Hughes Young Investigator Award (Applied Mechanics Division of the ASME), the 2016 GSOFT Early Career Award for Soft Matter Research (APS), and he is a Fellow of the APS.

Songbai Ji
(Worcester Polytechnic Institute, USA)

Dr. Songbai Ji, a professor of biomedical engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is a leader in the study of mechanics in health and sport. He additional holds an adjunct position at the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College, where he began his career and was promoted to the rank of associate professor. His lab integrates advanced neuroimaging techniques to study traumatic brain injury (TBI) and develops near real-time response feedback methods to create tools for studying the cumulative effects of repetitive head impacts in athletes and improve clinical concussion diagnostics. Dr. Ji also collaborates with engineers and clinicians to establish accurate and robust patient registration techniques for surgical image-guidance, particularly in spine surgery. His contributions include advances in computational modeling and medical imaging, as well as real-time monitoring systems for sporting events. Dr. Ji is a leader in on the Solid Mechanics Technical Committee of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' (ASME) Bioengineering Division, and an associate editor of the ASME Journal of Biomechanical Engineering. He holds a bachelor's degree from Shanghai Jiaotong and master’s and doctoral degrees from Washington University, and conducted post-doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania.

Miguel A Bessa
(Brown University, USA)

Bernd R. Noack
(Harbin Institute of Technology, China)

Bernd R. Noack is National Talent Professor and Chair of Artificial Intelligence and Aerodynamics (CAIA) at the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), Shenzhen, and Professor and Chair of Turbulence Control at the Technical University of Berlin. At HIT, he heads a growing team with three laboratories for the aerodynamics problems of the low-altitude economy. Recently, he has built the world’s largest fan array wind generator for research and UAV testing in gusty urban terrain. For over three decades, he has worked on engineering turbulence control for transport vehicles in leading European and the US institutions, including the Max-Plank Society, German Aerospace Center (DLR), United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), TU Berlin and the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Prof. Noack has written over 300 refereed publications, including 2 international patents, 1 China Utility Model Patent, 6 books and over 140 journal articles. His work has been awarded with dozens of national and international awards. For instance, he became Fellow of the American Physical Society, got the first senior ANR Chair of Excellence in Fluid Mechanics, and was the only winner of the annual von Mises award 2005. Mendeley/Stanford lists him as highly cited scientist and Research.com rates him as Top Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Scientist.

Chandini Raina Raina MacIntyre
(UNSW, Australia)

Raina MacIntyre (MBBS Hons 1, M App Epid, PhD, FRACP, FAFPHM) is Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and Head of the Biosecurity Program at the Kirby Institute, UNSW, Australia. She leads a research program in control and prevention of infectious diseases, spanning vaccinology, pandemics, bioterrorism and emerging infections, and personal protective equipment. She has conducted the largest body of clinical research on masks and respirators in the world, including several randomised, clinical trials in community and healthcare settings. She has led a large body of clinical, modelling and experimental research on face masks and respirators for prevention of respiratory transmissible infections. Her area of vaccine expertise is vaccination of older adults and immunosuppressed people and vaccines for biodefense. She has done several clinical trials of vaccines in adults and immunosuppressed populations such as transplant patients. She has also done research on the role of influenza and other infections on triggering cardiovascular events, and how these can be prevented by vaccines, and a body of work on smallpox vaccines. She has led the development of EPIWATCH, an AI-driven epidemic observatory that has proven capability in early detection of serious outbreaks. She has over 400 peer reviewed publications. She has received many awards including the 2022 Eureka Prize for Leadership in Science and Innovation, The Sir Henry Wellcome Medal and Prize from the Association of Military Surgeons of the US, the Public Health Association of Australia’s National Immunisation Award (for her research on adult vaccination), and the Frank Fenner Award for Research in Infectious Diseases. She is on the editorial boards of Vaccine, BMJ Open and Epidemiology & Infection. In 2021 she was on a US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine pandemic consensus committee, and is currently a member of the WHO COVID-19 Vaccine Composition Technical Advisory group, and The WHO SAGE working group on smallpox and Mpox.

Manouk Abkarian
(CNRS-INSERM-Université de Montpellier, France)

I am a CNRS Senior Scientist working at the Centre de Biologie Structurale in Montpellier (France), in the Biophysics and Bioengineering department. I co-lead the "Physics and Mechanics of Biological Systems" team ((www.physmechbio.com). I am a soft matter physicist with an expertise in colloidal systems and microfluidics.
The common denominator of my research revolves around understanding the relationship between microstructure, mechanics and the overall behavior of interfaces between two fluid media with a particular interest for biological systems.

Simon Mendez
(Institute of Montpellier Alexander Grothendieck, CNRS, University of Montpellier, 34095 Montpellier, France , France)

Davide Laera
(Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy)

Dr Davide Laera obtained his PhD in Mechanical Engineering in 2016 at the Polytechnic University of Bari (Bari, Italy) defending a thesis on modelling of thermoacoustic instabilities. In September 2016 he joined the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Imperial College London (London, UK) as a post-doc performing high-fidelity LES simulations of flame dynamics. In May 2018 he moved to Cerfacs (Toulouse, France), initially with a post-doc position and then promoted to a permanent member of the CFD group from January 2020. At Cerfacs, he has been actively involved in the development of advanced and massively parallel software (AVBP) for high-fidelity LES of turbulent reactive flows with a focus on: decarbonized combustion (hydrogen and ammonia), two-phase flame, pressure gain combustion (CVC and RDE) and thermoacoustic instabilities. In 2018, Dr Laera won the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship with his project CLEANERFLAMES on LES simulations of combustion instabilities in annular combustors. In 2021, he was awarded of the prestigious ATOS-Joseph Fourier Prize with the H2OPE project. In September 2022, he left Cerfacs for a faculty position as Associate Professor (Tenure-track) at the Politecnico di Bari (Italy) where he is responsible for numerical and experimental research on decarbonized combustion for a sustainable energy generation & transportation. Dr. Laera has a wide range of national and international collaborations (including CERFACS, IMFT, SUSTech University, DLR, etc.). He is author of more than 20 peer- reviewed articles, he has supervised the research activities of several trainees co-directing more than 10 PhD students.

Vishal Acharya
(Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

Dr. Acharya is an Associate Fellow of the AIAA and is a Principal Research Engineer in the Aerospace Combustion Lab at Georgia Tech. At the Lab, he directs modeling and simulations-based research operations on a wide range of unsteady combustion problems in power generation, propulsion, advanced/future tech. His activities focus on both R&D that transitions academic research to industry as well as fundamental research using theoretical, numerical, statistical, and computational tools.

Thibault Frederic Guiberti
(KAUST, Saudi Arabia)

Thibault Guiberti is an assistant research professor of Mechanical Engineering in the Clean Combustion Research Center at KAUST in Saudi Arabia. He obtained a Ph.D. in Energy from Centrale-Supelec, France, in 2015 and his Habilitation from University of Toulouse III in 2020. His research interests include turbulent reactive flows and optical diagnostics. With his research, Thibault hopes to contribute to the promotion of carbon-free fuels, such as hydrogen and ammonia, in practical combustion devices for mobility and power. Recently, he has been awarded the Silver Combustion Medal by the Combustion Institute for his work on multi-species Raman imaging in high-pressure hydrogen flames.

Charles Meneveau
(Johns Hopkins University, USA)

Charles Meneveau is the Louis M. Sardella Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and is Associate Director of the Institute for Data Intensive Engineering and Science (IDIES). He holds joint appointments in the JHU Department of Physics and Astronomy and of Environmental Health and Engineering. His area of research is focused on understanding and modeling hydrodynamic turbulence, and complexity in fluid mechanics in general. The insights that have emerged from Professor Meneveau’s work have led to new numerical models for Large Eddy Simulations (LES) and applications in engineering and environmental flows, including wind farms. He also focuses on developing methods to share the very large data sets that arise in computational fluid dynamics. He received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María in Valparaíso, Chile, in 1985 and advanced degrees from Yale University. He then was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford and has been on the Johns Hopkins University faculty since 1990. Prof. Meneveau is Deputy Editor of the Journal of Fluid Mechanics and has served as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Turbulence. Professor Meneveau is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, a foreign corresponding member of the Chilean Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of APS and ASME.

Marco Giometto
(Columbia University, USA)

Dr. Giometto is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at Columbia University and an Amazon Visiting Academic. He studies both fundamental and applied problems related to fluid dynamics and turbulence, with an emphasis on atmospheric boundary layer flows. He received his Ph.D. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Braunschweig TU University and the University of Florence in 2014, and in 2016 he earned a second PhD in Mechanical Engineering from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, where he won the EDME Award for the best thesis in mechanical engineering. Before joining Columbia University in 2018, he held postdoctoral positions at the University of British Columbia and at the Center for Turbulence Research at Stanford University. Between 2018 and 2021 he was a part-time Senior Research Scientist in the Amazon Prime Air program. Marco is the recipient of several awards, including an Early CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, an Early Career Program Award from the Army Research Office, a Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research, an ISSNAF Young Investigator Award for Research in Sustainability, and a Provost Diversity Award from Columbia University. More information can be found here: https://efpl.engineering.columbia.edu