Mark Gieles obtained his PhD in 2006 from Utrecht University in the Netherlands under the supervision of Prof Henny Lamers and Prof Simon Portegies Zwart. He then moved to the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile as a research fellow and support astronomer on the Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Cerro Paranal in the Atacama desert. In 2009 he won a Royal Society University Research Fellowship (URF) which he took up at the Institute of Astronomy of the University of Cambridge and in 2013 he moved it to the University of Surrey, where he started a new astrophysics research group. From 2013 to 2019 he was PI of a Starting Grant of the European Research Council (ERC) and since 2017 he is a member of the editorial board of Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), one of the leading peer-reviewed journals in astronomy and astrophysics.

Patrick Gamez received his PhD at the University of Lyon and was awarded the French Chemical Society Prize for his PhD research. After postdoctoral stays at the MPI für Kohlenforschung and at the University of Strasbourg, he became research associate at Leiden University. Since October 2010, he is ICREA Research Professor in bioinorganic chemistry at the Universitat de Barcelona. His research group is financed by the MICINN and is recognized by the Catalan Government. He is the (co-)author of over 248 publications (h-index: 57; >12750 citations). He is vice-president of the Spanish Bioinorganic Chemical Society (AEBIN) and a member of the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC), the RSC, the RSEQ and the Advisory Board of Inorganic Chemistry Frontiers (IF = 5.958). He has been  Associate Editor of RSC Advances (2015-2017). Since June 2016, he is Fellow of the RSC.

Prof M.C. Gonzalez-Garcia got her PhD in Theoretical Particle Physics at the University of Valencia in 1991. She held postdoctoral positions at University of Wisconsin-Madison and as a fellow of the CERN Theory Division. As early as 1993 she obtained a tenured scientist position at the CSIC of which she took residency in 1996 at IFIC (a joint CSIC-University of Valencia institute) where eventually she was promoted to full Research Professor. In 2003 she joined the Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook University as Associate Professor. She joined ICREA in the fall of 2006. She has written over 100 research papers on particle physics phenomenology, as well as some review articles. She is regularly invited to international meetings and conferences and she has given plenary talks at the most important conferences in her area.

I was born in Granada (Spain) in 1973. I studied physics and graduated with a PhD from the University in my hometown city in the year 2000. My post-doctoral work was under the supervision of Prof. David A. Weitz in the Department of Physics and DEAS at Harvard University. I subsequently held a lecturer position at the University of Almeria and an INEST Visiting Professor position at Harvard University. In 2008, I became Assistant Professor of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I obtained tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2014. I have performed research in soft matter, making substantial contributions to the physics of geometrically frustrated liquid crystals, surface-tension-driven instabilities and the thermodynamics of colloidal polymer gels. For my pHD work, I was awarded the prize for young researchers in experimental physics of the Spanish Royal Society of Physics and the doctoral thesis prize from the University of Granada.

Born on 30 May 1964 in Leningrad, USSR (=St. Petersburg, Russia). Graduated from Leningrad State University in 1986. PhD in Mathematics from St. Petersburg State University, 1991. Previous long-term positions: – Institute of Analysing Devices, Leningrad, USSR (1986-1989), researcher; – St. Petersburg University of Electrical Engineering, St. Petersburg, Russia, assistant professor (1989-1992) and then associate professor (1992-1998) in the Department of Mathematics; – Universidad de La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain (1996-1997), visiting professor; – Universitat de Barcelona, Spain (1999-2001), visiting research fellow; – Steklov Institute of Mathematics, St. Petersburg Branch (POMI), St. Petersburg, Russia (1998-2007), senior researcher; – Universitat de Barcelona, Spain (2003-2006), Ramón y Cajal researcher. Prizes: Young Scientist Award in the area of Mathematics from Academia Europaea (for fSU researchers), 1998.

I’m originally from Bilbao. I got both my BSc (in June 1990) and my PhD (in November 1995) in Physics from the University of the Basque Country. In January 1996 I went to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for my first postdoc. Two years later, I moved to Durham University, in northern England, for a second postdoc. Near the end of 1999 I took up a junior lecturer position back in Bilbao. I took leave from there in January 2001 to move to a Fellow position at CERN (the European Lab for Particle Physics, outside Geneva). Since January 2003 I am ICREA Research Professor at the Department of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics, Institute of Cosmos Sciences, at Universitat de Barcelona. In 2016 I was awarded an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council.