Andrew N. Cleland is the John A. MacLean Sr. Professor for Quantum Engineering Innovation in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering at the University of Chicago, Director of the Pritzker Nanofabrication Facility and a Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He served in the Chair line for the American Physical Society – Division of Quantum Information from 2019-2023, and is co-director, NSF Soft and Hybrid Nanotechnology Experimental Resource (SHyNE). He was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Quantum Science and Technology (US Dept of State, 2023).

His research focuses on developing superconducting quantum circuits and nanoscale optical and mechanical devices. His accomplishments include the first demonstration of a mechanical system cooled to its quantum ground state; the first observation of the acoustic Hong-Ou-Mandel effect; the demonstration of a high fidelity, scalable superconducting quantum bit operating at the threshold for quantum error-correction; and the development of a piezo-optomechanical system transducing between the microwave and optical frequency domains.

Cleland is the author of over 150 peer-reviewed publications. His work was recognized as the Science “Breakthrough of the Year” for 2010, and selected as one of the “Top Ten Discoveries in Physics” by the Institute of Physics (United Kingdom) in both 2010 and 2011. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

Cleland earned a BS in engineering physics and a PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the University of Chicago, Cleland was a Professor of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and served as the Associate Director of the California Nanosystems Institute.

Mercouri Kanatzidis is a distinguished scientist and educator with a prolific career spanning over three decades. He is a Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Chair Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Northwestern University, where he has been leading cutting-edge research and mentoring future scientists since 2006. Prior to joining Northwestern, Kanatzidis was a Distinguished Professor at Michigan State University, where he made significant contributions to the field of inorganic chemistry. Throughout his career, Kanatzidis has made groundbreaking discoveries and developed materials that have been instrumental in advancing alternative energy technologies. His work has focused on improving thermoelectric materials for waste heat recovery, which can help to reduce energy waste and lower carbon emissions. Kanatzidis and his team also developed the first solid-state solar cell device using a film of tin iodide perovskite in a solid-state dye-sensitized cell, achieving an efficiency of around 10%. This discovery has paved the way for the development of more efficient and stable solar cells. Kanatzidis is a highly cited researcher in chemistry, with over 1,550 published manuscripts and more than 45 patents to his name. He has also mentored over 100 Ph.D. students and nearly 120 postdoctoral fellows, helping to shape the next generation of scientists and engineers. Born in Greece, Kanatzidis received his B.S. degree from Aristotle University and his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.

Dr. Victor I. Klimov is a LANL Fellow and Leader of the Nanotechnology and Advanced Spectroscopy Team in the Chemistry Division. He is an expert in optical spectroscopy and device physics of nanocrystal quantum dots. His contributions to this field include the discoveries of nanocrystal quantum dot lasing and carrier multiplication, foundational studies of Auger effects and energy transfer phenomena, and fundamental and applied research into single-dot light sources, quantum dot lasers, LEDs, and luminescent solar concentrators. He has published >240 peer-reviewed papers cited in the literature >58,000 times. His citation h-index is 123 (Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=V8bIp74AAAAJ). He is a Fellow of both APS (2003) and OSA (2003), a winner of the R&D 100 Green Tech Award (2016), a recipient of the Humboldt Research Award (2013), and Los Alamos Fellows’ Prize (1999).

Prof Sir Konstantin ‘Kostya’ Novoselov FRS was born in Russia in August 1974. He is best known for isolating graphene at The University of Manchester in 2004, and is an expert in condensed matter physics, mesoscopic physics and nanotechnology. Every year since 2014 Kostya Novoselov is included in the list of the most highly cited researchers in the world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2010 for his achievements with graphene. His other notable achievements include his work on other 2D materials, their heterostructures, and lately on functional intelligent materials and the application of AI for materials design.

Kostya is a director of the Institute of Functional Intelligent Materials and holds a position of a Tan Chin Tuan Centennial Professor at the National University of Singapore. He is also part time Langworthy Professor of Physics and the Royal Society Research Professor at The University of Manchester.

He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and undertook his PhD studies at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands before moving to The University of Manchester in 2001. Later Professor Novoselov joint the National University of Singapore in 2019. Professor Novoselov has published more than 500 peer-reviewed research papers, including more than 30 in Nature or Scinece. His h-index is above 150. The paper on the discovery of graphene has more than 60,000 citations, and was included by Nature to the list of 100 most cited papers of all times. He was awarded with numerous prizes, including Nicholas Kurti Prize (2007), International Union of Pure and Applied Science Prize (2008), MIT Technology Review young innovator (2008), Europhysics Prize (2008), Bragg Lecture Prize from the Union of Crystallography (2011), the Kohn Award Lecture (2012), Leverhulme Medal from the Royal Society (2013), Onsager medal (2014), Carbon medal (2016), Dalton medal (2016), Otto Warburg Prize (2019), John von Neumann Professor from the John von Neumann Computer Society (2022) among many others. He was knighted in the 2012 New Year Honours.

Nam-Gyu Park is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Chemical Engineering and Director of the SKKU Institute of Energy Science and Technology (SIEST), Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU). He earned his B.S. degree in chemical education in 1988, followed by M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry from Seoul National University in 1992, and 1995, respectively. Prof. Park has served as a postdoctoral researcher at ICMCB-CNRS, France, from 1996 to 1997 and at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), USA, from 1997 to 1999. Prior to his current role, Prof. Park held key positions, including director of the solar cell research center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) from 2005 to 2009 and senior researcher at the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) from 2000 to 2005. He joined SKKU as a full professor in 2009. Prof. Park is recognized as an elected fellow of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST) since 2017. His expertise lies in the field of photovoltaics, with a career spanning back to 1997. Notably, he made groundbreaking contributions by being the first to report a long-term stable perovskite solar cell in 2012, thereby initiating the research domain of perovskite photovoltaics. Acknowledging his significant impact in the scientific community, Prof. Park was honored as a Citation Laureate (top 0.01% scientist), a New Class of Nobel Prize-Worthy Scientist, on September 20, 2017, and consistently recognized in the highly cited researchers (HCR, top 1% scientists) list from 2017 to 2023 by Clarivate Analytics. Throughout his career, Prof. Park has received numerous awards, including the Scientist Award of the Month (2008), the KIST Award of the Year (2009), the Dupont Science and Technology Award (2010), the SKKU Fellowship (awarded three times in 2013, 2018, and 2021), the PVSEC Hamakawa Award (2015), the Dukmyung KAST Engineering Award (2016), the Samsung Ho-Am Prize (2018), the Rank Prize (UK, 2022), and the NAEK Main Award (2024). Beyond his research contributions, Prof. Park actively contributes to the scientific community as the Senior Editor of ACS Energy Letters and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Chem. Rev., ChemSusChem, and Solar RRL.

Jonathan Rivnay is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science & Engineering at Northwestern University. Jonathan earned his BSc in 2006 from Cornell University. He then moved to Stanford University, where he earned a MSc and PhD in Materials Science & Engineering, studying the structure and electronic transport properties of organic electronic materials. In 2012, he joined the Department of Bioelectronics at the Ecole des Mines de Saint-Etienne in France as a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow, working on conducting polymer-based devices for bioelectronics. Jonathan spent 2015-2016 as a member of the research staff in the Printed Electronics group at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC, a Xerox Co.) before joining the faculty at Northwestern in 2017. He is a recipient of a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation (2018), a research fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (2019) and was named a Materials Research Society Outstanding Early Career Investigator (2020).