Prof. Alava holds a PhD in fusion plasma physics but has since then worked on materials science, applying computational approaches from multiscale modelling to machine learning and statistical mechanics. His particular focus is on the mechanical properties of materials. Prof. Alava is the Director of the NOMATEN MAB since the fall of 2019, prior to which he has been a professor of physics at Aalto University, Finland.

Konrad Banaszek leads the Centre for Quantum Optical Technologies at the University of Warsaw, Poland, established in 2018 in cooperation with the University of Oxford under the International Research Agendas Programme operated by the Foundation for Polish Science. After receiving a PhD degree in physics from the University of Warsaw in 2000, he held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Rochester, USA, and the University of Oxford, United Kingdom, followed by a Junior Research Fellowship at St. John’s College, Oxford, and faculty appointments at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń, Poland, and the University of Warsaw. He is an author or a co-author of over 130 original research articles and conference papers dealing with various aspects of quantum physics, optical engineering, and photonics, in particular development of novel techniques for communication, sensing, and imaging operating at or beyond standard quantum limits. He has also co-authored four inventions. In 2021 he was elected a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Sciences and in the following year a Fellow Member of Optica (formerly Optical Society of America). He also serves as the scientific coordinator of the QuantERA funding initiative coordinated by the National Science Centre Poland, which groups 39 research funding organisations from 31 countries and since 2017 organises on a biennial basis European calls for transnational research projects in quantum technologies.

Źródło: zdjęcie dzięki uprzejmości tygodnika Polityka

Prof. Agnieszka Chacińska – group leader and director of the institute of Polish Academy of Sciences, IMol. Head of the ReMedy project financed by the Foundation for Polish Science as part of the International Research Agendas Programme. Recipient of multiple awards and prestigious grants, including Welcome Grant from the Foundation for Polish Science, and Maestro grant from the National Science Centre. Corresponding member of Polish Academy of Sciences, elected member of European Molecular Biology Organization, Academia Europaea and German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Awarded the title of Professor by the President of the Republic of Poland in 2014.
Graduated from Biology Faculty at the University of Warsaw; received a doctoral degree in biochemistry at the Institute of Biochemistry and Biophysics of the Polish Academy of Sciences with Prof. Magdalena Boguta, and habilitation degree from the same institute. Completed post-doctoral training with Prof. Nikolaus Pfanner, followed by a junior group leader position at the University of Freiburg in Germany. Since 2009 the head of Laboratory of Mitochondrial Biogenesis created in the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, later moved to CeNT UW and finally transferred to IMol PAS.
Interested in biochemistry of cells and molecular aspects of cell biology. This includes biogenesis, transport and degradation of mitochondrial proteins and their failure resulting in pathologies.

Tomasz Dietl is a Head and a Professor at the International Centre for Interfacing Magnetism and Superconductivity with Topological Matter – MagTop, funded by a grant from the Foundation for Polish Science (FNP), and carried out at the Institute of Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where he earned PhD in 1978. In 2008 Dietl obtained an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC). From 2011-2014 he served as an ERC Scientific Council member and on the ERC Steering Committee. In 2023, he became a National Science Centre (NCN) Council Member.

His current research interests are focused on developing material systems and device concepts for nanospintronics of topological materials, ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic semiconductors, and hybrid metal/semiconductor nanostructures. He is the author or co-author of over 380 research publications and 30 popularizing articles, cited over 24 000 times, resulting in the h-factor over 58 (WoS). Dietl has presented over 200 invited talks at international meetings, including nine plenary lectures at major physics conferences.

In 1998 Dietl became a member of the Polish Academy of Sciences; in 2002, he was elected to the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics, Commission on Low-Temperature Physics; later he was nominated Fellow of the Institute of Physics, UK, the American Physical Society, and the Japanese Society of Applied Physics (in 2004, 2015, and 2019, respectively), while in 2009 Dietl was elected to the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as to the Warsaw Science Society and in 2011 to Academia Europaea. He is recipient of Maria Skłodowska-Curie Award in Poland (1997); Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in Germany (2003); Agilent Technologies Europhysics Prize (2005) for pioneering works that paved the way for the emergence of semiconductor spintronics; Foundation for Polish Science Prize (2006), and the Marian Smoluchowski Medal of the Polish Physical Society (2010).

Prof. dr. Jan Dumanski was born in Cracow, where he studied medicine (1979-1984) at Medical Academy (present Collegium Medicum UJ). In 1985 he started research studies at the Department of Clinical Genetics from Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. This is where he received his PhD and later the professorship in the area of medical molecular genetics. Since 2000, he is a professor at the Department of Immunology, Genetics and Pathology at Uppsala University, Sweden. He was also the professor of University of Alabama at Birmingham, at the Department of Genetics and Director of Howell and Elizabeth Heflin Center for Human Genetics. Since 2017, he is a professor at Medical University of Gdansk in Poland and currently the director of 3P Medicine Laboratory, a research center funded by the Foundation for Polish Research. He has been involved in numerous projects on characterization of the human genome and genetic mechanisms behind cancer predisposition.

Maiju Gyran is Senior Science Adviser working at the Academy of Finland. At the moment she is coordinating the Finnish Flagship Programme and Centre of Excellence Programmes and she is member state representative in Programme Committee for the European Research Council (ERC). Her background is in food science and technology, but she has been working for the government and in science policy issues almost 20 years.

W. Knap obtained his master and PhD degrees from Faculty of Physics – Warsaw University Poland working in Experimental Solid State Physics Department on Terahertz (Far infrared) properties of narrow gap semiconductors HgTe and InSb. In 1987 he left to France and worked at University of Montpellier, Grenoble High Magnetic Field Laboratory, Toulouse Pulsed High Magnetic Field Laboratory and Montpellier where founded CNRS Montpellier THz group. Between 1999 and 2001 he worked at– Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute USA and between 2007 and 2008 at Tohoku University Japan. He currently leads International Research Agenda -CENTERA at IHPP- Polish Academy of Sciences. His main scientific interests are : i) Fair Infrared-FIR (Terahertz - THz) properties of semiconductors, ii) Quantum phenomena in transport and iii)Terahertz Plasma excitations in nanostructures. He published more then 400 papers and his H factor is > 50. He is 2022 laureate of ERC advanced grant on THZ plasmonics.

Dr. Ewelina Knapska has been a group leader at the Nencki Institute in Warsaw since 2012. In 2013 she was promoted to Professor of the Institute, and since 2018 she has been vice-President of the Centre of Excellence for Neural Plasticity and Brain Disorders (BRAINCITY). Her research aims to understand the neural circuit mechanisms controlling social interaction and emotion-related learning. She was one of the first to describe sharing others' emotions and their brain correlates in rodents (Knapska et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2006). This discovery has started a new line of research on the brain mechanisms underlying socially transferred emotions and social learning. In 2016 she was awarded a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) to study functional connectivity of the amygdala in social behavior. With the behavioral protocols and c-fos-dependent tracing of functional connectivity of activated neurons (Knapska et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2012) she developed, she has shown that reading the emotions of others can provide information about the proximity of danger and that distinct central amygdala circuits are recruited by socially signaled imminent and remote danger (Andraka, Kondrakiewicz et al. Current Biology, 2021). Further, she has studied the role of the central amygdala circuits in learning, discovering that matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9)-related circuits are indispensable for reward learning (Knapska et al., J. Neurosci. 2013; Puscian et al., Br J Pharmacol., 2021), in particular for approach motivation (Lebitko et al., BiorXiv preprint), which suggests the target of selective treatment. Accordingly, she has recently shown that normalizing MMP-9 activity in the central amygdala rescues impaired reward learning in the Fragile X syndrome model (Puscian et al., Mol. Psychiatry).

Dr. hab. Vignesh Kumaravel is an Acting Director of ICRI-BioM. During the last 10 years of research, he has developed several novel materials and technologies in collaboration with eminent international scientists from academia and industry. The key findings have been published in more than 60 international peer-reviewed articles, including high impact journals, and over 3,200 citations with an h-factor of 31. Several students completed their research projects under his supervision. He is an expert in business relations tailored to commercialize the outcomes of research with various industries. During his career, he has secured grants for various national and international collaborative research projects. He has recently awarded with the M.ERA-NET grant with academic partners from Spain and Brazil. He is named among the 2022 ranking of the world’s Top 2% of scientists by Elsevier and Standford University, USA.

Maciej Malawski holds a PhD in computer science and an MSc in computer science and in physics. In 2011-2012 he was a postdoc at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Currently Director of Sano – Centre for Computational Medicine, Research Team Leader – Extreme-scale Data and Computing, associate professor at the Institute of Computer Science AGH University of Krakow and a senior researcher at Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH. He has over 20 years of experience in research in parallel and distributed computing, high performance computing (HPC), grid and cloud technologies, serverless and container-based infrastructures, and federated machine learning. Interested in innovative applications of these technologies to scientific computing. His research interests include scientific workflows with focus on usage of novel and emerging large-scale computing infrastructures, performance evaluation, resource management, scheduling and cost optimization, with special focus on the use of advanced computing in medicine. He is a co-author of over 100 scientific papers, and has served community as a member of technical program committees of premier conferences on scientific, parallel and distributed computing (SC, ICCS, CCGrid, UCC, IPDPS), and was a general co-chair of EuroPar 2020. Since 2002 he participated in several European (CrossGrid, CoreGRID, ViroLab, VPH-Share, Eur-Valve, CECM, NearData) and nationally funded (NCN Opus, MEiN) research projects.

Prof. dr hab. Natalia Marek-Trzonkowska is the director of the International Centre for Cancer Vaccine Science (ICCVS) at the University of Gdańsk. Research led by Prof. Marek-Trzonkowska focuses on clinical application of the immune system cells. She is the author of numerous publications and patents, including the first application of regulatory T cells (Tregs) in the treatment of type 1 diabetes in children. Currently, she is working on cellular therapy for non-small cell lung cancer. She is interested in intercellular communication, immune tolerance and translational immunology. She is a recipient of the Kościuszko Foundation's award, the Scholarship of the Minister of Science and Higher Education for Outstanding Young Scientists, and the Award of the Minister of Education and Science for Significant Achievements in Implementation Activities. Her research has been recognized with numerous awards granted by national and international organizations, including the Polish- American Medical Society, the Polish Academy of Sciences, the International Society for Pediatric and Adolescent Diabetes (ISPAD), the European Federation of Immunological Societies (EFIS), and the International Islet and Pancreas Transplantation Association (ISPAD).

Kjell-Håkan Närfelt has been working with technology driven business development and R&D for more than 20 years in different management positions. He has served as a board member and advisor to several R&D based start-ups during his time as an investment director in a corporate venture capital firm and as partner in a private seed investment company. He has also served as an international advisor, chairman and board member in different governmental initiatives in Norway, EU and Thailand.
He is currently involved in the strategic development of a new area at Vinnova – Ecosystems for innovative companies. Mr Narfelt is also chairperson for UNECE’s Team of Specialists on Innovation and Competitiveness Policies, and member of the International Advisory Board for the National Innovation Agency of Thailand.
Mr. Närfelt has a research background in computer science which resulted in an academic spin-off that encouraged him to leave academia and to exploit the research results in a commercial context

I am trained as a Medical Doctor and an Electronics Engineer and have worked most of my life in the area between these field. After 10 years in the biotech industry I became Professor of Physiology in 1998 and director of a Center of Excellence within cardiac arrhythmia during 2005-15. Since 2015 I have been the CEO of the Danish National Research Foundation supporting about 40 Centers of Excellence within life science, natural and technical sciences, the humanities, and social sciences. I am vice-chair of the Carlsberg Foundation and chair of the Carlsberg Laboratory supervisory board.

ENSEMBLE3 CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE, WARSAW, POLAND ŁUKASIEWICZ - INSTITUTE OF MICROELECTRONICS AND PHOTONICS, WARSAW, POLAND UNIVERSITY OF WARSAW, WARSAW, POLAND

Prof. Dorota A. Pawlak (DAP) is the president of the newly established Centre of Excellence for nanophotonics, advanced materials and novel crystal growth-based technologies, ENSEMBLE3 (e3) in Warsaw, Poland (www.ensemble3.eu). The Centre combines the know-how and expertise in the crystal growth of important strategic materials together with innovative research on applying crystal growth to novel materials concepts. The strategic materials include oxides (active materials for lasers, scintillators, optical isolators, passive Q-modulators, nonlinear optical materials, substrates materials), III-V compound semiconductors including phosphates, arsenides, and antimonides. DAP leads the Functional Materials Technology group which works on new materials with special optical properties and potential applications in such fields as photonics, optoelectronics, medicine and photoelectrochemistry. She proposed utilization of crystal growth and eutectic solidification for realization of new material types such as metamaterials, plasmonic materials, topological insulator heterostructures, or novel materials for hydrogen generation. Together with her group they invented a direct method for producing volumetric glass-based composites doped with various species including plasmonic nanoparticles, quantum dots, rare earth ions, so called Nanoparticles Direct Doping method. She was/is a laureate/coordinator of highly competitive projects including first new-member-state-coordinated FP7 NMP Collaborative project and one of three in Poland Teaming for Excellence H2020 projects by the European Commission; International Research Agenda Programme and TEAM projects by the Foundation for Polish Science; or MAESTRO from the National Science Centre in Poland. DAP is currently the president-elect of the Polish Society for Crystal Growth; she is also a member of the Directorial Board of Metamorphose Virtual Institute for Artificial Electromagnetic Materials and Metamaterials METAMORPHOSE VI AISBL.

Professor Leszek Roszkowski is a theoretical physicist, head of the International Research Agenda ``AstroCeNT – Science and Technology Centre for Particle Astrophysics”, based at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also a professor at the Particle Theory Group at the National Centre for Nuclear Research.
Professor Roszkowski’s scientific research and interests are in the areas of particle physics and astrophysics which encompass quantum phenomena and elementary particle physics (sometimes called ``microcosm”) on the one hand and of the Universe, especially its particle content and evolution since the Big Bang (``macrocosm”). Areas of his particular activity and expertise are the nature of the dark matter in the Universe and the Higgs boson and so-called new physics searched for in colliders like the Large Hadron Collider.
Roszkowski obtained Master’s degree in physics from Warsaw University in 1981, a PhD degree from the University of California, Davis in 1987 and habilitation from the Jagiellonian University in 1993. Following postdoctoral research positions at CERN, University of Michigan and University of Minnesota, in 1996 he joined Lancaster University in the UK as a Lecturer (associate professor) and in 2003 he moved to the University of Sheffield to assume a post of a professor. In 2011 he returned to Poland as a recipient of a Welcome programme award from the Foundation of Polish Science to start and lead the particle theory group at National Centre for Nuclear Research. Since 1 July 2018 his main post has been that of a professor at the Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center of the Polish Academy of Sciences as head of and the leader of the Particle Astrophysics Group at Astrocent.
Professor Roszkowski is a member of the European Academy of Sciences (since 2022) and of the Chamber of Astronomy and Mathematical and Natural Sciences of Copernican Academy (since 2023). He is a representative of Poland in the General Assembly of APPEC (Astropartice Physics European Consortium). Roszkowski is the initiator of the international annual conference series COSMO and chairman of the COSMO Steering Committee.

Maciej Wojtkowski (born 1975) is a Polish physicist, specializing in physical optics and biomedical imaging. His research interests focus on understanding the interaction of light with living tissue and the possibilities of in vivo imaging using optical methods. With his work, he has made significant contributions to the development of optical coherence tomography (OCT) methods, fluorescence retinal imaging and the understanding of two-photon vision.
In 2003, Wojtkowski was the first to demonstrate the feasibility of 100-fold accelerated OCT, introducing Fourier domain detection (FdOCT, also known as Spectral domain OCT), in imaging the human eye. With this work, he pushed the boundaries of 3-D in vivo imaging and quantitative morphometric analysis of the human eye, which have been implemented in many medical devices available in eye clinics around the world. In 2014, he led a study that elucidated the phenomenon of two-photon vision by proving the role of two-photon absorption in the isomerization of retinal pigments that cause visual sensation. In 2021, he and his collaborators showed, for the first time, images of the human retina measured by two-photon excited fluorescence in vivo. Wojtkowski is the author of eight patents and more than 260 publications, including more than 130 in recognized professional journals.

Wojtkowski pursued his graduate studies with the Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, where he received his MSc in experimental physics in 1999, his PhD in physical sciences in 2003, habilitation in the same discipline in 2010 and full professorship in 2014. Currently, Prof. Wojtkowski is head of the Department of Physical Chemistry of Biological Systems at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, where he also heads his own research team (Physical Optics and Biophotonics Team). More recently, he has begun directing the new Center of Excellence International Center for Translational Eye Research established at the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences. During his academic career, Wojtkowski has completed numerous research internships at institutions around the world, including the University of Vienna, Austria; University of Kent, Canterbury, England; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA; and University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.

In 2012, Wojtkowski received the Foundation for Polish Science Award in Mathematical and Physical Sciences and Engineering. Wojtkowski's scientific activities have been recognized by several distinguished bodies, including the Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland (First Degree Award for his habilitation dissertation in 2010); the authorities of the Faculty of Physics at the University of Warsaw (Professor Stefan Pienkowski Award in 2004), the authorities of the Warsaw University of Technology (Young Scientist Medal in 2008); and the Chapter of the Polityka Weekly Scholarships (the "Stay with us" campaign in 2001). Since 2015, Wojtkowski has been a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, and since 2016 he has been a corresponding member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2007, Wojtkowski received the prestigious European Young Investigator Award research grant.

Professor, director of International Centre for Theory of Quantum Technologies (ICTQT), Univ. of Gdansk, member of Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) LONGER VISITING POSTIONS: Visiting professor of Univ. of Innsbruck (Collaboration with Zeilinger), many times in the period (1991-1999); Visiting professor of University of Vienna, several semesters (2000-2018), Tsinghua Univ., Beijing, Chair professor (October, 2015). Univ. of Science and Technology of China (USTC), visiting distinguished professor (2011); Univ. of Singapore, visiting scientist (2004-5); Wenner Gren Stipend, Stockholm (2006).
MAIN POSITIONS OF TRUST:
(2010-2018) in Board of National Science Centre (NCN).
(2016-2019) an editor of Phys. Rev. A.
(2017-) in Strategic Advisory Board of EU program QUANT-ERA.
AWARDS: The Prize of FNP (2013)
Copernicus Prize (with Weinfurter) DFG/FNP (2014),
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Prize, III Div of PAN (2013)
Total value of procured GRANTS over $ 10 m.
Founder of ICTQT thanks to an IRAP grant of FNP (2018-2023).
SCIENTIFIC INTERESTS: Quantum Physics, Quantum Information, Quantum Optics
PUBLICATIONS: over 160 papers;ISI h-index 39, citations: 8600 (Web of Science); h=51. 14500 (Google Scholar).
MAIN RESULTS: physical conditions for entanglement swapping, quantum teleportation, and multiphoton interference (1993-7). Full set of multipartite correlation Bell-CHSH inequalities (2001), schemes for d-dimensional interference and entanglement (1997), proof of their high-non-classicality (2000), observation of 4-photon (2003) and 6-photon interference (2009), observation of interference of independent photons (2006), test of Leggett-type models for correlations (2007), Information Causality as a principle of physics (2009), relation of Bell inequalities and communication complexity (2002-5, 2020), non-linear entanglement indicators (2008), weak measurements with parametric down conversion (2012), “Quantum Bridge” – (2014). new definition of quantum Stokes observables f(2015), non-classicality indicators for states of undefined photon numbers (2016-), analysis of Bell experiments involving single photon, a critique of Wigner Friend experiment (2021-2023).