Karsten König is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technologies at the Saarland University. He gained the PhD degree in physics and habilitation degree in cell biology from the University Jena. Karsten Koenig is also founder and president of the companies JenLab GmbH in Berlin/Germany and Multiphoton Laser Technologies Inc. in California. Prof. Karsten Koenig published about 500 scientific papers (e.g. in Nature) in the field of biophotonics and laser material machining. He pioneered fluorescence lifetime imaging, femtosecond laser nanoprocessing including laser transfection, as well as clinical multiphoton tomography and high-resolution optical skin biopsies.

Dr. Young-Kai (Y. K.) Chen is Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Coherent Corporation, andvisiting professor at Cornell University and UCLA. He was a Program Manager at DARPA from September 2017 to September 2021. Before joined DARPA in 2017, he was a Senior Director at Nokia Bell Labs. Dr. Chen and his teams contributed to development of integrated lasers, silicon photonics ICs, photonic processing, wireless backhauls, and 100G coherent optic data links. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of Bell Labs, IEEE,Optica, a member of National Academy of Engineering, and Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Yeshaiahu (Shaya) Fainman is ASML/Cymer Chair and Distinguished Professor in ECE at UCSD. He received the M. Sc and Ph. D degrees from Technion- in 1979 and 1983, respectively. He is directing research of the Ultrafast and Nanoscale Optics group at UCSD and made significant contributions to nanophotonics, silicon photonics, and semiconductor nanolasers. He is a Fellow of the OSA, IEEE, SPIE, and a recipient of the Miriam and Aharon Gutvirt Prize, Lady Davis Fellowship, Brown Award, SPIE Gabor Award, OSA Emmett N. Leith Medal, OSA Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize and OPTICA (former OSA) Nick Holonyak Jr Award.

I was born in Minsk (Belarus). I had received MS in physics from the Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus) in 1977, PhD in theoretical physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1981, and the Doctor of Sciences degree (habilitation) in theoretical physics from the N. N. Bogoliubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (Kiev) in 1989. Till 1991, I was a senior researcher at the Institute for Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Moscow). Since 1991, I was an Associate Professor, and since 1998 a Full Professor at Tel Aviv University. I have published 1,300+ papers and four books. The total number of citations to my publications exceeds 62,000. My h-index is 94 (Web of Science) / 97 (Scopus)/ 113 (Google Scholar). I am an editor of two major international journals: “Physics Letters A” and “Chaos, Solitons & Fractals”, an editor-in-chief of a newly established journal “Photonic and Quantum Waves”, and an editorial board member of “Journal of Optics”, “Symmetry”, “Photonics”, “Optics Communications”, and “Chaos”. I have been an advisor to 31 MS students, 14 PhD students, and 11 postdocs. I am a Senior Member of the Optical Society of America (recently renamed to Optica), and a Foreign Member of the Serbian Academy of Nonlinear Sciences. In 2025, I was a recipient of the NSC (Nonlinear Science & Complexity) Lagrange award for lifetime achievement in Nonlinear Physical Science.

Prof. Dr. Miroslav D. Dramićanin earned his PhD in Physics from the University of Belgrade and has held notable positions including Full Professor of Applied Physics at the University of Belgrade and Head of the Department for Radiation Chemistry and Physics at Vinča Institute. He currently serves as Associate Editor for Optical Materials, and is a foreign member of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. His research centers on luminescent spectroscopy and materials science, with a focus on luminescence thermometry and nanomaterials for advanced optical applications. Prof. Dramićanin has authored one book, nine book chapters, and nearly 390 peer-reviewed publications, with approximately 18,500 citations and an h-index of 65, according to Google Scholar. He is the winner of the Galileo Galilei Award for 2025 from the International Commission for Optics. Additionally, he is recognized on Stanford University’s list of the world’s most influential scientists.

Dr. Nikitin has worked in different topics in nanophotonics and 2D materials, and his scientific interests have centered around polaritons in anisotropic van der Waals materials and theory for near-field optical microscopy. He has published over 100 scientific papers which have got over 12.000 citations. He has contributed into discovery of plasmon polaritons in graphene and topological insulators, hyperbolic phonon polaritons in various polar crystals such as MoO3 and developed several methodologies for modelling and interpretation of nanoimaging with the near-field microscopy

Dr. R Holland Cheng, Ph D is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at University of California. Dr. Rhcrev received a master degree in 1989 and a Ph D degree in 1992 from Purdue University. Dr. Rhcrev has served as a Panel Reviewer for NIH programmed project grant, NIH Microbiology & Infectious Diseases Research Committee ,NIH National Center for Research Resources, Wellcome Trust, UK and Earth & Life Sciences Council, Netherlands (2002). Dr. Cheng has actively served on the advisory board of the International Microscopy Congress plus regional microscopy societies, American Biographical Institute, and International Virus Assembly Symposium.He is also a regular member of the American Chemical Society,American Society for Microbiology and American Biophysical Society . Dr. Rhcrev has published nearly fifty papers in peer reviewed journals and his research mainly focuses on Proteome imaging of macromolecular systems. Professor R. Holland Cheng′s area of expertise is in proteome imaging of model/macromolecular systems. Dr. Cheng′s lab focuses mainly on conformational analysis of receptor or antibody-bound protein complexes that can be effectively interpreted based on the density of 3D reconstructions.