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.