Pietro Barabaschi
Pietro Barabaschi is a Director-General of ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor). ITER is the world’s largest fusion experiment. Thirty-five nations are collaborating to build and operate the ITER Tokamak, the most complex machine ever constructed by humans. Pietro Barabaschi has been working since 2009 in Fusion for Energy (F4E), the European Union organisation responsible for […]
Jannicke Mikkelsen
Jannicke Mikkelsen didn’t grow up thinking she would go to space. She carved that path herself—one bold decision at a time. From the icy wilderness of the Arctic to the vacuum of space, she has redefined what’s possible in both science and storytelling. In 2024, she became the first Norwegian in space and the world’s […]
Alex LeBrun
Alex LeBrun is the CEO of AMI Labs, a foundational world models company he co-founded with Yann LeCun. Before AI was a buzzword, he was already building it — founding VirtuOz, one of the earliest conversational AI companies (acquired by Nuance/Microsoft), then Wit.ai (acquired by Meta), laying infrastructure that now powers billions of interactions. He also co-founded […]
Helen Czerski
Helen Czerski is a physicist, writer and broadcaster, and enjoys being endlessly enthusiastic about the physics of the natural world. Her academic home is University College London, where her research focuses on breaking waves and bubbles in the open ocean, and how these bubbles influence the movement of carbon dioxide and oxygen between air and […]
Bernhard Schölkopf
Bernhard Schölkopf‘s scientific interests are in machine learning and causal inference. He has applied his methods to a number of different fields, ranging from biomedical problems to computational photography and astronomy. Bernhard studied physics and mathematics and earned his Ph.D. in computer science in 1997, becoming a Max Planck director in 2001. He has (co-)received […]
Mary Lewis
Vice President – Office of the Founder The Jane Goodall Institute Following 25 years in the oil and gas business with Conoco Inc, Mary began working and travelling with Jane Goodall in 1990. As Vice President -Office of the Founder – Global, she worked closely with Jane on all aspects of her complex life. She […]
Andreas Kaufer
Andreas Kaufer is a senior science leader at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). He earned his PhD in astronomy at Heidelberg University (1996) and joined ESO in 1999, contributing to the start of operations of the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile. His scientific work focuses on high-resolution spectroscopy of massive, luminous stars, probing how their atmospheres, winds, and circumstellar environments evolve and vary over […]
Xavier Barcons
Xavier Barcons, ESO Director General since 1 September 2017, was born in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Catalonia, Spain in 1959. He received Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in physical sciences from the University of Barcelona in 1981. He was awarded a PhD in statistical physics in 1985 from the University of Cantabria, Spain. Barcons began his academic […]
Philip Torr
Professor Philip Torr did his PhD (DPhil) at the Robotics Research Group of the University of Oxford under Professor David Murray of the Active Vision Group. He worked for another three years at Oxford as a research fellow, and still maintains close contact as visiting fellow there. He won several awards including the Marr prize […]
Mar Gómez
Mar Gómez holds a PhD Cum Laude and a degree in Physical Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid, specializing in Atmospheric Physics. She has two master’s degrees, one in Meteorology and Geophysics and the other in Renewable Energy and Environment. For four years, she participated in a research project at the Complutense University as […]
