Dora Angelaki is a Professor at the Center for Neural Science and the Tandon school of Engineering at New York University. She holds a diploma and Ph.D. degrees in electrical and biomedical engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, and the University of Minnesota. Interested in understanding the principles that make our brain so much better than man-made machines and AI. She uses naturalistic foraging tasks that combine uncertainty, spatial navigation, decision-making and episodic memory to understand inference in the brain. She explores how task-relevant latent variables and multisensory signals flow dynamically across brain areas to generate perception and cognition, how hierarchical causal inference is implemented in the brain, how beliefs propagate through the network, and how internal states modulate this information flow.

Giovanni Cecchi is an Emeritus professor of Physiology at the Department of Medicina Sperimentale e Clinica of the University of Firenze where he researched the mechanisms of force production in single frog skeletal muscle fibres and the effects of fatigue on crossbridge performance in mammalian muscle. As an amateur classical guitar playermusic has always been an added interest, not unlike many scientists, which recently has leaded him to publish some papers in the field of musical acoustic. Starting with a short review on the relationship between hearing mechanism and the Tartini’s terzo suono , a phenomenon involving Physiology , Acoustic and Music, up to a more recent study of the combination tones (to which the Tartini terzo suono belong) emitted by violins of various quality and age. It is especially pleasant that this paper, published on JASA, has attracted interest also by a series of popular scientific journals and by some newspapers.

Bente Klarlund Pedersen, MD MDSc, is Professor of Integrative Medicine, a specialist in infectious diseases and internal medicine and chief physician at Copenhagen University Hospital – Rigshospitalet, Denmark. She is the Director of Centre for Physical Activity Research (CFAS), which count 27 senior researchers/postdocs, 14 PhD students, 16 other academic and technical personnel, 11 pre-graduate students and an administration of 4 persons (https://aktivsundhed.dk).
The research group has identified skeletal muscle as an endocrine organ that produces and releases so-called “myokines”. The identification of myokines provides a conceptual basis for understanding how muscles communicate with other organs. Through translational research, the aim is to develop targeted exercise training regimes for specific disease groups by applying a translational strategy: “from bedside to bench and back”.
BKP has had many positions of trust and is a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters. BKP has more than 700 scientific publications, > 58.000 citations and her “H”-index is 121 (Web of Science).
BKP has written several popular books about exercise and health. She has contributed to hundreds of articles in the public press. BKP writes weekly columns on health and serves as letters editor for Politiken.
In addition, her research has been featured internationally to a broad audience on several occasions. She has received several prizes, including the “Rosenkjærpris”.

Michela Matteoli is Full Professor of Pharmacology, Humanitas University; Director of the CNR Institute of Neuroscience; Head of Pharmacology and Brain Pathology lab, Humanitas Research Hospital, Milano. She is member of EMBO, Academia Europaea and Accademia dei Lincei. She was/is in the International Scientific Advisory Boards of the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychiatry in Paris, the Center for Integrative Research in Biology al Collège de France and the Umberto Veronesi Foundation, and member of international evaluating panels, including the Armenise Harvard-Italy Foundation, ERC Advanced grants and SNSF starting grants. She has been awarded with several international grants, including the ERC Advanced Grant in 2022. In 2013 she was conferred the Mid-Career Mentoring Award by the journal Nature, in 2015 the Athena Award for scientific merits, and in 2019 the Feltrinelli Award for Physiology, Biochemistry and Pharmacology.  Her research focuses on the synapse and how the immune system affects its formation and function.
https://www.humanitas-research.org/researcher/michela-matteoli/

Vittorio Porciatti DSc, FARVO is the James L. Knight Professorship of Ophthalmology, Vice Chair and Director of Research at Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, University of Miami, where he also has secondary appointments at the Department of Biomedical Engineering and at the Neuroscience Program. He received his education in biological sciences and training in visual neuroscience in Pisa, Italy, where he also worked for many years as senior scientist at the Institute of Neurophysiology of the National Research Council (CNR) with secondary appointment at the Department of Ophthalmology, Catholic University, Rome, Italy. His translational research on the visual system has taken advantage of non-invasive electrophysiological tools for retinal ganglion cell function testing he pioneered and continuously developed. At the Bascom Palmer Eye Institute, he has developed multiple NIH-funded programs on retinal ganglion cell plasticity and early detection/restoration of visual function in pre-clinical models and in patients with glaucoma and optic nerve disorders.