Katrien Bernaerts graduated as a licentiate (master) in chemistry from Ghent University (Belgium) in 2000. From 2000 – 2005 she performed in PhD in polymer chemistry in the group of Prof. Du Prez at Ghent University (Belgium) on the synthesis and evaluation of stimuli responsive copolymer architectures by combination of different polymerization techniques. After PhD, Katrien spent 7 years in industry (Agfa, Teijin Aramid, DSM), doing research in the field of coatings and fibers. Since 2012, she holds an academic position at Maastricht University, where she is currently Full Professor Sustainable Polymer Synthesis.
Her main research focus is on the design and synthesis of sustainable polymer materials with tuneable properties for the circular economy. Sustainability entails biobased building blocks (but no biorefinery) instead of fossil raw materials, green routes for polymer synthesis and processing, as well as chemical recycling/reprocessing methods (biodegradability, depolymerization, dynamic bonds) to make the end-of-life of polymers more sustainable. Structure-property relationships of the resulting polymers are evaluated in several fields of application e.g. stimuli-responsive polymers, coatings, fibres, engineering plastics and biomedical materials. Growing focus on the use of artificial intelligence techniques to support and accelerate the experimental work, e.g. data interpretation and prediction of structure-property relationships.

Distinguished Professor Vivian W. Y. Tam is the Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and a world-leading researcher in the field of construction engineering and management. Her findings have found applications and impact for tackling climate-change issues for green buildings and recycled concrete. She is currently the Director for the ARC Industrial Transformation Training Centre in Digital Platforms for Net-Zero Building Ecosystem Lifecycle (NØBEL) at School of Built Environment and Design, Western Sydney University, Australia. She has served as the College of Expert, Australian Research Council, Australian Government in 2018-2021 and currently holds this position again from 2025 onward. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Construction Management. She has published over 500 referred journal articles of which 8 are highly-cited. Her work has been recognised by peers nationally and internationally, which has been exemplified by ten Australian Research Council projects and over 44,000 citations with a h-index over 114. Vivian is named as the Winner for the Excellence in Engineering or Information and Communication Technologies, 2025 NSW Premier’s Prizes for Science and Engineering, Office of the NSW Chief Scientist and Engineer and 100,000 Top-Scientists (Top 2% Scientists) in the World for since 2017. Vivian is also nominated as a Runner Up, Scopus Researcher of the Year Award 2019, Excellence in Research Impacting a Sustainable Future, Scopus, and her team has won the Gold Award, 2021 Urban Innovation and Entrepreneurship Competition, Guangzhou International Sister-City Universities (GISU), from this project development.

Xiaonan Wang is a tenured Associate Professor and Director of the Beijing Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence for Advanced Chemical Engineering Materials, Department of Chemical Engineering, Tsinghua University. She also serves as the Associate Dean of Office of International Affairs at Tsinghua. She received B.Eng. from Tsinghua University in 2011 and PhD from University of California, Davis in 2015. After working as a postdoctoral research associate at Imperial College London, she joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) as an assistant professor since 2017 and later became an adjunct associate professor. She is leading a Smart Systems Engineering research group at NUS and Tsinghua and also the director of the Intelligent Chemical Engineering Research Centre. She has published more than 180 papers, with > 15,300 citations and H index 72. She is an associate editor of Applied Energy and npj Thermal Science and Engineering etc. an editorial board member of Green Chemistry etc., recognized as a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher, World’s Top 2% Scientists, Cell Press Women Scientist Award, Young Beijing Scholar, ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering Lectureship, 50 Women in Tech by Forbes China etc.

Dr. Ying Li is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research spans polymer mechanics and physics, polymer membranes for water and environmental applications, and machine-learning-accelerated polymer design. His honors include the Materials Today Rising Star Award, ACS PMSE Young Investigator Award, NSF CAREER Award, AFOSR Young Investigator Award, and 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.

Susana Garcia is Full Professor of Chemical and Process Engineering and Global Head of the Institute of Mechanical, Process and Energy Engineering at Heriot-Watt University. Trained as a Chemical Engineer, she received her PhD from the University of Nottingham in 2010, completed postdoctoral research at INCAR-CSIC in Spain, and joined Heriot-Watt in 2014. She serves as Associate Director for Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS) at the Research Centre for Carbon Solutions since 2017 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2021. In 2023, she held a Visiting Professorship at EPFL, Switzerland. Internationally recognised for her work on low-carbon separation processes, CCUS, direct air capture (DAC), and AI-driven materials discovery for industrial decarbonisation, she also advises funding agencies, industry, foundations, and scientific societies.

Leite is a Professor in Materials Science and Engineering and a 2022-2026 Chancellor’s Fellow at UC Davis (USA). She has >75 publications (with 37 journal covers) and has delivered >200 invited talks at conferences and research institutions around the globe. Leite is a Fellow of Optica and of SPIE, a senior member of IEEE and a 2026 IEEE Photonics Lectureship Awardee, an associate editor of APL Materials, a 2025 ACS Energy Lectureship Award finalist, an awardee of the 2016 APS Ovshinsky Sustainable Energy Fellowship from the American Physical Society, and of the 2014 Maryland Academy of Sciences Outstanding Young Scientist Award. Her research interests encompass materials for sustainability and for photonics. Leite has pioneered the use of AI to forecast material’s dynamic behavior, publishing her first article in this topic in 2019. Before joining UC Davis, Leite was an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. She also worked at NIST and was a post-doctoral scholar at Caltech. Under her guidance, the researchers in the group have received 97 awards in the last 13 years, including 11 NSF graduate fellowships. Leite’s research has been supported by several programs from NSF, DARPA, and by the ARO.