Michel Blanc was director of the Midi-Pyrenees Observatory at Toulouse and Pic-du-Midi (1988-1998) and of the Marseille Observatory (2000-2005) before being Vice-President for research of Ecole Polytechnique (2007-2012). He is presently an astronomer at IRAP (CNRS-University of Toulouse), a Discipline Scientist at the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland, and since late 2016, the Executive Director of the International Space Science Institute in Beijing, China. His works focus on space plasma physics applied to the magnetized environments of planets, particularly the Earth and the giant planets. He specializes in the exploration of giant planets systems, being an Interdisciplinary Scientist on the Cassini-Huygens mission, a co-I of the Juno mission and the lead proponent of the Laplace proposal to ESA, which led to the selection of ESA's JUICE mission. He is the author of over 100 scientific papers and of about 50 invited talks in international conferences and gives many outreach lectures for the general audience.
Gregory Herczeg joined the Kavli Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (KIAA) at Peking University in 2011 as a Youth Qianren Professor. His fields of research include the evolution of protostars and pre-main sequence stars, the physics and chemistry of circumstellar disks, and the formation of planets as a product of disk evolution. He has co-authored 150 publications in refereed journals.
Dr. Veerle Sterken worked in 2007 on the Darwin mission in a joint venture between ESA, TU Delft and Thales Alenia Space (France) before she started her Ph.D. project at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (MPIK) in 2009. There, she studied the motion of interstellar dust in the solar system and was involved in the Stardust mission. She obtained her Ph.D. degree from the TU Braunschweig in August 2012 while working at the MPIK. She first continued her work as a postdoctoral researcher in the same research group, then moved toBern, Switzerland in 2014 for a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Space Science Institute. She focused on the interpretation of Ulysses interstellar dust measurements using computer simulations, and on laboratory calibrations for the Cassini Cosmic Dust Analyser. Dr. Sterken presently works at the Astronomical Institute at the University of Bern. She is the author or co-author of 26 refereed publications.
Since 1991, Helmut Lammer has been a Scientist, and more recently Group Leader, at the Space Research Institute (IWF), Austrian Academy of Sciences (OAW), Graz, Austria. His research interests cover planetary aeronomy and comparative planetology, the formation and escape processes of exospheres, the evolution of atmospheres and the habitability of planets and moons. He has participated in many space projects in Russia, Europe and the United States, as well as in several key collaborative research projects in Austria. He was a member of several advisory bodies, including the Solar System Exploration Working Group (SSEWG) of ESA. He is the author or co-author of over 260 publications in international refereed journals and of four scientific books.
Willy Benz has occupied a broad diversity of professor positions at Harvard, Tucson, Geneva and finally Bern. He was the director of the Physikalisches Institute of the University of Bern and is currently the director of the National Center for Competence in Research PlanetS of Switzerland. His scientific works focus on the theory of planet formation, which he approaches in part by developing numerical models of the accretion and migration of planets within circumstellar disks. He is the Principal Investigator of the Swiss-ESA CHEOPS mission, was the chairman of the SSAC of ESA, and is a member of many space science advisory bodies in different countries. He is the author of 455 publications and is very active in Public Outreach, with over 50 public lectures over the last 50 years.
Stephane Udry is a Full Professor at the department of astronomy of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. He is currently the director of this department and the co-director of the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research PlanetS. His research interests cover the search for extrasolar planets and substellar companions by a diversity of methods, the statistical study of the orbital parameters of exoplanetary systems and of their dynamics, and the study of spectroscopic binary stars. He had and still has important responsibilities in the scientific leadership of several important space-based and ground-based exoplanet observation projects, and is a member of several high level committees, including the chairs of the "Astronomy and Fundamental Physics" panel of the ESSC (European Space Science Committee) and of the Swiss Commission for Astronomy. He is the author of 440 highly-cited publications in peer-reviewed journals and of over 55 public conferences in the last 10 years. He is also heavily involved in the development of modern teaching tools for higher education, such as MOOCs.
Rafael Rodrigo's scientific career began at the Institute of Astrophysics of Andalusia, of which he was director from 1990 to 2004, and where he was directly involved in the direction of many projects on Planetary Atmospheres and Solar System Exploration. He was the President of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) from 2008 to 2012. He has been involved in many space missions (Rosetta, Cassini-Huygens, Mars Express, Bepi-Colombo, JUICE.). He is currently a Research Professor at the Centro de Astrobiologia (CSIC), Madrid, and the Executive Director of the International Space Science Institute in Bern, Switzerland. He is the author or co-author of more than 300 scientific publications in international journals.
Maurizio Falanga received the venia docendi in physics from the University of Basel in 2013. His scientific background is in high-energy astrophysics (hot universe andcompact objects). Since 2009, he has been the Science Program Manager at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI) in Bern, Switzerland. Between 2013 and 2016, he was appointed as the founding Executive Director of the International Space Sciences Institute in Beijing, China. He is the author or co-author of over 100 published papers and editor of several books in his research fields.
