Dr. Weiqun Gan earned his PhD (1989) in the Department of Astronomy at Nanjing University. Following his education, he joined the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and was promoted to full professor in 1995. From 2004 to 2014, he served as Deputy Director of PMO. For many years, his research has focused on solar flares through modeling the atmosphere, hydrodynamics, spectroscopy, and high-energy solar physics. He has been actively involved in nearly every project aimed at advancing space-based solar observations in China. In 2011, he proposed the mission concept for ASO-S and led its pre-study from 2011 to 2013. From 2014 to 2016, he led the background development of the mission. In late 2017, ASO-S was formally established by CAS, with Gan appointed as the Chief Scientist for the mission. To date, he has authored/co-authored around 300 publications, including the monograph titled High Energy Solar Physics (2002, Science Press, in Chinese).
Dr. John Leibacher is a solar physicist, working primarily on atmospheric dynamics and helioseismology, who was previously at the National Solar Observatory (NSO), in Tucson, Arizona, USA for many years where he was director and director of the Global Oscillation Network Group (GONG), and he is currently at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale, Université de Paris-Saclay, Orsay, France and the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory of the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. He has been actively involved in a number of space missions. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Solar Physics for 19 years and he previously served for a number of years on the Editorial Committee of the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
Dr. Cristina H. Mandrini is a Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Astronomía y Física del Espacio, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Universidad de Buenos Aires, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been the head of the Solar Physics Group in this institution for more than 20 years and Assistant and Associate Professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires for 17 years. She is interested in solar active phenomena, their origin, magnetic field modelling, topology calculation, and their impact in the interplanetary medium. She is full member of the Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales since 2018, in which she is the present President of the Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy Section, and a member of its Board of Directors, as well as full member of The World Academy of Sciences. She has been Editor in Chief of the journal Solar Physics since 2016.
Dr. Lidia van Driel-Gesztelyi is a solar physicist, working on the formation and evolution of solar active regions and their magnetic activity phenomena (e.g. flares and coronal mass ejections), magnetic helicity, coronal heating, elemental composition of the solar corona, and the origin of the solar wind. She is Emeritus Professor of Space and Climate Physics at University College London, UK, and Emeritus Researcher at Konkoly Observatory, Hungary. She has served in various leadership roles in the International Astronomical Union. She was awarded the Service Award of the Royal Astronomical Society, UK, Doctor Honoris Causa of Paris Observatory, France, and Order of Merit of Hungary. She has been Editor in Chief of the journal Solar Physics since 2005 and served for five years on the Editorial Committee of the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics.
