Prof. Matthias Sutter is Managing Director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, and also Professor for Experimental Economics at the University of Cologne and the University of Innsbruck. Matthias Sutter, born in 1968, received his doctorate in economics from the University of Innsbruck in 1999, where he also habilitated in 2002. From 2003 to 2005, he was C3-professor at the Max Planck Institute for Economics in Jena. Subsequent positions included chairs at the University of Cologne (2005-2006, 2015-2017), the University of Innsbruck (2006-2013) and the European University Institute in Florence (2013-2014). From July 2007 to June 2013, he was also a part-time professor at the University of Gothenburg. Since 2017, Sutter is Director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods and leads the experimental economics group. He is still part-time professor at the Universities of Cologne and Innsbruck where he teaches experimental economics. He has published in all Top-5 journals in economics, but also in “Science”, “Nature Communications” or “PNAS”. Sutter also writes popular science books, like “Behavioral Economics for Leaders” (2023). His German books “Die Entdeckung der Geduld” (2018) and “Der menschliche Faktor” (2022) both hit the Austrian bestseller lists.
Dr. Heidi Seibold is co-founder co-executive director of the Digital Research Academy, a trainer network focused on Open Science, Data Literacy and Research Software Engineering. Her research used to be at the intersection of statistics, machine learning and medicine, before wandering into the field of Open Science. She left her academic career in 2021 to pursue her passion of helping researchers improve the quality of their research through good scientific practices and Open Science.
She is in the steering group of the German Reproducibility Network and initiated the Open Science Retreat, an unconference that is in its third year now. Heidi writes a successful newsletter on open and reproducible data science with >2000 subscribers and has been involved in various podcast productions.
Heidi is an avid cyclist and hiker and tries to avoid cars and airplanes as much as possible.
Prof. Ignacio Cirac is a Spanish theoretical physicist in the field of quantum information theory. With his collaborators, he introduced the first proposals of quantum computers, simulators, and repeaters with atoms, and developed a theory of tensor networks to describe quantum many-body systems. Ignacio Cirac graduated in Theoretical Physics at the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain) in 1988, and gained his PhD in 1991 at the same university. Between 1991 and 1996, he was Associate Professor at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain), and spent eighteen months at the University of Colorado (US) working with Peter Zoller. From 1996 until 2001 he was Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). Since 2001 he is a member of the Max Planck Society and director at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics (Garching, Germany). In 2002 he also became honorary professor at the Technical University of Munich. Prof. Cirac has won numerous awards, including the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society in 2018, the Bell Prize in Physics 2019 and the Micius Quantum Prize in 2019.
Prof. Volker Springel received his PhD in Astrophysics from the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität in Munich in 1999. He went on to be a Post-doc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and subsequently at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, where he became a tenured research group leader in 2005. He was appointed Prof. of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Heidelberg in 2010, where her also became group leader for Theoretical Astrophysics at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and member of the Interdisciplinary Center of Scientific Computing in Heidelberg. Since 2017 Prof. Springel is Director at the Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, and since 2019 he is Honorary Professor at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich. He also serves as Vice President of the German Astronomical Society, as Member of the Cosmological Simulation Working Group (CSWG) of the EUCLID satellite of the European Space Agency (ESA) and as member of the Research Board of the ORIGINS Cluster of Excellence. From 2017-2023 he was a member of the scientific advisory board of the Gauß-Center for Supercomputing (GCS) and from 2019-2022 he was member of the Steering Committee of the Max-Planck Princeton Center for Plasmaphysics. in 2016 Prof. Springel was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and in 2020 he became an International Member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. In 2021 he won the Leibniz Award of the DFG.
Dr. Richard Kembleton has been working in fusion physics for over 20 years, starting with a PhD in fusion materials at Cambridge University. He then joined UKAEA (UK Atomic Energy Authority) where he was a member of the Power Plant Technology Group and worked on DEMO, power plant designs, and fusion economics. Dr. Kembleton joined EUROfusion in Garching in 2018 to manage the Prospective R&D programme aimed at realising technology for commercialisation, and then joined Gauss Fusion in 2023 where he now acts as the CSO. --- Dr. Samuel Lazerson has a B.S. in Engineering Physics from Emby-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach Florida, and a Ph.D. in Space Physics from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has worked on stellarator physics for 15 years as a researcher at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory and the Max-Planck Institute for Plasma Physics in Greifswald. He's conducted research on the Large Helical Device, HSX, CNT, DIII-D, NSTX, ITER, and W7-X. In May of last year Samuel joined Gauss Fusion as the stellarator physics lead.
Friedrich Wagner was born on 16 November 1943 in Pfaffenhofen (Swabia). After studying physics and taking his PhD at the Technical University of Munich in 1972, Wagner then went as a postdoc to Ohio State University, where he did research in the field of low-temperature physics from 1973 to 1974. In 1975 he joined Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics, being made head of the ASDEX tokamak experiment in 1986 and appointed Scientific Fellow in 1988. Wagner qualified for lectureship in the same year at the University of Heidelberg, where he held a teaching post till 1991. That year he became Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Munich. From 1989 till 1993 he has been project head of the Wendelstein 7-AS stellarator experiment. From 1993 to 2005 he was member of the Directorate of IPP, from March 1999 till April 2007 Speaker of the Greifswald Branch Institute and from 2003 till 2005 head of the "Wendelstein 7-X Enterprise". In 1987 he was awarded the "Excellency in Plasma Physics" prize by the Plasma Physics Division of the American Physical Society, in 2007 the Hannes Alfvén Prize of the European Physical Society. In 2008 he has been awarded the Stern-Gerlach Medal 2009 by the German Physical Society. Since 1999 he is Ordinary Professor at the Ernst-Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald. Besides his institute commitments, Wagner was from 1996 till 2004 Chairman of the Plasma Physics Division of the European Physical Society, from 2007 till 2009 he was President of the European Physical Society. Wagner is Honorary Member of the Ioffe Institute, St. Petersburg, Fellow of the Institute of Physics of the American Physical Society, and Member of the Editorial Board at the Institute of Physics. He retired end of 2008.
