Dieter Bimberg received the Ph.D. magna cum laude from Goethe University, Frankfurt, Germany. He held for 7 years a Principal Scientist position at the Max Planck-Institute for Solid State Research, Grenoble, France. After serving as a Professor of Electrical Engineering, Technical University of Aachen, Germany, he assumed the Chair of Applied Physics at Technical University of Berlin. He is the Founding Director of its Center of NanoPhotonics and was for 21 years the chair of the department ofSolid-State Physics. He was holding guest professorships at the Technion, Haifa (twice), U.C. Santa Barbara, CA, USA, and at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, CA. He was Distinguished Adjunct Professor at KAU, Jeddah 2012-2018.In 2018 he was appointed asexecutive director of the “Bimberg Chinese German Center for Green Photonics” at the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a position he is still holding. He is a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina,the EU Academy of Sciences, aForeignMember of the Russian Academy of Sciences,the US Academies of Engineering and of Inventors, the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence (NAAI), Fellow/Member of the Academic Committee of the CORE Academy and Chinese Optical Society, a Life Fellow of the American Physical Society and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE, Fellow of the Electromagnetic Academy, Vice-President of the International Artificial Intelligence Associationand a honorary member of the Ioffe Institute of the RAS. He is recipient of many important international awards, like the UNESCO Nanoscience Award, the Max-Born Award and Medal of IoP and DPG, the Heinrich-Welker-Award, the Nick Holonyak Jr. Award of IEEE, the Oyo Buturiand MOC Awards of the Japanese Society of Applied Physics, the Jun-Ichi Nishizawa Medal and Award of IEEE, the Stern-Gerlach Award of DPG (the highest German physics award),to mention a few. He received honorary doctorates of the University of Lancaster, UK, and the St.Petersburg AlferovUniversity of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He has authored more than 1600 papers, 71 patents and patent applications, and six books. The number of times his research works has been cited is72,000+ and his Hirsch factor is 118(@ Google Scholar). His research interests include nanostructure based photonic and electronic devices, like edge and surface emitting lasers and semiconductor optical amplifiers,energy efficient data communication, andphysics and technology of nanostructures.

Professor at the Leibniz University Hannover, Institute of Quantum Optics, Hannover, Germany He graduated with honors and received PhD in Physics from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1981. He started his scientific carrier at P.N. Lebedev Institute of Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow and later worked in many research centers worldwide. At present, he is Professor of Physics at Leibniz University Hannover, Institute of Quantum Optics and Chair of Nanoengineering. In 2024 he received the Julius Springer Prize for Applied Physics. Scientific areas: laser physics and laser applications, nanoengineering, additive manufacturing technologies, quantum and nonlinear optics, nano- and biophotonics, biomedical implants and devices, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

Karsten König is Full Professor and Head of the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technologies at the Saarland University. He gained the PhD degree in physics and habilitation degree in cell biology from the University Jena. Karsten Koenig is also founder and president of the companies JenLab GmbH in Berlin/Germany and Multiphoton Laser Technologies Inc. in California. Prof. Karsten Koenig published about 500 scientific papers (e.g. in Nature) in the field of biophotonics and laser material machining. He pioneered fluorescence lifetime imaging, femtosecond laser nanoprocessing including laser transfection, as well as clinical multiphoton tomography and high-resolution optical skin biopsies.

Yeshaiahu (Shaya) Fainman is ASML/Cymer Chair and Distinguished Professor in ECE at UCSD. He received the M. Sc and Ph. D degrees from Technion- in 1979 and 1983, respectively. He is directing research of the Ultrafast and Nanoscale Optics group at UCSD and made significant contributions to nanophotonics, silicon photonics, and semiconductor nanolasers. He is a Fellow of the OSA, IEEE, SPIE, and a recipient of the Miriam and Aharon Gutvirt Prize, Lady Davis Fellowship, Brown Award, SPIE Gabor Award, OSA Emmett N. Leith Medal, OSA Joseph Fraunhofer Award/Robert M. Burley Prize and OPTICA (former OSA) Nick Holonyak Jr Award.

I was born in Minsk (Belarus). I had received MS in physics from the Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus) in 1977, PhD in theoretical physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 1981, and the Doctor of Sciences degree (habilitation) in theoretical physics from the N. N. Bogoliubov Institute for Theoretical Physics, Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (Kiev) in 1989. Till 1991, I was a senior researcher at the Institute for Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences (Moscow). Since 1991, I was an Associate Professor, and since 1998 a Full Professor at Tel Aviv University. I have published 1,300+ papers and four books. The total number of citations to my publications exceeds 62,000. My h-index is 94 (Web of Science) / 97 (Scopus)/ 113 (Google Scholar). I am an editor of two major international journals: “Physics Letters A” and “Chaos, Solitons & Fractals”, an editor-in-chief of a newly established journal “Photonic and Quantum Waves”, and an editorial board member of “Journal of Optics”, “Symmetry”, “Photonics”, “Optics Communications”, and “Chaos”. I have been an advisor to 31 MS students, 14 PhD students, and 11 postdocs. I am a Senior Member of the Optical Society of America (recently renamed to Optica), and a Foreign Member of the Serbian Academy of Nonlinear Sciences. In 2025, I was a recipient of the NSC (Nonlinear Science & Complexity) Lagrange award for lifetime achievement in Nonlinear Physical Science.

Dr. Young-Kai (Y. K.) Chen is Deputy Chief Technology Officer at Coherent Corporation, andvisiting professor at Cornell University and UCLA. He was a Program Manager at DARPA from September 2017 to September 2021. Before joined DARPA in 2017, he was a Senior Director at Nokia Bell Labs. Dr. Chen and his teams contributed to development of integrated lasers, silicon photonics ICs, photonic processing, wireless backhauls, and 100G coherent optic data links. Dr. Chen is a Fellow of Bell Labs, IEEE,Optica, a member of National Academy of Engineering, and Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Setsuhisa Tanabe is a Professor of Material Chemistry at Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Japan. He received his PhD in 1993 at Department of Industrial Chemistry, Kyoto University, where he earned B.S. and M.S degrees also, being supervised by Prof. N. Soga. After working as an assistant professor, he became an Associate Professor in 2001 and was promoted to a full Professor in 2008. He was a visiting scientist at Rutgers University, NJ working with Prof. Elias Snitzer during 1996-1997, an invited professor at University of Rennes I, France in 2010 & 2016, Chimie Paris Tech France in 2016, at University of Gdansk, Poland in 2019 and at University of Bordeaux in 2025.. He is the author of >300 original papers, >25 book chapters, and >40 review papers on rare-earth doped luminescent materials for upconversion lasers, optical fiber amplifier for telecommunication, LED phosphors and persistent phosphors. According to the Scopus statistics, his h-index is 69 and citation is 16,440. He was the chair of TC20 (Glass for Photonics and Optical Fibers) of International Commission of Glass, ICG during 2002-2011 and served as a member of the Steering Committee of ICG during 2013-2020. As well as serving as a committee member of various international conferences on glass and photonic materials, he has organized Workshop on Photoluminescence on Rare-Earths 2012 (PRE’12), International Conference on Optical, Optoelectronic and Photonic Materials and their Applications 2012 (ICOOPMA2012), International Workshop on Luminescent Materials 2013 & 2015 in Kyoto as the Organizing Chair. He now serves as Editor of Journal of Luminescence since 2013. He received several academic awards from The Ceramic Society of Japan (2009), The Chemical Society of Japan (1997), The Rare-Earth Society of Japan (2025) as well as the Otto Schott Research Award (2024) from the E. Abbe Foundation, the Varshneya Frontier of Glass Science Award (2018) from the American Ceramic Society (ACerS) and W.E.S. Turner Award (2012) from ICG. He is a Fellow of ACerS, SPIE (International Society of Optics and Photonics) , Society of Glass Technology and The Ceramic Society of Japan. He will organize ICL 2026 Kyoto, now under preparation.

Dr. R Holland Cheng, Ph D is a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology at University of California. Dr. Rhcrev received a master degree in 1989 and a Ph D degree in 1992 from Purdue University. Dr. Rhcrev has served as a Panel Reviewer for NIH programmed project grant, NIH Microbiology & Infectious Diseases Research Committee ,NIH National Center for Research Resources, Wellcome Trust, UK and Earth & Life Sciences Council, Netherlands (2002). Dr. Cheng has actively served on the advisory board of the International Microscopy Congress plus regional microscopy societies, American Biographical Institute, and International Virus Assembly Symposium.He is also a regular member of the American Chemical Society,American Society for Microbiology and American Biophysical Society . Dr. Rhcrev has published nearly fifty papers in peer reviewed journals and his research mainly focuses on Proteome imaging of macromolecular systems. Professor R. Holland Cheng′s area of expertise is in proteome imaging of model/macromolecular systems. Dr. Cheng′s lab focuses mainly on conformational analysis of receptor or antibody-bound protein complexes that can be effectively interpreted based on the density of 3D reconstructions.