Ricardo Díez Muiño
Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC)

BIO
Ricardo Díez Muiño holds a PhD degree in physics by the University of the Basque Country. He further developed his scientific career at the University of Bordeaux (France) and at the LBNL (Berkeley, USA). Díez Muiño later joined, as a CSIC researcher, the Centro de Física de Materiales (CSIC-UPV/EHU) where he served as Deputy Director (2005 – 2011) and Director (2011 – 2015). He is currently Ikerbasque Professor and Director (since 2013) of the Donostia International Physics Center. His main fields of research are chemical physics and condensed matter theory, in particular molecular dynamics at surfaces, the theory of electronic excitations, and the theory of photoemission and photoelectron diffraction. He has published more than 120 scientific articles, as well as two books. Díez Muiño has been the organizer or coorganizer of 5 international conferences. He is Vicepresident of Euskampus Campus of Excellence, Board Member of CIC nanoGUNE, and very active in science communication activities.

Martin Mevissen
IBM

BIO
Dr. Martin Mevissen is the Senior Research Manager for AI & Quantum at the IBM Research lab in Dublin, Ireland. He received a M.S. degree in mathematics from ETH Zurich in 2007, and a Ph.D. degree in mathematical and computing sciences from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2010. After a post-doctoral fellowship with LAAS-CNRS in Toulouse, he joined IBM Research in 2011. Dr. Mevissen’s expertise lies in the areas of mathematical optimization, operations research, decision making under uncertainty and their applications. He has published in top venues and presented at numerous conferences & research institutions worldwide. Dr. Mevissen has been recipient of IBM Research Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards and an IBM Research Division Award. His current focus is in quantum algorithms for mathematical optimization problems, optimisation-based methods for quantum systems, AI Applications and scaling and automating AI. Dr. Mevissen is a Master Inventor and a member of the Mathematical Science Council at IBM Research.

Ivan Coluzza
BCMaterials

BIO
Prof. Coluzza’s research focuses on the applications of statistical mechanics to soft matter and complex biological systems. During his research experience, he developed a deep interest in many different fields ranging from physics to biology. He worked in world-leading biophysics groups and created an extensive network of collaborators. He graduated in physics from La Sapienza University in Rome and obtained his doctorate in physics from the University of Amsterdam. Prof. Coluzza worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge and at the Institute for Medical Research in London. He recently held the post of assistant at the University of Vienna. and the position of head of the Computational Biophysics group at the CIC biomaGUNE research centre in San Sebastián (Spain). Currently, he is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at BCMaterials in Leioa Spain, where he is the head of the Computational Soft Matter and Biophysics group.

Adriana Navajas
Tecnalia

BIO
Adriana Navajas Guerrero, Ph.D., is an artificial intelligence researcher with a strong track record of innovation. She obtained her Ph.D. in Control, Automation, and Robotics Engineering from the University of the Basque Country (EHU/UPV), where her research focused on the development of predictive maintenance algorithms and failure prediction within Industry 4.0 contexts. Prior to her venture into artificial intelligence, she obtained her bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and completed a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering at the University of La Rioja.
Dr. Navajas Guerrero currently works as a researcher at Tecnalia Research & Innovation, where she applies her expertise to a diverse range of multidisciplinary projects and domains. She has over six years of experience in the field of artificial intelligence, and her primary research areas encompass hyper-heuristic techniques for optimization problems, anomaly detection in time series, pattern analysis, descriptive analytics, and unsupervised learning methods for various applications.

Mois Ilia Aroyo
UPV/EHU

BIO

Mois Ilia Aroyo, doctor in Physical Sciences from the University of Sofia, Bulgaria; Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and since 1998 professor at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), is the co-founder, coordinator and responsible for the implementation and maintenance of the Bilbao Crystallographic Server at the UPV/EHU. His research activitiesare focusedontheoretical and mathematical crystallographyand its applicationto the analysis andstructure-propertyrelationshipof materials. His fieldsofexpertise includethetheory ofcrystallographicand magneticgroups, subgroup relationships and representations appliedto solvingproblemsofsolid-state physicsand structuralchemistry. Aroyo is editor of International Tables for Crystallography, Vol. A: Space-group symmetry (2016), 6th ed. Wiley: Chichester (ISBN: 978-0-470-97423-0) and of Teaching Edition of International Tables for Crystallography (2021). Crystallographic Symmetry, 6th ed., Chichester: Wiley (ISBN 978-0-470-97422-3). He is also co-editor of the Acta Crystallographica A: Foundations and Advances magazine.

Ivan Infante
BCMaterials

BIO
Ivan Infante holds the position of Ikerbasque Research Professor and co-leads the Computational Materials Science transverse line at BCMaterials. His current research objectives aim at elucidating surface processes of colloidal semiconductor quantum dots by combining theoretical models with experiments. He also devlops tools to facilitate the preparation of molecular structure models to launch them on supercomputers in an automated way. Ivan obtained his PhD at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (The Netherlands) in Theoretical Chemistry under the supervision of Lucas Visscher and Evert Jan Baerends. After a two-years postdoc experience in Laura Gagliardi’s group at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, he was bestowed a Juan de la Cierva grant and moved to the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), where he could pursue his independent research career. In 2014, he was awarded a prestigious Vidi grant (800.000 euros) from The Netherlands Organization for scientific research (NWO) that enabled him to establish his own research group as an Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (The Netherlands). In 2018, he moved to the Italian Institute of Technology to build up a computational section at the Nanochemistry department led by Liberato Manna, also head of the Nanomaterials division. In 2022 he received an Ikerbasque Professor position.

Jose Antonio Lozano
BCAM

BIO
Jose A. Lozano received his M.Sc. degree in mathematics and PhD in computer science from the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU, in Spain, in 1992 and 1998 respectively. He has been a full professor at the University of the Basque Country since 2008 where he leads the Intelligent
Systems Group. Since January 2019 he is the scientific director of the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics (BCAM) and fellow of the IEEE. Prof. Lozano has authored more than 180 ISI journal papers some of them have become highly cited papers. He has supervised 27 PhD and
received several “best paper awards” at recognized international conferences. His current research interests include combinatorial optimization, machine learning and its synergies.
Prof. Lozano has  served on the organizing and program committee of over 70 international conferences being the general chair of IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (IEEE CEC 2017) and the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD 2021) and the editor-in-chief of the Genetic and Evolutionary
Computation (IEEE CEC 2017) and the European Conference on Machine Learning and Principles and Practice of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (ECML/PKDD 2021) and the editor-in-chief of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2020). He also serves (or has served) as Associate Editor of top journals in the field such as IEEE Trans. on Evolutionary Computation, Evolutionary Computation Journal and IEEE Trans. on Neural Network and Learning Systems, to name but a few.

Karolina Zofia Milowska
CIC Nanogune

BIO
Dr Karolina Z. Milowska is an Ikerbasque Research Fellow at CIC nanoGUNE working on low-dimensional systems for sustainable energy generation. Prior to this she spent 5 years at the University of Cambridge (UK) as Research Associate designing reactive nanoparticles for in situ catalytic cracking of hydrocarbons (2017-2021) and investigating thermoelectric properties of CNT-metal composites (2016). As a postdoctoral research fellow (2013-2015) at Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München (Germany) she was engaged in modelling work in the field of controlled self-assembly, photocatalysis, and optoelectronics. In 2012 she received 1 of 100 prestigious awards for the best PhD students in all disciplines in Poland, where she completed her PhD studies in physical sciences at Institute of Theoretical Physics, University of Warsaw (2013) and her master studies in biophysics (2008) and experimental solid state physics (2008) at Jagiellonian University.