Yvonne Buckley is Professor of Zoology at Trinity College Dublin and an ecologist with expertise in environmental decision making, conservation, natural capital management and population ecology. She leads a team of researchers and students seeking to understand the fundamental drivers of animal and plant population processes in a rapidly changing world. She uses these discoveries to provide support for environmental decisions in the areas of biodiversity conservation, invasive species management, climate change and habitat restoration. Yvonne Buckley is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and Academia Europaea, an Irish Research Council Laureate and was awarded the British Ecological Society President’s medal (2021) and BES award (2022). She has highly cited papers in ecology, zoology, botany and agricultural sciences, is a Senior Editor for Journal of Ecology and co-directs Nature+, the Trinity Centre for Biodiversity and Sustainable Nature-based Solutions.

David Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist. He is Regius Professor of Botany (emeritus post 2019) at the University of Cambridge. David Baulcombe has made an outstanding contribution to plant virology, gene silencing and disease resistance. He discovered a specific signalling system and an antiviral defence system in plants. He also helped unravel the importance of small interfering RNA in epigenetics and in defence against viruses. This led to the development of new technologies that promise to revolutionise gene discovery in plant biology. In June 2009, David Baulcombe was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II.

Christian Wolfrum is Vice President for Research and Professor of Food Nutrition and Health at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on elucidating the molecular mechanisms underlying the altered adipocyte differentiation and maturation associated with obesity and other metabolic disorders. Christian Wolfrum received several honors, including the H.P. Kaufmann Award (2000), the Young Investigators Award by the EFSTL (2004), the Starting Independent Researcher Grant from the ERC (2008) and the Rössler Award (2014).

Meredith Schuman is Assistant Professor of Spatial Genetics at the Departments of Chemistry and Geography at the University of Zurich. She completed her PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany, graduating from the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in 2012. Starting as a junior group leader at MPI Jena, she later became an ecology platform leader, initiating her research program. In 2018, she joined UZH as a guest professor. She received numerous awards, including the Max Planck Society Otto Hahn Medal for outstanding scientific achievement. The research program of Prof. Schuman is rooted in chemical ecology and her current efforts leverage this knowledge to the understanding of the spatial and temporal effects of natural products on landscapes.

Philipp Langer is Deputy Director-General for International Research and Innovation Programmes at Switzerland’s State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI). Together with his team, he is responsible for the international and national processes concerning Switzerland's participation in the EU Framework Programmes for Research and Innovation and in other bi- and multilateral research and innovation programmes, as well as for Switzerland's integration in the European Research and Innovation Area (ERA).Before joining the Ministry in 2009, Philipp Langer pursued an academic career: After a BSc / MSc in Pharmaceutical Sciences in Lausanne (Switzerland), he did his PhD in Behavioural Genetics in Lausanne and Australia. Following this, he did a PostDoc at Harvard University (USA) in Game Theory. Philipp also worked in other research topics such as brain research (ETH & University of Zurich, Switzerland), cardiovascular diseases (University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada) and virus/host interactions (University of Utah, USA).