Mari Sundli Tveit was Deputy Director-General of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise before leading the Research Council of Norway (RCN). Prior to that, she was Professor of Landscape Architecture and Rector of the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She has also held numerous elected positions, including as a board member at the European University Association and at the Centre for Advanced Studies of Chalmers Technical University, as well that of president of Universities Norway.

She is experienced in leading large mergers, organisational integration, strategic development, and working with a large international network within academia, the business sector, and government.

Marcel Levi is president of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and professor of Medicine at the University of Amsterdam’s Medical Center and at University College London, as well as consultant in Acute Medicine and Haematology. He has previously worked at the Universities of Perugia and Oxford, as well as the Center for Transgene Technology and Genetherapy of the Catholic University of Leuven. He currently chairs or sits on the boards of several national and international health and research organisations and charities. He is also a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Science.

Francisco Javier Moreno Fuentes is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of the Spanish National Research Council (IPP-CSIC). He has a BA in Sociology from the Complutense University of Madrid, a Master in Social Sciences from the Juan March Institute, an MSc in Social Policy from the LSE, and a PhD in Political Science from the Autonomous University of Madrid. Between July 2018 and September 2019, he was Deputy Director of the Spanish High Commission against child poverty. He has been a researcher for the European Social Policy Network (ESPN) of independent experts on social protection and inclusion of the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion of the European Commission since 2014. He led a significant number of research projects on welfare policies and immigration in Spain and the EU, based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. He is the (co-)author of 10 books, 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals, 37 chapters in edited books, and more than 50 reports related to his areas of specialisation. Since July 2022, he is the Vice-President for International Affairs of CSIC.

Katja Becker has served as President of the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2020, leading one of the world’s foremost research funding organisations and advancing international co-ordination in science policy. From 2021 to 2023, she chaired the Governing Board of the Global Research Council, strengthening trust, reciprocity and shared principles among research funders worldwide. She also serves on several high-level scientific advisory boards and is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

An internationally recognised biomedical scientist, Professor Becker has shaped global health research through pioneering work on cellular redox metabolism as a therapeutic target in malaria parasites and cancer cells, documented in more than 300 publications and major interdisciplinary consortia. Her research and clinical engagements have taken her to Africa, Australia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States.

She studied medicine at Heidelberg University, where she completed her doctoral degree and habilitation, before becoming Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Giessen University.

Katarina Bjelke was appointed Director General of the Swedish Research Council in 2022. She has a degree in dentistry and a PhD in neuroscience from Karolinska Institutet. She has been University Director at Karolinska Institutet, as well as at Uppsala University. Katarina Bjelke has also held roles such as Chair of the Audit Committee of the Nobel Foundation and the Swedish National Space Agency, and as an elected member of the boards of Young Academy of Sweden, the Association of Swedish Higher Education Institutions, the European Spallation Source, the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education, and several holding companies.

Anna Di Ciaccio is a full professor in physics at the University of Roma Tor Vergata and a member of the Executive Committee of the European Physical Society. She is involved in research in experimental particle physics with the ATLAS experiment at CERN. She has previously worked at the University of Freiburg, at Harvard University, and at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in the USA. She is a member of the Equal Opportunity Committee of the Italian Society of Physics. She was selected for the 100 Women Against Stereotypes project, an online platform collecting 100 names and CVs of female experts in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics), a sector historically underrepresented by women.

Tjaša Dobnik is Director of the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency. She formerly held the position of Head of the Department of Innovation Projects, in which she established one of the agency's core operational sectors. She has extensive experience in European cohesion policy, the implementation of funding schemes, and support for research, development, and innovation across both the public and private sectors.

Her professional career has encompassed leading evaluation procedures, co-ordinating expert committees, and overseeing major calls for proposals that advanced the strategic transformation of Slovenian companies. Moreover, she has an active role in several expert bodies, where she contributes to systemic solutions related to the Slovenian R&I system.

Christof Gattringer is the president of the Austrian Science Fund FWF and Professor for Theoretical Physics at the University of Graz (currently on leave of absence). Previously he has served as Vice Rector of Research and Career Development and as Dean of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Graz University. The academic career of Christof initiated with a PhD at the Werner Heisenberg Max-Planck-Institute in Munich, with subsequent PostDoc appointments at UBC Vancouver, the MIT in Boston and the University of Regensburg, as well as a sabbatical at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Krzysztof Jóźwiak has been the director of the National Science Center (NCN) in Poland since 2023. Before that, he served eight years as a member of the NCN Council, where inter alia he headed the Committee of Life Sciences of the Council.

He is scientifically affiliated with the Faculty of Pharmacy of the Medical University of Lublin, and conducts research on molecular pharmacology and medicinal chemistry of drugs acting on neuronal receptors. He has completed two post-doctoral trainings: the first at the National Institutes of Health, USA and the second at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw, Poland. Additionally, he was a visiting professor at the Università di Bologna.

In 2012, Professor Jóźwiak received the UCB-Ehrlich Award for Excellence in Medicinal Chemistry granted by the European Federation for Medicinal Chemistry.

Torsten Schwede, a renowned bioinformatician, has presided the Research Council of the Swiss National Science Foundation since 2025. He is Professor of Structural Bioinformatics at the University of Basel and a research group leader at the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, where he has been teaching and conducting research on protein structure modelling since 2001. Such models are used, for example, in the development of pharmaceutical agents.

From 2018 to 2024, Professor Schwede served as Vice President for Research at the University of Basel, where he was responsible for support for early-career researchers, internationalisation, and digital research infrastructures.

Professor Christopher Smith is the International Champion for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). He has been Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews since 2002, and he was also Vice-Principal (2007-2009), before being seconded as Director of the British School at Rome, the UK’s leading humanities and creative arts research institute overseas, from 2009 to 2017.

He is the author or editor of over 20 books from textual editions to museum studies. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Member of the Academia Europaea.