Dr. Xinyue Ye is currently the Shelby Distinguished Professor at the University of Alabama. He is the first elected Fellow of the American Association of Geographers from the Early Career category. In 2025, he received the AAG Distinguished Scholarly Achievement Award for his groundbreaking contributions at the intersection of geography, urban planning, and data science (the award is given to only one to two scholars annually), setting the record for the fastest election after receiving his PhD.

Hans Koster is Full Professor of Urban Economics and Real Estate in the Department of Spatial Economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. He is also a Research Fellow at the Tinbergen Institute and the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and an elected board member of the Urban Economics Association.

Krzysztof Matyjaszewski is J.C. Warner University Professor of Natural Sciences and director of the Center for Macromolecular Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. In 1994, he discovered Cu-mediated atom transfer radical polymerization, which was commercialized in 2004 in the US, Japan, and Europe. He synthesized many precisely controlled advanced materials for biomedical, environmental, and energy-related applications.

Dr. Ulrich Schridde is currently a Senior Editor for the Cell Press journal Neuron and lives and works in Boston, MA, USA. At Neuron, Ulli is part of the editorial team and handles/oversees the review and publication of manuscripts across all areas of neuroscience. Ulli also acts as a neuroscience advisor to other journals in the CP portfolio. From 2004 to 2007 he was a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Hal Blumenfeld at the Dept. of Neurology at the Yale University School of Medicine, USA.

Effective pipeline leak detection and localization are essential for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions in hydrocarbon transportation systems. However, the complex spatiotemporal dynamics, limited sensor coverage, and measurement disturbances pose significant challenges. This talk presents advanced estimation and control strategies designed for pipeline networks modeled by infinite-dimensional systems governed by partial differential equations (PDEs).

Dr. Richard Zhang is Director of the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES), the Hugh P. and Ethel C. Kelly Chair Professor in the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, and an IEEE Fellow.

Tim Burness is a Professor of Pure Mathematics at the University of Bristol in the UK, where he currently serves as Director of the Institute for Pure Mathematics. Tim works in group theory and related areas, specializing in the study of finite and algebraic simple groups, and the application of probabilistic and computational methods.

Sumit Agarwal is a distinguished professor and thought leader in the fields of finance, economics, and real estate, currently serving as the Low Tuck Kwong Distinguished Professor of Finance, Economics, and Real Estate at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is the Managing Director of the Sustainable and Green Finance Institute, Head of the Department of Real Estate, and President of the Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research.

We estimate the ecological costs of corporate toxic emissions using managerial pressure to meet earnings benchmarks as an instrument for toxic releases. Linking plant-level emissions to millions of U.S. birdwatching records from 2002–2018, we examine changes in local bird populations around manufacturing facilities owned by U.S. public firms.

In this talk, I will introduce the key definitions and I will discuss some of the main methods we use to study subgroup regularity. I will then present some recent results obtained with my PhD student Marina Anagnostopoulou-Merkouri, and I will also discuss work with Hongyi Huang on the regularity of nilpotent subgroups of simple groups, and joint work with Lei Wang on the regularity of irreducible subgroups of classical groups.

Huang Ling, currently an associate professor of economics at the University of Connecticut, graduated from Duke University, with research areas including environmental economics and industrial organization. Professor Huang Ling is committed to designing more effective policies by mining large-scale microdata, with a particular focus on the evaluation of environmental policy effectiveness and the impact of individual strategic behavior.

Neural activities in the human brain exhibit multiple different timescales, such as the duration of neural information processing, which are referred to as Intrinsic Neural Timescales (INT). Previous studies have found that INT display a hierarchical topological structure in the human brain, ranging from sensory regions to higher-order cognitive regions. However, the specific mechanisms by which INT contribute to consciousness remain to be further elucidated.

Dr. Paul Yushkevich is a Professor in the Department of Radiology at the University of Pennsylvania and a member of the Bioengineering Graduate Group. His research focuses on developing novel computational methodologies for biomedical image analysis, including shape representation for statistical analysis, multi-atlas and shape-based segmentation, groupwise registration, and structure-specific fMRI and diffusion MRI analysis.

Dr. Bak Kong Low is a senior professor at the UniversityTunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR) main campus of Kampar, Malaysia. Dr. Low earned a BS and an MS at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore) for 35 years and is a Fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers. He also remains a registered professional engineer of Malaysia.

Professor Khellil Sefiane (PhD, HDR, FRSC, FInstP) is Chair of Thermo-Physical Engineering at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is Vice-Chair of the UK National Heat Transfer Committee and has served as associate editor for several top international journals in heat transfer. He has held honorary professorships at universities worldwide, including Tsinghua University.

Han Yan is an assistant professor of accounting at the Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia. His research focuses on banking, climate risk, and artificial intelligence. He received his PhD in Accounting from the Stern School of Business at New York University. His recent work has been published in the Review of Accounting Studies.

Using a proprietary dataset that documents corporate bond issuances in China, we find that bond regulators' comment letters (CLs) on issuers' public disclosures generally target opaque firms and reduce bond issuance success.

Chris Olivers (MSc Nijmegen, Netherlands, 1996; PhD Birmingham, UK 2001) is Full Professor of Visual Cognition, principal investigator at the Institute for Brain and Behaviour Amsterdam, and Head of Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit. His main research lines focus on attention, working memory and cognitive control, using behavioral and neurophysiological approaches.

Professor Andrei Okounkov, born in Moscow, Russia, is a world-renowned mathematician who works on representation theory and its applications to algebraic geometry, mathematical physics, probability theory, and special functions. He obtained his PhD from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1995, under the supervision of Alexandre Kirillov.

Brian Tom has been a programme leader/MRC investigator at the MRC Biostatistics Unit since February 2014. His research focuses on the analysis of complex data with particular emphasis on statistical methodology for precision medicine. His work is motivated by substantive applied projects in chronic and infectious diseases, with long-standing interests in musculoskeletal health and brain health.