Elif Akata is a PhD candidate at the University of Tübingen and the International Max Planck Research School for Intelligent Systems. She is based at the Tübingen AI Center as part of the research groups “Scalable Trustworthy AI” and “Computational Neuroscience and Machine Learning.” She works towards analyzing the mechanism behind AI’s recognition and decisions and making these understandable to humans, combining methods from cognitive science and machine learning. She previously studied computer science in Saarbrücken and Tübingen and worked at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, Saarbrücken, and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, as a student researcher.

Zeynep Akata is full professor of computer science in the Cluster of Excellence Machine Learning at the University of Tübingen. After completing her PhD at the INRIA Rhône Alpes in 2014, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (2014–17) and University of California Berkeley (2016–17) and as an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam (2017–19). She received a Lise Meitner Award for Excellent Women in Computer Science from the Max Planck Society in 2014, a young scientist’s honor from the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring foundation in 2019, an ERC Starting Grant from the European Commission in 2019, the DAGM German Pattern Recognition Award in 2021, and the ECVA Young Researcher Award in 2022. Her research interests include multimodal learning and explainable AI.

Carsten Baldauf is Representative of the Board of Directors and Group Leader at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (MPG), Berlin, with a special interest in research data in physical sciences, energy and fitness landscapes, and biomolecules. After studying biochemistry at universities in Bochum and Leipzig, he spent time as a postdoc at the TU Dresden’s biotechnology center BIOTEC and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences/MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology in Shanghai. He joined the Fritz Haber Institute in 2010.

Aljoscha Burchardt is principal researcher, research fellow, and deputy site director of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) in Berlin. He is an expert in language technology and artificial intelligence. Aljoscha Burchardt is Senior Research Fellow of the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society and deputy chair of the Berlin Scientific Society (Berliner Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft). He was also a member of the German Federal Parliament’s Study Commission on Artificial Intelligence.

Jamie Cohen-Cole is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and has held fellowships at the Fishbein Center for History of Science at the University of Chicago, the Charles Warren Center at Harvard University, and the Center for Humanities at Wesleyan University. His research examines culturally specific definitions of data ethics, scientific definitions of human and non-human intelligence, and the cultural history of developmental psychology and its interactions with the history and philosophy of science. His first book, The Open Mind: Cold War Politics and the Sciences of Human Nature (University of Chicago Press, 2014) examines the conjunction of the computational, cognitive and social sciences, norms of scientific reason, and the cultural politics of post–World War II America. The book was awarded an honorable mention by the Organization of American Historians in 2015.

Christian Doeller is a cognitive neuroscientist and director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany. He researches the fundamental question in neuroscience—What are the key coding principles of the human brain underlying higher level cognition?—using two model systems: human memory and the neural population code for space. Christian Doeller’s undergraduate training was in psychology and computer science. After finishing his PhD in Saarbrücken in 2005, he worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and was appointed principal investigator at the Donders Institute at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands in 2010. In 2016, he became professor of medicine and neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and director of the Braathen-Kavli Centre at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience in Trondheim, Norway.

The diplomat Hila Engelhard is head of economic and scientific affairs at the Embassy of Israel in Berlin.

Ariel Ezrahi, based in Berlin, is a Nonresident Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council, where he works on a range of Middle East and North Africa projects and initiatives. Previously, he was the first Director of Energy at the Office of the Quartet, where he designed and led all energy and sustainability initiatives. Ariel Ezrahi was the architect of the Gas for Gaza project, working closely with the key international actors and Israel on this cornerstone Palestinian project. He was the energy adviser to the Quartet Representative, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. Prior to that, he worked for international law firms. The holder of an MPhil from the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s College), an LLM from Georgetown University, and an LLB from the University of Manchester, Ariel Ezrahi is also a member of the MENA 2050 Organization.

Christina Ezrahi is a historian and author specializing in the relationship between dance, politics, and society in the Soviet Union. She is the author of Swans of the Kremlin: Ballet and Power in Soviet Russia (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012) and Dancing for Stalin: A True Story of Extraordinary Courage and Survival in the Soviet Gulag (Elliott & Thompson, 2023). Her books have been translated into French, Italian, Czech, and Hungarian. She was educated at Princeton University, St. Antony’s College (University of Oxford), and University College London. Christina Ezrahi is the founder and editor of Teen World of Arts, an online magazine for teenagers and students about the performing and visual arts. She is a member of the family advisory board of the Werner Siemens-Stiftung.

Ofer Gal has been a member and sometimes director of the School of History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney University since 2004, and has founded and directed a number of other institutions. His work concentrates on epistemological, ontological, and historiographical questions in early modern science, and he has also published extensively on global knowledge, eighteenth-century chemistry, and various philosophical themes. Ofer Gal’s latest monographs are Baroque Science (with Raz Chen-Morris, Chicago University Press, 2013) and Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge University Press, 2021). He is currently working on the epistemological and ethical implications of the rise of the New Science, especially those entailed by the naturalization of the senses.

Rubén García-Santos has served as the head of scientific affairs and innovation networks at the NOMIS foundation since 2017. García earned an MSc in international healthcare management, economics, and policy from SDA Bocconi University (Italy) and has further postgraduate education in strategy, innovation, and sustainability from Harvard Business School (US) and Cambridge University (UK). Prior to joining NOMIS, he spent nearly fifteen years in the life science, healthcare, and international development sectors. He has held global positions in the areas of market access, business development, and strategic alliance management in leading medtech and biopharmaceutical organizations, as well as at the United Nations. In his current role, García is spearheading NOMIS strategy, partnerships, innovation networks, and strategic communications.

Krishna P. Gummadi is a scientific director at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Germany. He also holds a honorary professorship at the Saarland University. Krishna Gummadi’s research interests lie in the measurement, analysis, design, and implementation of Internet-scale systems. His current research focus is on understanding and building fair, accountable, transparent, and explainable social computing systems. His work on fair machine learning, online social networks and media, Internet access networks, and peer-to-peer systems has been widely cited and his publications have received over ten best or outstanding papers awards, including the Test of Time Awards at ACM SIGCOMM and the International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media of the AAAI and Privacy Awards at PETS and CNIL-Inria. In 2017, he received an ERC Advanced Grant to investigate “Foundations for Fair Social Computing.”

Oren Harman studied biology and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Oxford, and Harvard. He is a historian and writer, and teaches at the STS Graduate Program at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. At the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, Oren Harman is a senior research fellow, and hosts the lecture series Talking about Science in the 21st Century. Harman’s books include The Man Who Invented the Chromosome; the trilogy on Rebels, Outsiders, and Dreamers in biology; Evolutions: Fifteen Myths that Explain Our World; and the prizewinning study The Price of Altruism. Harman’s books have been translated into Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, Italian, Korean, Polish, and Malayalam. His fields of specialization include evolutionary theory, the history and philosophy of biology, scientific biography, and science and mythology. Oren is currently a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Henrike Hartmann is Deputy Secretary General of the Volkswagen Foundation, Hannover, and Head of the Funding Division. She joined the Volkswagen Foundation after her PhD in pharmacology at the University of Heidelberg and three years as a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School and the University of Frankfurt. Henrike Hartmann chairs the University Council of the University of Constance and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of Frankfurt and of various Max Planck Institutes. The Volkswagen Foundation is dedicated to the support of the humanities, social sciences, and science and technology in higher education and research. In its work, the Foundation also seeks to improve the processes of research funding, including experimentation with innovative tools for peer review.

Dirk Hartung is the executive director of the Center for Legal Technology and Data Science at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, with a special interest in computational legal studies, natural language processing, network science and regulation, and digitalization of the legal profession. He is a nonresidential fellow at CodeX: The Stanford Center for Legal Informatics. In his research, Dirk Hartung applies methods from complexity and computer science to the legal domain. He has most recently published on regulatory complexity and NLP in the legal domain including the LexGLUE benchmark and justice technology. The Center for Legal Technology and Data Science has recently co-published work on GPT-4 Passing the US Bar Exam, which was referenced in the official technical release report by OpenAI.

Hans-Christian von Herrmann is professor of literary studies at the Technische Universität Berlin, with a special interest in the intersections of the history of literature with the history of science and technology. His research and publications include studies on the Zeiss Planetarium as a key epistemic object of the twentieth century and on machine-generated literature from the late nineteenth century to the more recent developments in the field of artificial intelligence.

Jeanette Hofmann is a full professor at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, with a special interest in digitalization, regulation*,* and democracy. Head of the research group “Politics of Digitalization” at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB), she is a founding co-director of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, and principal investigator at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society. Her research groups study the "politics of digitalization" and the changing formation of power and domination as manifested in the proliferation of digital platforms.

Roni Horowitz is a senior lecturer at the Azrieli College of Engineering, Jerusalem, with a special interest in creative problem solving. An influential figure in the realm of Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT), he works on the understanding and application of inventive problem-solving methodologies. He is one of the co-founders of the SIT Institute in Tel Aviv, an institution that delivers workshops on inventive thinking to globally leading corporations. Recently, Roni Horowitz has begun to explore the application of innovation practices in the context of generative artificial intelligence.

Zhijing Jin is a doctoral candidate at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Tübingen, and ETH Zurich. Researching socially responsible NLP via causal and moral principles, she works on expanding the impact of NLP to other disciplines and developing robust, interpretable, and fair NLP models. Zhijing Jin has presented her work at numerous NLP and AI venues and it has been cited on the websites MIT News, ACM TechNews, Wevolver, VentureBeat, and Synced. She is actively involved in AI for social good, and has organized workshops on NLP for Positive Impact (ACL 2021 and EMNLP 2022) and RobustML (ICLR 2021). To foster the causality research community, she organized the tutorial on CausalNLP at EMNLP 2022 and served as publications chair for the 2022 conference on Causal Learning and Reasoning.

Daria Kim is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition, Munich, with a special interest in innovation and regulation. She holds MA (Indiana University of Pennsylvania), LLM (Munich Intellectual Property Law Center), and Dr. iur. (University of Augsburg) degrees and has published on topics related to intellectual property law and policy, regulation of biomedical research, clinical trials, data-driven innovation, and artificial intelligence. Daria Kim has been actively involved in the MPI Research Group on Regulation of the Digital Economy and has contributed to the work of the Innovation & Commercialization Working Group as part of the Global Partnership on Artificial Intelligence (GPAI) initiative.

Daniel Knebel earned his PhD in neuroscience in 2018 at Tel Aviv University. He then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in mathematics and computer science (Bar-Ilan University) and at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology (Jena), combining empirical work with computational modeling of insects’ social behavior. His hands-on experience in neuroscience led him to ask how the emergence of neuroscience as a scientific discipline shaped the modern study of the nervous system. To this end, Dr. Knebel investigates how and under what scientific circumstances the traditional study of neuromotor control, specifically the concept of the reflex—instrumental for biology, psychology, and philosophy—changed in the last century.

Sebastian Koth is a scholar in the field of Science and Technology Studies. He studied physics, philosophy, and sociology in Leipzig and Berlin. He is currently based at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin as part of the research group “Reorganizing Knowledge Practices,” where he is investigating changes in scientific institutions and practices in the context of the digital economy and technology innovation.

Katja Krause, professor of the history of science at the Technical University Berlin, leads the Max Planck Research Group “Experience in the Premodern Sciences of Soul and Body” at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Her research rethinks the relationship between experience and science in the premodern sciences of living beings. She is also interested in the continuities and discontinuities of scientific practices and ideals from premodernity to the present. Among her recent publications are Aquinas on Seeing God (Marquette University Press, 2020) and the edited collection Premodern Experience of the Natural World in Translation (Routledge, 2023). After earning her PhD in philosophy at King’s College London, Katja Krause held postdoctoral fellowships in the history of science at the MPIWG and Harvard University and an assistant professorship in medieval thought at Durham University.

Rainer Lange is head of the research policy department at the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat), Cologne, which advises the German federal and state governments on issues of research and higher education policy. Before entering the Council’s office, he was trained in biology and philosophy, and holds a PhD in philosophy of science. His work as a policy adviser covers the organization and funding of scientific research, research infrastructures, and research assessment. In recent years, he has worked on open science with a focus on open access to publications and on research data. Currently, he also co-chairs the focus group on digitalization in science at the Alliance of Science Organizations in Germany.

Michael Levitt is a South African-born biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University, a position he has held since 1987. Levitt received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems." In the 1970s, Michael Levitt, Martin Karplus, and Arieh Warshel successfully developed methods that combined quantum and classical mechanics to calculate the courses of chemical reactions using computers.

Johannes Meier is chairman of the Mercator Foundation and serves on the supervisory boards of New Work SE, Nederlandse Gasunie NV, Meridian Foundation, and UNICEF Germany. He is an honorary professor of leadership at the HHL Graduate School of Management, Leipzig. Johannes Meier was CEO of the European Climate Foundation (2011–17), managing board member of the Bertelsmann Foundation (2003–9), CEO of GE CompuNet Computer AG (1998–2003), and partner at McKinsey & Co. (1990–97). In 2009, he founded a software start-up and developed a collaboration platform for the German Federal Employment Agency, the Labor Market Monitor. The platform won the 2011 award for most innovative e-government solution in Germany. He holds a MSc in Computer Science from RWTH Aachen and a PhD in Communication and Information Sciences from the University of Hawaii Manoa.

Jakob Ohme is Head of Research Group at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, where he leads the “Digital News Dynamics” research group. The group examines the perception, distribution, and function of professional journalist news on digital platforms relative to other information being disseminated by, for example, political parties or influencers or through artificial intelligence. His research centers on the impact of digital and mobile communication on news exposure and political behavior in digital democracies, focusing on generational differences in media use and political socialization. Jakob Ohme has a special interest in developing digital methods in political communication and journalism research. Currently, he is a fellow at the Digital Communication Methods Lab at the University of Amsterdam.

Ohad Parnes is Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. He studied biology, philosophy, and the history of science at Tel Aviv University and, after completing his PhD with a dissertation on the concept of agency in modern biomedicine, worked at the University of Berne, the Center for Cultural and Literary Research (ZfL) in Berlin, and the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine, London. He held professorships at the Open University in Israel and the Central European University, Budapest. Ohad’s research is in the history of the life sciences and modern medicine, focusing on epigenetics and on the history of immunology. He is currently working on the history of the notion of forgetting, as well as researching and publishing the estate of his doctoral supervisor, Yehuda Elkana.

Corine Pelluchon, professor at the Université Gustave Eiffel (Paris region), is currently a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. A specialist in moral and political philosophy, phenomenology, and applied ethics (bioethics, philosophy of the environment, and animal ethics), she has also published on Leo Strauss, Levinas, and Paul Ricœur. Corine Pelluchon’s recent publications include Les Lumières à l’âge du vivant (Seuil, 2021; Das Zeitalter des Lebendigen: Eine neue Philosophie der Ernährung und der Umwelt, WGB, 2021), L’espérance ou la traversée de l’impossible (Rivages, 2023; Die Durchquerung des Unmöglichen, Beck, 2023), and Réparons le monde. Humains, animaux, nature (Rivages, 2020; Verbessern wir die Welt. Sorge um Mensch, Tier, Natur, WBG, 2023). She was named Knight of the Legion of Honor in July 2021.

Iyad Rahwan is the managing director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, with a special interest in the impact of artificial intelligence on society. He is also an honorary professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the Technical University Berlin. Prior to joining the Max Planck Society, he was an associate professor of media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Wolfgang Rohe joined the Mercator Foundation in 2008. He was appointed its executive director in 2014 and has chaired the executive board since 2021. He previously held various positions at two of the most influential science organizations in Germany: From 1992 to 2002, he worked with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) in Bonn, initially in the Department for Collaborative Research Centers and then as head of the strategic planning unit. In 2002, he moved to the Wissenschaftsrat (German Science and Humanities Council), where he served as head of the Research Policy Department and from 2005 also as vice secretary general. Wolfgang Rohe holds a PhD in German philology.

Eric Schulz studied psychology (Humboldt University, Berlin), cognitive science (UCL), statistics (Oxford), and computer science (UCL). He completed his PhD in experimental psychology in 2017, winning the Glushko Disertation Prize of the Cognitive Science Society. After postdoctoral research at Harvard University and MIT, he became a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen. There, his Computational Principles of Intelligence lab works on using machine learning to understand human cognition and using cognitive science to understand machine learning algorithms. Eric Schulz has received a Jacobs Research Fellowship and a Volkswagen AI Grant for his work on the intersection between human and machine learning.

Carl von Siemens is a writer based in Berlin. He is the author of two books, the novel Kleine Herren (S. Fischer, 2011) and the travelogue Der Tempel der magischen Tiere (Malik, 2018). He has published in German-language media such as Rolling Stone, Lettre International, Der Freund, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Das Magazin (Switzerland), WELT, and DIE ZEIT.  Most of his work is related to travel. It is located in the context of autofiction, narrative journalism, and the personal essay.

Judith Simon is Full Professor of Ethics in Information Technologies at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She is interested in ethical, epistemological, and political questions arising in the context of digital technologies, in particular with regard to big data and artificial intelligence. Judith Simon chaired the German Ethics Council’s working group on human-machine relations, which published the report “Humans and Machines: Challenges of Artificial Intelligence” in March 2023. She is a member of various other advisory committees on science policy and has also served on the Data Ethics Commission of the German Federal Government (2018–19). Her Routledge Handbook of Trust and Philosophy was published in June 2020.

Cornelia Woll is President of the Hertie School in Berlin. She has a special interest in international political economy and economic sociology, specifically the international and national dynamics of the economic order, European integration, and the role of business in politics. She is the author of Corporate Crime and Punishment: Negotiated Justice in Global Markets (Princeton, in press), The Power of Inaction: Bank Bailouts in Comparative Perspective (Cornell, 2014), and Firm Interest: How Governments Shape Business Lobbying on Global Trade (Cornell, 2008). Before joining the Hertie School in 2022, Cornelia Woll served in many roles at Sciences Po in Paris, including President of the Academic Board, Professor of Political Science, and Co-Director of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center. She received the Lipset Prize and the Max Planck Society’s Otto Hahn Medal for her binational dissertation.

Torsten Zesch is a full professor of computational linguistics at the CATALPA Center of Advanced Technology for Assisted Learning and Predictive Analytics, FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany. He holds a doctoral degree in computer science from Technische Universität Darmstadt. His research interests are in educational natural language processing, in particular the ways in which teaching and learning processes can be supported by language technology and AI. For this purpose, he develops methods for the automatic analysis of multimodal language data, with a focus on robust and explainable models. Torsten Zesch is currently the president of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL).

Frederike Zufall is Professor of Public Law and Computer Science at the Center for Applied Legal Studies at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Her research interest lies in applied interdisciplinary and theoretical aspects of AI and law, with publications in legal science and natural language processing. Frederike Zufall holds the first and second German state examinations in law and a doctoral degree in law from Humboldt University, Berlin. She was an assistant professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study at Waseda University, Tokyo, and a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn, and is one of the main organizers of the Max Planck Law Tech Society Initiative.

Aziz Al-Azmeh is emeritus professor of history at the Central European University, Vienna, with a special interest in religion. He has been a long-term fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and was twice Directeur de recherches associé at the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris. He was a fellow at the institutes for advanced study in Uppsala, Budapest, and Marseille, a fellow of the Nuffield Foundation, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg, and a resident scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Scholars in Bellagio. Among his books in English are Secularism in the Arab World (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), The Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2014), Islams and Modernities (Verso, 2009), and Muslim Kingship (I.B. Tauris, 1996). He is presently writing a history of unbelief.

Françoise Baylis, Distinguished Research Professor at Dalhousie University and member of the Governing Board of the International Science Council, is a philosopher whose innovative work in bioethics, at the intersection of policy and practice, has stretched the boundaries of the field. Her work challenges us to think broadly and deeply about the direction of health, science, and biotechnology. It aims to move the limits of mainstream bioethics and develop more effective ways to understand and tackle public policy. Baylis is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the International Science Council. She is a member of the Order of Canada and the author of Altered Inheritance: CRISPR and the Ethics of Human Genome Editing (Harvard University Press, 2019). In 2022, she was awarded the Killam Prize in the Humanities.

Isaac Ben-Israel graduated from Tel Aviv University with degrees in mathematics, physics, and philosophy, earning his PhD in 1988. A retired major-general in the Israel Air Force, Prof. Ben-Israel has served as director of defense R&D directorate of the Ministry of Defense. He twice received the Israel Defense Award, and was a member of Knesset in 2007–9. He is currently head of the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center and the Yuval Ne'eman Workshop for Science, Technology, and Security at Tel Aviv University, as well as holding key advisory roles in the field of cyber security and secured Artificial Intelligence. He has written widely on the philosophy of military intelligence, cyber security, and the interface between science, technology, and security, most recently a book on a journey in science and philosophy “from Kant to the quant.”

Sebastian Bonhoeffer is full professor of theoretical biology at the department of environmental systems science, ETH Zurich, becoming director of the Collegium Helveticum in 2021. He studied music in Basel and physics in Munich and Vienna, completing his doctorate at the University of Oxford. After postdoctoral stays at Oxford and Rockefeller University, he became junior group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute in Basel and held a research professorship at the Swiss National Science Foundation, ETH Zurich. His research focuses on the evolution and population biology of bacteria and viruses, and also on the development and analysis of mathematical or computer-oriented models that describe the dynamics of infectious diseases. In 2014, Prof. Bonhoeffer was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Association. In 2019, he became an International Honorary Member of the American Academy for Arts and Science.

Moran Cerf is professor of neuroscience and business at Northwestern University and the Sloan Professor of Screenwriting at the American Film Institute. He spent a decade working in cybersecurity as a hacker and consulted with the government and numerous companies across various other industries. His academic research uses neuroscience to understand the underlying mechanisms of our psychology, behavior, decisions, and dreams. He holds a PhD in neuroscience (Caltech), an MA in philosophy of science, and a BSc in physics (Tel Aviv University). Prof. Cerf holds multiple patents and has published in over seventy academic journals. His research is regularly portrayed in popular outlets and has been featured in venues such as the Venice Art Biennial. He has made much of his research accessible via public talks at TED, TEDx, DLD, and more, gathering millions of views and a large following.

Chiara Cirelli received her medical degree and PhD in neuroscience from the University of Pisa, Italy, where she investigated the role of the noradrenergic system in sleep regulation. She continued this work as a fellow in experimental neuroscience at the Neuroscience Institute in San Diego, California, and since 2001 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she is currently a professor at the Department of Psychiatry. She has published over 150 papers on sleep and is Associate Editor of SLEEP. With Giulio Tononi, she received the 2017 Farrell Prize in Sleep Medicine from Harvard Medical School. In 2018, Dr. Cirelli was awarded the Outstanding Scientific Achievement Award from the Sleep Research Society; in 2022, her outstanding contribution to sleep science was honored with the Pisa Sleep Award.

Lorraine Daston, director emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, and Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, has published on a wide range of topics in the history of science. Among her recent books are Against Nature (MIT Press, 2019) and Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton University Press, 2022). Her current projects include the origins of international governance in science and the history of diversity as an aesthetic, economic, and political value. Prof. Daston is the recipient of numerous awards including the Sarton Medal of the History of Science Society and the Dan David Prize in the History of Science.

Amos Elkana studied jazz guitar at Berklee College of Music and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music. He then went on to Bard College, earning an MFA in electronic music and sound. Elkana has received numerous awards for his compositions, among them the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Music Composition, ACUM’s Golden Feather Award, and the Rozenblum Prize for Excellence in the Arts. He composes concert music for orchestras, ensembles, and individual performers as well as for dance, theater, and film. His works have been performed and recorded by ensembles and musicians all over the world. He also released several highly acclaimed albums of his music. Elkana regularly participates in concerts and performances as an electric guitar player and electronic music producer.

Michael Esfeld has been full professor of the philosophy of science at the University of Lausanne since 2002. His research lies at the intersection of the natural and the human sciences, with a focus on the ontology of physics, the philosophy of mind, and the limits of the applicability of natural science–based methods in the human sciences. Prof. Esfeld’s latest book is Science and Human Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020; German version: Wissenschaft und Freiheit, Suhrkamp, 2019; French version: Sciences et liberté, Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2020). Recent papers include “Super-Humeanism and Free Will,” Synthese 198 (2021), pp. 6245–58, and “A Persistent Particle Ontology for QFT in Terms of the Dirac Sea,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 70 (2019), pp. 747–70 (with Dirk-André Deckert and Andrea Oldofredi.

Rivka Feldhay is professor of the history and philosophy of science and ideas at the Cohn Institute and head of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University. Her research and teaching focuses on knowledge, religion, and politics in the early modern era; intellectual currents in the Renaissance; science education in Catholic Europe; and the culture of Baroque and the New Science. Prof. Feldhay has co-directed research groups on “Jesuit Mechanics: Science Education in a Catholic Context” and “Before Copernicus” at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, and currently leads a Minerva Humanities Center project on migrating knowledge. Among her numerous publications are After Merton: Catholic and Protestant Science in the Seventeenth Century (ed. with Yehuda Elkana, Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Russians in Israel (ed. with Julia Lerner, Hakkibutz Hameuchad, 2012).

Giovanni Frazzetto was born and grew up in Sicily. He graduated from University College London and then conducted his doctoral studies at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg. In 2007–8, he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he later worked as Academic Coordinator of the College for Life Sciences. He is the author of Joy, Guilt, Anger, Love: What Neuroscience Can—and Can’t—Tell Us About How We Feel (Penguin, 2014) and Together, Closer: The Art and Science of Intimacy in Friendship, Love, and Family (Penguin, 2017). He lives in Ireland.

Marina Garcés directs the research program in Philosophy for Contemporary Challenges at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Her work focuses on politics and critical thinking, and expresses the need for a philosophical voice that is capable of challenging and engaging. In one of her best-known books, Nova il·lustració radical (“A new radical enlightenment,” Anagrama, 2017), she rethinks the relation of humans to the world and criticizes the ease with which humanity currently accepts forms of oppression instead of striving for dignity and freedom. Alongside her professorship, Marina Garcés is a member of the board of trustees of the Fundació l’ARC, devoted to arts as social transformation, and the founder of the collective project Espai en Blanc. Since summer 2022, she has been involved in the program “The Foundations of Value and Values” at THE NEW INSTITUTE.

Ehud Gazit is a professor and endowed chair at The Shmunis School of Biomedicine and Cancer Research and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Tel Aviv University, where he works on the molecular self-assembly of biological, bio-inspired, and other organic building blocks. He is the founding director of the Blavatnik Center for Drug Development, and was a member of the Israel National Council for Research and Development from 2014–2018. From 2008–2012, Prof. Gazit was vice president for research and development at Tel Aviv University and chaired the board of directors of the university’s technology transfer company. He has published widely in journals including Science, Cell, Nature Nanotechnology, Nature Physics, Nature Catalysis, Nature Chemical Biology, and Advanced Materials, and is also a prolific inventor. Prof. Gazit has recently been chosen as the International Solvay Chair in Chemistry for 2023.

Gerd Gigerenzer, Director of the Harding Center for Risk Literacy, University of Potsdam, and Director emeritus, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, was formerly professor of psychology at the University of Chicago and John M. Olin Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Law. He is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences, and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. Awards for his work include the Association of American Publishers Award for the best book in the social and behavioral sciences, the German Psychology Award, and the Communicator Award of the German Research Foundation. His popular books Calculated Risks, Gut Feelings, Risk Savvy, and How to Stay Smart In A Smart World have been translated into twenty-one languages.

Daphna Hacker, a legal scholar and sociologist, is full professor at the Law Faculty and the Women and Gender Studies Program, Tel Aviv University. Her sociolegal research focuses on the intersection of law, families, and gender and provides both empirical and normative insights in relation to post-divorce parental arrangements, inheritance conflicts, filial piety towards elder parents, and transnational families. Prof. Hacker has published numerous articles in leading legal and sociolegal journals and is the author of three books. Her latest, Legalized Families in the Era of Bordered Globalization (Cambridge University Press, 2017), won the American Law & Society Association’s Best Book Award. Daphna Hacker was recently elected as a member of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) for the term 2023–26.

Nora Hageneier (dancer, wee dance company, Germany) received her dance training at the ballet school of the Leipzig Opera and at the dance academy “balance1” in Berlin, where she graduated in 2005. Since then, she has been working with Dan Pelleg and Marko E. Weigert for the wee dance company. With the Israeli De De Dance Company, she also performed choreographies by Gundula Peuthert, Hanoch Ben Dror, Sommer Ulrickson, Amit Goldenberg, and Ya’ara Dolev. Nora Hagemeier has toured to countries including Israel, the Netherlands, Croatia, Russia, Zimbabwe, and the USA. Since 2010, she has also been working on the open air events of Freilichtspiele Schwäbisch Hall. She has been a member of the wee dance company, the company of the Gerhart Hauptmann Theater Görlitz-Zittau, since the season of 2011/12.

Eva Jablonka is a retired professor at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, a member of the Sagol School of Neuroscience, Tel Aviv University, and a research associate at the CPNSS, London School of Economics. She is interested in the understanding of evolution, especially evolution driven by non-genetic hereditary variations and the evolution of nervous systems and consciousness. Her books include Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution (Oxford University Press, 1995, with Marion Lamb), Evolution in Four Dimensions (MIT Press, 2005, with Marion Lamb), The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul (MIT Press, 2019, with Simona Ginsburg), and Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (Cambridge University Press, 2020, with Marion Lamb). An art-science book written with Simona Ginsburg and illustrated by Anna Zeligowski, Picturing the Mind Through the Lens of Evolution, appeared in 2022 (MIT Press).

Daphna Joel is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the School of Psychological Sciences and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University. She studies questions related to brain, sex, and gender. In her research, Prof. Joel uses various analytical methods to analyze diverse datasets, from large collections of brain scans to information obtained with self-report questionnaires. In a series of papers, she has described and tested the “mosaic” hypothesis. Other studies focused on the perception of gender identity and its relation to sexuality, and her ongoing research attempts to characterize aspects of gender beyond the binary. She is also the author of Gender Mosaic: Beyond the Myth of the Male and Female Brain (Little, Brown, 2019; with Luba Vikhanski).

Mika Kerttunen, DSocSc (Pol.), LTC (ret. FI A), is director of the Cyber Policy Institute, adjunct professor in military strategy at the Finnish National Defence University, member of the board of the Swedish Defence University, and, since October 2022, non-resident fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Mika Kerttunen’s research focuses on cyber conflict prevention and on building national, societal, and organizational resilience through policies and strategies based on transparency and the rule of law. These themes and objectives are covered through his advisory role for various governments and training and education for academic and professional audiences with a particular focus on developing countries. His latest academic publications include a handbook on international cybersecurity (Routledge, 2020).

Mordechai Kremnitzer is a Senior Research Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute and professor emeritus of the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Prof. Kremnitzer served as president of the Israeli Press Council and chaired several government committees, including the Committee to Examine the Use of Force by the Police, the Committee on Civic Education in Israel, and the Committee on Discipline in the Civil Service. With S. Z. Feller, he drafted the preliminary and general parts of Israel’s Criminal Code. He led the Ministry of Justice team to reform homicide offenses, a reform passed by the Knesset in 2019. Mordechai Kremnitzer’s areas of expertise are criminal law, public law, military law, corruption in government, and proportionality in public policy. His latest book is Proportionality in Action (Cambridge University Press, 2020, ed. with Talya Steiner and Andrej Lang).

Wilhelm Krull, previously Secretary General of the Volkswagen Foundation, has been the founding director of THE NEW INSTITUTE since January 2020. After graduating in German studies, philosophy, education, and political science, he worked as a DAAD lecturer at the University of Oxford, at the German Science and Humanities Council, and in the General Administration of the Max Planck Society. Alongside professional activities in science policy and research funding, he has held numerous positions in national and international supervisory and advisory bodies. Dr. Krull was awarded an honorary doctorate from Ilia State University, Tbilisi (2016), Foreign Membership of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering (2019), and an Honorary Fellowship from St. Edmund Hall, University of Oxford (2019). His most recent publications are Krieg—von allen Seiten (Wallstein, 2013) and Die vermessene Universität (Passagen, 2017).

Simone Kühn is head of the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, and professor of neural plasticity at the Clinic for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University Clinic Hamburg Eppendorf. Her research focuses primarily on how the brain is shaped by the environment in health and in psychiatric patients. She has also studied habitual behavior and self-control and has a strong interest in brain imaging methods. Dr. Kühn studied psychology at Columbia University and Potsdam University, and received her doctorate in psychology from the University of Leipzig. She held postdoctoral positions at the University of Ghent, the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, and the university hospital Charité in Berlin.

Shai Lavi, head of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, is a professor of law at Tel Aviv University and the founder of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Tel Aviv University. He specializes in sociology and jurisprudence and studies the interaction of technology, law, and ethics. His PhD is from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, University of California Berkeley. Prof. Lavi’s book The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States (Princeton University Press, 2005) won the 2006 Distinguished Book Award in the sociology of law from the American Sociological Association. He is currently working on medical authority over the body in Germany, Turkey, and Israel.

Christoph Markschies is president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and of the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. After studying theology, classics, and philosophy in Marburg, Munich, and Tübingen and at the Dormition Abbey in Jerusalem, he held chairs of Church History (Jena and Heidelberg) and Ancient Christianity (Humboldt University, Berlin, where he was also president of the university). Prof. Markschies is a member of the European Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Europea. He serves on several advisory councils, such as the German Protestant Institute of Archaeology, and is a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute. Prof. Markschies was awarded the Leibniz Award of the German National Research Council in 2001. His numerous publications include a variety of introductory course books on theology and church history.

Sandra Matz is the David W. Zalaznick Associate Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. As a computational social scientist, she studies human behavior using a combination of Big Data analytics and experimental methods. Her research explores how psychological characteristics influence real-life outcomes in different business-related domains (for example financial well-being, consumer satisfaction, or team performance), with the goal of helping businesses and individuals make better and more ethical decisions. Dr. Matz’s research has been published in the world’s leading scientific journals and is frequently covered by major news outlets around the world. She has won numerous awards, including Data IQ’s most influential people in data-driven marketing, Pacific Standard’s Top 30 Thinkers under 30, and Poets&Quants Best 40 under 40 business school professors.

Lucia Melloni is head of the “Neural Circuits, Consciousness, and Cognition” Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt, and a research professor in the department of neurology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Her lab is broadly interested in understanding the neural underpinnings of how we see (perception), how and why we experience what we see (consciousness), and how those experiences become imprinted in our brain (learning and memory), as well as the interplay between these processes. Dr. Melloni’s novel approach aims to advance scientific discoveries on the neural basis of conscious perception resting on “adversarial collaboration” and open science. Her interdisciplinary project combines multiple imaging and electrophysiology approaches in a rigorous, large-scale project spanning multiple laboratories across the globe, and has been described recently by Dr. Melloni and colleagues in the leading journal Science.

Thomas Metzinger was full professor of theoretical philosophy at the University of Mainz until 2019. Past president of the German Cognitive Science Society and the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness, he is a co-founder of the German Effective Altruism Foundation, president of the  Barbara Wengeler Foundation, and on the advisory board of the Giordano Bruno Foundation. From 2018 to 2020, Thomas Metzinger served in the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group on Artificial Intelligence. Among his books in English are the collections Conscious Experience (Imprint Academic, 1995) and Neural Correlates of Consciousness (MIT Press, 2000) and the monograph Being No One: The Self-Model Theory of Subjectivity (MIT Press, 2003). His The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Basic Books, 2009) discusses the ethical, cultural, and social consequences of consciousness research.

Volker Meyer-Guckel is secretary general of the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, an association of foundations for the promotion of the sciences and humanities. He studied English philology, chemistry, and philosophy in Kiel, Belfast, and New York, completing his PhD in American Studies at the University of Kiel in 1992. He served in the German National Scholarship Foundation Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and with Federal President Roman Herzog, focusing on international, cultural, and educational issues. At the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft, he was responsible for higher education reform and change management in science and research, themes on which he has published widely. Dr. Meyer-Guckel is a governing board member in foundations including the Europa Universität Viadrina, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the German Cancer Aid Foundation, and is a member of the Global Learning Council.

Julia Mossbridge is an affiliate professor in the Department of Biophysics and Physics at University of San Diego, a fellow at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, the co-founder and co-founder of the nonprofit TILT: The Institute for Love and Time, and the founder of the for-profit Mossbridge Institute. The author or co-author of multiple books and scientific articles related to precognition, informational time travel, artificial intelligence, and unconditional love, Dr. Mossbridge also invented and patented Choice Compass, a physiologically based decision-making app, and created the Loving AI project with Hanson Robotics’ humanoid robot Sophia and SingularityNet’s OpenCog AI. She completed her PhD in communication sciences and disorders and her postdoc in psychology at Northwestern University. Her MA degree in neuroscience is from UC San Francisco, and she was awarded her BA in neuroscience with highest honors by Oberlin College.

Glenn Most retired in November 2020 as professor of Greek philology at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, and remains an External Scientific Member of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and a regular visiting professor on the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. He has published books on classics, ancient philosophy, the history and methodology of classical studies, comparative literature and literary theory, cultural studies, the history of religion, and the history of art, as well as numerous articles, reviews, and translations in these fields and others such as modern philosophy. He is currently working on various projects involving both ancient Greek philology and the comparison of philological practices in different periods and cultures throughout the world.

Keely A. Muscatell is associate professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she directs the Social Neuroscience and Health Laboratory. She founded the field of social psychoneuroimmunology, an interdisciplinary subfield that integrates research on social processes such as hierarchies, close relationships, and culture together with research that uncovers the impact of these processes on the brain and the immune system. Ultimately, her work aims to document the intimate connections between the social world and physiology. She received her PhD in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and completed postdoctoral training in psychology and public health at University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Francisco. Her innovative research has been recognized with early career awards from the American Psychological Association and the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society.

Adolf Muschg, former full professor of German language and literature at the ETH Zurich, became the first director of the Collegium Helveticum at the Semper Observatory in 1997; he retired in 1999. His research focused on Gottfried Keller, Goethe, and Wolfram von Eschenbach and on the correlation between literature and therapy. He has served on several Swiss commissions, including the commission for the complete revision of the Swiss Federal Constitution (1974–77) and for the creation of the Swiss Foundation for Solidarity (1997). Adolf Muschg has been an author since 1965, and was awarded the Büchner Prize for his novel Der Rote Ritter: Eine Geschichte von Parzival (Suhrkamp, 1994). He is the recipient of numerous other international awards and a member of the Academies of Berlin, Mainz, Darmstadt, and Hamburg. His works have been translated into numerous languages.

Joachim Nettelbeck was born in Mannheim in 1944. He studied jurisprudence and sociology in Freiburg im Breisgau and Berlin. From 1971 to 1978, he was administrative director of the Berlin School of Economics. During a research residency in France, he earned his doctorate in 1978/79 with a dissertation on the appointment of higher education instructors in the Federal Republic of Germany and France. From 1979 to 1981, Dr. Nettelbeck was Executive Board Assistant of the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD in Bonn, and in 1981 he became the Secretary of the newly founded Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, where he continued to serve until 2012.

Maria Paradiso, full professor of political and economic geography at the University of Naples Federico II and board member at the International Science Council, chairs the “Human Mobility, Governance, Environment and Space” section at Academia Europaea (London). She is Vice President of the International Geographical Union, and founded the IGU Commission on the Mediterranean Basin, the IGU’s first commission with a regional focus. Maria Paradiso’s main interest in recent years has been to explore changes in Mediterranean relationships through the narratives of people in motion, and to enhance understanding of cultural dialogue and human development. She is now starting new collaborations in marine studies (oceans and seas as social spaces), and continues her work on human life in the Internet Age. Prof. Paradiso is interested in developing methodologies and practices for science’s commitment to more equitable societies across the globe.

Dan Pelleg's professional path began at the age of sixteen with multidisciplinary training in classical singing and as a dancer. Aged twenty-one, he was awarded the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Program scholarship at Tel Aviv University for studies focusing on musicology and linguistics. After an employment with Ensemble Batsheva, he moved to Berlin and there, with Marko E. Weigert and Sommer Ulrickson, co-founded the wee dance company, which operated as an independent dance company for twelve years. In 2011, when he and Weigert were appointed as directors of the dance division at the Gerhart-Hauptmann Theater Görlitz-Zittau, the wee dance company became that theater’s permanent dance company. Since it was founded, the company has made guest appearances in twenty-six German cities and in fourteen other countries, to enthusiastic acclaim from the press and audiences.

Alexander Polzin is a sculptor, painter, and stage designer who was born in Berlin in 1973. His works are shown in public spaces around the world, and in galleries or museums such as the Getty Center in Los Angeles. Among other things, Polzin created a monument to Giordano Bruno that was installed at Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, and his sculptural Homage to Paul Celan was placed in the Anne Frank Garden in Paris. Again and again, his works are created in dialogue with literature, music, and philosophy. Part of this exchange are his stage designs for opera productions in Salzburg, New York, Madrid, Brussels, and Geneva.

Jürgen Renn has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (MPIWG) since 1994 and worked closely with Yehuda Elkana from the 1980s onward. In 2022 he was additionally appointed director at the Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology (MPIGEA) in Jena. An honorary professor at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Freie Universität Berlin, he is a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and a pioneer of the Digital Humanities and Open Access. At the MPIGEA, Jürgen Renn will focus on the impact of the human-made technosphere on the natural Earth system and the dynamics of this coupled system, shaping a transdisciplinary research setting in the spirit of Yehuda Elkana. Jürgen Renn’s most recent book is The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene (Princeton University Press, 2020).

Christian Schubert, MD, PhD, MSc, is a physician, clinical and health psychologist, and medical psychotherapist (psychodynamic psychotherapy). He is a professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics, and Medical Psychology at the Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria, where he has led a psychoneuroimmunology laboratory since 1995. The focus of his scientific work is the development of an integrative single case design for investigating psychosomatic complexity. He is the author of numerous German and English-language publications including books and papers. His latest book is Stresstest Corona (BoD, 2021), and his latest paper is “About-Weekly Pattern in the Dynamic Complexity of a Healthy Subject’s Cellular Immune Activity: A Biopsychosocial Analysis,” published in Frontiers in Psychiatry in 2022.

Haya Shulman is professor of computer science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt and director of the Cybersecurity Analytics and Defenses department at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology SIT in Darmstadt. She also heads the Analytics-Based Cybersecurity research area of ATHENE, and directs the Fraunhofer Innovation Platform for Cybersecurity at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author of more than ninety scientific articles, in 2021 she received the Horst Goertz Foundation’s Deutsche IT-Sicherheitspreis, the most prestigious award for cybersecurity innovations in Germany. In addition to her personal research and technical work, she is strongly engaged in activities helping cybersecurity startups and in increasing the number of women in cybersecurity. Haya Shulman started the “Women in Cybersecurity” series at Fraunhofer SIT, and is a member of the advisory board of “She Transforms IT.”

Tania Singer, professor of social neuroscience and psychology, heads the Max Planck Society’s Social Neuroscience Lab, Berlin. After her PhD in psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, she worked at the Wellcome Centre for Imaging Neuroscience and the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience in London and held the inaugural Chair of Social Neuroscience and Neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich. She is a world expert on compassion and empathy, with a passion for creating bridges between fields that typically never interact. Prof. Singer developed the ReSource project, a large-scale longitudinal study on the effects of meditation on brain, behavior, and mental health. She is also working with micro- and macroeconomists on new models of caring economics. Recently, her CovSocial project tested the effect of short mental online training on mental health and resilience during the Covid19 pandemic.

Tamara Stefanovich is a concert pianist with the world’s leading orchestras. She has performed with the Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestras, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and is a regular visitor to prestigious concert halls worldwide, such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Albert Hall, Suntory Hall, and Carnegie Hall. Fruitful collaboration connects her with composers including Pierre Boulez, George Benjamin, Hans Abrahamsen, and György Kurtág and she regularly partners with conductors such as Kirill Petrenko, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Vladimir Jurowski. Tamara Stefanovich has recorded works from Bach to contemporaries that won the Edison Award, and has twice been nominated for a Grammy Award. She has recently accepted a position as visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She is a member of the jazz improvisation band SDLW.

Rudolf Stichweh is senior professor of sociology at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn, and director of the Department for Comparative Research on Democracies at the Forum Internationale Wissenschaft. After studying sociology and philosophy, Prof. Stichweh earned his doctoral degree with a dissertation on the history of physics in the modern system of scientific disciplines. He is a permanent visiting professor at the University of Lucerne and a member of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften and the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. Prof. Stichweh’s main research fields are functional differentiation and theory of world society; structure and history of the modern system of science, 1750–2020; authoritarian and democratic political systems in the twenty-first century; inequality and asymmetrical dependency; university as a world organization; and sociological systems theory.

Giulio Tononi is professor of psychiatry, Distinguished Professor in Consciousness Science, Director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sleep and Consciousness, and David P. White Chair in Sleep Medicine at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His scientific work on consciousness has centered on the development of the “integrated information theory” (IIT), a comprehensive theory of what consciousness is, its neural substrate, what determines its quantity and quality, and how it can be measured independent of report. The theory accounts for why certain parts of the brain are critical for consciousness, and why consciousness vanishes during deep slow wave sleep and seizures despite continuing neural activity. It has led to the development of measures of information integration to assess the quantity of consciousness in healthy humans and, by extrapolation, in unresponsive patients.

Éliane Ubalijoro, PhD, is the executive director of Sustainability in the Digital Age and the director of the Future Earth Canada Hub. She is a member of the Capitals Coalition Supervisory Board, the Crop Trust Executive Board of the Science for Africa Foundation, and Genome Canada. Éliane Ubalijoro is a Professor of Practice for Public-Private Sector Partnerships at McGill University’s Institute for the Study of International Development, where her research focuses on innovation and sustainable development for prosperity creation, and a research professor at Concordia University in the Department of Geography, Planning, and Environment. She is a member of Rwanda’s National Science and Technology Council. Dr. Ubalijoro is a member of the Impact Advisory Board of the Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet. She recently co-edited the volume Building Resilient African Food Systems after COVID-19 (IFPRI, 2021).

Marko E. Weigert (choreographer, wee dance company, Germany) trained as a dancer, choreographer, and dance teacher at the Palucca University of Dance Dresden and the University of Music and Theater “F. M. Bartholdy” Leipzig. After working for five years as a dancer and assistant choreographer with the toladá dance company under the artistic direction of Joseph Tmim from Tel Aviv, Marko Weigert co-founded the wee dance company with Dan Pelleg and Sommer Ulrickson. In 2011, when he and Pelleg were appointed as directors of the dance division at the Gerhart Hauptmann Theater Görlitz-Zittau, the wee dance company became that theater’s permanent dance company. Since it was founded, the company has made guest appearances in twenty-six German cities and in fourteen other countries, to enthusiastic acclaim from the press and audiences.

Dan Weinstein is a virtuoso musician, teacher, and lecturer, focusing mainly on contemporary and experimental music. As a cellist, he is dedicated to exploring new ways of interpreting contemporary music. Enthusiastic about the intersection between traditional and contemporary, closed and open forms, improvisation and written music, Dan has inspired composers and instrumentalists for collaborative work as soloist and chamber musician. He has collaborated with composers and musicians including Steve Reich, Betsy Jolas, John Zorn, Morton Subotnick, David Grubbs, and Amnon Wolman, and has performed and recorded on French and Israeli radio and television and for the European Broadcasting Union. Dan Weinstein regularly performs as soloist and with several ensembles. A senior lecturer in the New Music Department, Naggar Multidisciplinary School of Art and Society, Jerusalem, he conducts the open social  “Scratch Orchestra” in the Israeli Center for Digital Art.