Dr. Zhigang Chen is currently a specially-appointed professor at Nankai University, China. He earned his Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and was promoted to the rank of Senior Research Staff Member at Princeton University after two years of postdoctoral work before joining the faculty at San Francisco State University in 1998. He has edited one book and published 8 invited book chapters along with some 250 papers in refereed journals. His work received numerous citations and was featured frequently in science magazines and news media. Dr. Chen was named the Chinese Distinguished Oversea Young Scholar and the Cheung-Kong Scholar. He was elected to the Fellow of the Optical Society of America in 2009 and Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2015. Dr. Chen has served as an Editor/Guest Editor for several journals including Optics Letters, Light Science & Applications, Science Bulletin, Advances in Physics X, Scientific Reports, and as a Chair/Organizer for many conferences including the Program/General Chair for CLEO-Fundamental Science.
Daniel Leykam is a Young Scientist Fellow at the Institute for Basic Science and an Assistant Professor at the University of Science and Technology, both in Daejeon, Korea. He completed his PhD in Physics at The Australian National University in 2015, for which he was awarded the Australian Institute of Physics Bragg Medal, and before taking up his current position worked as a Research Fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is a member of the Early Career Editorial Advisory Board of APL: Photonics and the Editorial Board of Physical Review A. His research interests include topological band theory, nonlinear optics, and silicon photonics.
Hrvoje Buljan is a professor of physics at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and a visiting professor at Nankai University, China. He defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Zagreb in 2002. After he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Technion, Israel, he was appointed as faculty in Zagreb. He is a theoretical physicist with results in optics and photonics (nonlinear optics, graphene nanophotonics) and ultracold atomic gases (interacting quantum systems). He published some 80 papers in refereed journals which have received numerous citations. He received the Annual Croatian State Award for Science in 2010, and Andrija Mohorovičić award as an outstanding scientists and teacher of the University of Zagreb in 2019. He leads the Center of Excellence for Quantum and Complex Systems in Zagreb, which involves about 80 theoretical physicists and mathematicians and receives support from the European Union funds.