Tim Flohrer leads ESA's Space Debris Office since 2020. He joined the office as an engineer in 2007, and became analyst in 2009, senior analyst in 2018. Since 2014 he is working for ESA's Space Situational Awareness Program (SSA) and Space Safety Programme (S2P) and leads activities addressing the monitoring of space debris. In parallel he is supporting operational collision avoidance activities for ESA and third party missions, re-entry predictions, mitigation analyses, long-term predictions of the space debris environment, and space debris risk assessments. Before he moved to Darmstadt, Germany, Tim was a research associate at the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland, where he mainly worked on ground- and space-based optical space surveillance, and related planning and processing software. Tim is an ESA delegate to the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC), where he is chair to WG1 (measurements) and he was chair of WG2 (environment and database). Tim holds a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD; Dr. phil.-nat.) from the University of Bern, Switzerland, and a Diplom-Ingenieur in Geodesy from the Dresden University of Technology, Germany. Tim has been working on space debris and space surveillance topics for more than 22 years.

Fellow of AIAA (American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics), full Member of IAA (International Academy of Astronautics), Honorary Member of IAASS (Int. Assoc. for the Advancement of Space Safety), Member of ESA delegation at IADC (Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee) and UNCOPUOS/STSC (Scientific & Technical Sub-Committee). Klinkrad was ESA visiting scientist in ESOC’s Flight Dynamics Division (1980-1983), Flight Dynamics Engineer for the ERS-1 Project at ESTEC (1983-1988), Senior Mission Analyst in ESOC’s Mission Analysis Office (1988-2005), Head of ESA's Space Debris Office (2006-2014), Appointment as “ESA Senior Advisor” on space debris in 2008. Author of the text book on “Space Debris” (2006), 250 publications, recipient of the “Joseph P. Loftus Space Sustainability Award” from the Int. Association for the Advancement of Space Safety (IAASS) in 2013, recipient of the “Distinguished Service Award” from the International Astronautical Federation (IAF) in 2015, recipient of two “ESA Team Awards” in 2013 and 2014.

Stoewer was the European Space Agency’s (ESA) first program Manager for the Spacelab project, where he created a strong systems group. Stoewer also founded the ESA’s Systems Engineering and Programmatics Department, where he implemented an end-to-end systems engineering philosophy across ESA projects. He served as managing director of the German Space Agency’s national space science and applications projects.

Yi Li is an Associate Professor and Assistant Dean at the School of Astronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, China. His research group works on sounding rockets and aerodynamics related to spacecraft. He also works on space education. In 2017, he founded the first students’ club of sounding rocket in China. He is also a division director of Shaanxi Society of Aeronautics and Astronautics. From 2009 to 2014, he worked as a PhD student at German Aerospace Center and received the doctoral degree from Technical University Braunschweig in 2015.

Prior to joining the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, Dr. Worden was Director of NASA's Ames Research Center. He was research professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona. He is a recognized expert on space and science issues and has been a leader in building partnerships between governments and the private sector internationally. Dr. Worden has authored or co-authored more than 150 scientific papers in astrophysics and space sciences. He served as a scientific co-investigator for three NASA space science missions – most recently the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph launched in 2013 to study the Sun. He received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for the 1994 Clementine Mission to the moon. Dr. Worden was named the 2009 Federal Laboratory Consortium 'Laboratory Director of the Year' and is the recipient of the 2010 Arthur C. Clarke Innovator's Award.

Alessandro Golkar is Full Professor at the Technical University of Munich, Chair of Pico-, Nanosatellites, and Satellite Constellations. His research interests are in systems engineering and in the development of novel mission concepts of spacecraft systems, with particular interest in nanosatellites and satellite constellation systems. Prof. Golkar served as co-PI of the FSSCAT CubeSat mission, a satellite mission sponsored by ESA, 1st Prize Winner of the ESA Sentinel Small Satellite Challenge, and Overall Winner of the 2017 Copernicus Masters. From 2012 to 2022, Prof. Golkar was among the founding faculty members of the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Moscow, Russia, a new research university founded in collaboration with MIT. From 2017 to 2019 Prof. Golkar took a sabbatical leave from academia and joined Airbus as Vice President of the Technology Planning and Roadmapping unit of the Corporate Technology Office at group level, in charge of creating the Airbus Concurrent Design Facility and running roadmapping studies for the steering of the overall group R&T budget of 800 MEUR per year. Professor Golkar holds a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and M.Sc. and B.Sc. degrees in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. He serves as Associate Editor of the INCOSE Systems Engineering journal.

Željko Ivezić obtained undergraduate degrees in mechanical engineering and physics from the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Kentucky in 1995. After working on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) at Princeton University, he took a professorship in astronomy at the University of Washington in 2004. Željko's scientific interests are in detection, analysis, and interpretation of electromagnetic radiation from astronomical sources, with emphasis on data mining and machine learning methods. He has co-authored over 300 refereed publications, with a cumulative citation count of over 100,000. His current obsession is the Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), for which he served as the Project Scientist for well over a decade, and he is now serving as the Director of the Rubin Construction project. In many ways similar to SDSS, which provided to us the first large digital color snapshot of the faint optical sky, LSST will deliver a digital color movie of the night sky by collecting about 60,000,000 GB (or 60 PB) of astronomical imaging data.

Hrvoje Buljan received a MSc degree in physics from the University of Zagreb in 1997 and defended his PhD thesis at the same university in 2002. In the period from 2002-2004 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. His research at the time was focused on nonlinear optical phenomena such as incoherent solitons. After the postdoc period he moved back to the University of Zagreb as an Assistant Professor and formed his group with diverse activities including photonics, condensed-matter systems, quantum gases. HB authored and co-authored more than 88 publications in peer reviewed journals with ~4300 citations in Web of Science. HB was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Zagreb in 2009, and to the rank of Full Professor in 2013. He received the Annual Croatian State Award for Science in 2010, the Andrija Mohorovičić award in 2019, and the Croatian Academy of Sciences award in 2023. He mentored 7 PhD theses and more than 40 diploma theses. HB is the PI on several research projects including the Scientific Center of Excellence for Quantum and Complex Systems including 80 scientists from 9 Croatian public institutions and 5 MEUR from EU Regional and Development Fund (2015-2025). At the Brijuni conference, he will present applications of his work in space technologies.