Pietro Cicuta studied physics (Laurea, Milan, 1999 and PhD, Cambridge, 2003) working initially on “soft matter” moving to "living matter". Since 2016 he is Professor of Biological Physics at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge (http://people.bss.phy.cam.ac.uk/~pc245/), with projects ranging from infectious diseases (blood stage malaria and antibiotic resistance) to the physics of lung function, biophysics of lipid bilayers and self-assembly of responsive soft systems. His team also innovates instrumentation (automated optical microscopes, tweezers and microfluidics), audio (covid19 sounds project) and video analysis (multi-DDM). Most of his work involves rheology, dynamics, mechanics and flow in biological systems.

Gerald Fuller is the Fletcher Jones Professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. He joined Stanford in 1980 following his graduate work at Caltech where he acquired his MS and PhD degrees. His undergraduate education was obtained at the University of Calgary, Canada. Professor Fuller's interests lie in studies of rheology and interfacial fluid mechanics. His work has been recognized by receipt of the Bingham Medal of The Society of Rheology, membership in the National Academy of Engineering, election to the American Academy of Arts and Science, and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Crete, Greece, and KU Leuven, Belgium. He presently serves as the General Secretary to the International Committee on Rheology.

Randy H. Ewoldt is Professor and Kritzer Faculty Scholar in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), USA. He conducts fundamental research in fluid mechanics, rheology, and soft matter. This includes yield stress fluids, polymer gels, biological materials, new measurement methods, data computation, and techniques for avoiding bad data in rheology. He is the winner of numerous awards for science and teaching accomplishments including the PECASE award from the US White House and the Metzner Award from the Society of Rheology. He regularly lectures at rheology short courses in the USA and Europe.

Gareth H. McKinley FRS is the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation and former Associate Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research interests include extensional rheometry, microfluidic rheometry and non-Newtonian fluid dynamics. He is the author of over 330 technical publications and has won the Publication Award of the Society of Rheology twice (2007; 2022) as well as the 2021 Walters Award from J. Non-Newtonian Fluid Mechanics. He was awarded the Bingham Medal of The Society of Rheology in 2013, the Gold Medal from the British Society of Rheology in 2014 and the G.I.Taylor Medal from the Society for Engineering Science (SES) in 2022. In 2019 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and also inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of London.

Sébastien Manneville is Professor of Physics in Lyon. He received his basic physics training at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. After completing his PhD on time-reversed acoustics applied to flow velocimetry he continued with a post-doc at Boston University specializing in ultrasound imaging. In 2001, he joined the CNRS as a junior researcher in Bordeaux and 2006 he was appointed as a full professor at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon. His research focuses on shear-induced instabilities in complex fluids and soft glassy materials as well as developing innovative tools for soft matter and rheology based on ultrasound.