RWTH Aachen University
Julia Kowalski is a professor in the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering at RWTH Aachen University and speaker of its profile area Modeling and Simulation Science. She holds a Ph.D. from the Seminar for Applied Mathematics at ETH Zurich. Prior to her current position, she served as a Heisenberg Professor at the University of Göttingen, led a junior research group at the Aachen Institute for Advanced Study in Computational Engineering Science, and worked as an Analytics Specialist at McKinsey & Company. Her research lies at the intersection of computational science, applied math and engineering, with a focus on methods for model-based prediction and decision support, including data-integrated simulation methods for transport-dominated and phase-change processes, Bayesian methods, and digital-twin infrastructures for complex computational workflows. She is an advocate for open science, FAIR principles, and sustainable research software.
Black Hole Initiative, Harvard University
Paul Tiede is a computational radio astronomer and data scientist interested in black hole physics. He is a research associate at the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University and the chief data scientist for the Black Hole Explorer project. Previously, Paul was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Waterloo and Perimeter Institute in 2021. Within Julia, Paul is the lead developer of several radio astronomy packages, including Comrade.jl, and is the co-lead of the EHTJulia software group.
Engineering Fellow, Epic Games
Simon Peyton Jones, FRS, graduated from Trinity College Cambridge in 1980. After two years in industry, he spent seven years as a lecturer at University College London, and nine years as a professor at Glasgow University, before joining Microsoft Research (Cambridge) in 1998. He moved to Epic Games as an Engineering Fellow in 2022. Simon’s main research interest is in functional programming languages, their implementation, and their application. He was a key contributor to the design of the now-standard functional language Haskell, and is the lead designer of the widely-used Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). He has written two textbooks about the implementation of functional languages. He is particularly motivated by direct application of principled theory to practical language design and implementation — that is one reason he loves functional programming so much. Simon is chair of Computing at School, the grass-roots organisation that was at the epicentre of the 2014 reform of the English computing curriculum.
