Cosimo Bambi is currently Xie Xide Junior Chair Professor at the Department of Physics at Fudan University. He received the Laurea degree from Florence University in 2003 and the PhD degree from Ferrara University in 2007. He worked as a postdoctoral research scholar at Wayne State University, at IPMU at The University of Tokyo, and at LMU Munich. He joined Fudan University at the end of 2012 as Associate Professor under the Thousand Young Talents Program. He was promoted to Full Professor at the end of 2013 and named Xie Xide Junior Chair Professor of Physics in 2016. In 2015, he was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship for experienced researchers to collaborate with the group of Kostas Kokkotas at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. Professor Bambi has received a number of awards, including the Magnolia Gold Award in 2022 and the Magnolia Silver Award in 2018 from the Municipality of Shanghai, the International Excellent Young Scientists Award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China in 2022, the Xu Guangqi Prize from the Embassy of Italy in Beijing in 2018, and a JSPS Invitation Fellowship for Research in Japan from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in 2016. Professor Bambi has worked on a number of topics in the fields of high-energy astrophysics, particle cosmology, and gravity. He has published over 200 papers on refereed journals and authored/edited several academic books with Springer.
Leonardo Modesto is currently Tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Physics at Cagliari University (Italy) and qualified as Full Professor in theoretical physics of the fundamental interactions in Italy in 2014. In April 2023, he was honored by the prestigious "direct call for clear fame and scientific merits" from the Ministry of Scientific Research and the Italian University that allowed him to return to Italy as a Professor at the University of Cagliari. Professor Modesto studied in Pisa, where he got the Master degree, and in Turin, where he completed the PhD program. Afterwards, he carried out scientific research in Marseille, Bologna, and Waterloo (Canada) at the renowned Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. He worked at Fudan University in Shanghai from 2012 to 2016, and at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen from 2016 to 2023 as associate professor. Professor Modesto has made decisive contributions on several topics in theoretical physics: the development of "loop quantum gravity", the study of space-time singularities and on the related information loss problem in black holes, but above all he proposed a class of theories for quantum gravity that are UV finite in the quantum field theory framework.
Ilya Shapiro is professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Minas Gerais, Brazil) and also level 1A fellow of the productivity grant from CNPq (main national agency of supporting science in Brazil). He graduated from high school in the city of Pavlodar in Kazakhstan, USSR and went to study in the Physics Department of the Tomsk State University, Russia. After graduating in 1981 he defended Ph.D. in physical and mathematical sciences in 1985. Between 1984 and 1987 worked as assistant professor at the Department of Mathematics at Tomsk Medical Institute, and from 1987 as associated professor at Tomsk State Pedagogical Institute (now University). In 1993 got highest degree (Doctor of Science) at Tomsk State University. Between 1994 and 1996 was research visitor at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. starting from 1996 was visiting professor at Federal University of Juiz de Fora where became permanent in 2000. From 2015 to 2018 was a member of the CNPq Physics and Astronomy Board and from 2018 is one of responsibles for Quantum Field Theory in the Brazilian Physical Society.
Prof. Shapiro supervised and co-supervised a number of theses and dissertations, including 13 Ph.D. theses. He is author and co-author of 170+ articles and of several books, including I.L. Buchbinder et al, "Effective Action In Quantum Gravity", IOPP/1992, with more than 900 citations in the ISI, "Introduction to Classical Mechanics", together with G. de Berredo-Peixoto, Livraria da Física/2011, 2nd edition in 2016, English translation published in Springer/NY in 2013, "A Primer in Tensor Analysis and Relativity" (Springer/NY, 2019), "Introduction to Quantum Field Theory with Applications to Quantum Gravity", together with I.L. Buchbinder (Oxford Un. Press, 2021).
