Peter Hänggi (University of Augsburg, Germany and external member of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems (MPI-PKS, Dresden) ) is a pioneering physicist renowned for transformative contributions to statistical mechanics, including foundational work on classical and quantum fluctuation relations, stochastic resonance, and Brownian motors. With 700+ publications (6 in Reviews of Modern Physics), > 55.000 citations (ISI-all data bases, ISI- h-index >100, Google h-index 121, his seminal research spans equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems, relativistic thermodynamics, quantum thermodynamics and quantum transport. Among several other accolades he is the recipient of both, the highly distinguished 2023 APS-Lars Onsager Prize and the 2011 Norwegian Lars Onsager lecture prize, cf. https://www.ntnu.edu/onsager/lecture, the 2024 Czech Academy Medal for Sciences & Humanities. He is elected to 5 academies among which are the German National Academy of Sciences, the Academia Europaea, and the AAAS. He was Editor-in-Chief of European Physical Journal B, editor for New Journal of Physics, and EPJ Special Topics, while advancing emerging fields like quantum thermodynamics, dissipative quantum transport and phononics.




Yunyun Li (Tongji University, China) received her Ph.D. in Natural Sciences in 2011 from the University of Augsburg, Germany, where her research focused on noise-assisted transport. She subsequently carried out postdoctoral work at Hong Kong Baptist University before returning to Tongji University in 2013 as an Assistant Professor in the School of Physics Science and Engineering. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 2016. Her research lies at the intersection of non-equilibrium statistical physics and soft matter, with a particular emphasis on active matter and its applications. In recent years, her work has focused on the theoretical and computational study of active particle dynamics in complex environments, including confinement, disorder, and heterogeneous media. She has published over 60 papers in peer-reviewed journals, secured multiple national and ministerial research grants.




Ran Ni (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore) received his Ph.D. in Physics in 2012 in Utrecht University (the Netherlands) focusing on the computational study on self-assembly of colloidal systems. From 2012 to 2014, he did his postdoc in University of Amsterdam and Wageningen University focusing on the self-assembly of fibril-forming polypeptides. In 2014, he was awarded the NWO VENI fellowship which is the most prestigious personal grant for young scientists in the Netherlands to start independent research. In March 2016, he joined the School of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering in Nanyang Technological University as an assistant professor, and got promoted to an associate professor with tenure in September 2021. He is a renowned expert in the theory and numerical simulation of hyperuniform systems; the results of his research have been published in top scientific journals like Science, Nature, PNAS, PRL, etc.