José Manuel Garcia was born in 1956. He has a Ph.D. in History from the University of Porto and belonged to the National Commission for the Commemoration of Portuguese Discoveries. He collaborated with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and belongs to the Portuguese History Academy and the Navy Academy. Professor Garcia is a researcher at the Lisbon Studies Office and has organized exhibitions and published numerous works on the History of Portugal and the Discoveries.

Associate Professor since 2011 at the University of Toulouse, author of "El imperio de papel de Juan Díez de la Calle: pensar y gobernar el Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XVII" (Madrid, FCE, 2017), Guillaume Gaudin has coordinated several issues and books on the role of distance in the functioning of the Spanish and Portuguese empires. He is currently writing a book on political communication between the Philippines and the rest of the empire around 1600.

Specializing in the early Spanish colonial history of the Philippines,  Dr. Gerona spent many years of graduate and post-graduate research in various archives in the Philippines and in Europe, particularly in Spain, Portugal, and Italy where he also delivered lectures in prestigious gatherings of scholars.

As a prolific scholar, he has published numerous books and monographs on various topics in local and national histories, the most important of these being Ferdinand Magellan: The Armada de Maluco and the European Discovery of the Philippines, the first comprehensive and fully documented book on the subject written by a Filipino historian, and La Ciudad de Nueva Caceres: The Rise of a 16th Century Spanish City which traced the birth of one of the first four Spanish royal cities in the Philippines.

Dr. Gerona is Director of the Center for Partido Studies and the Magellan-Elcano Studies Center at the Partido State University in Camarines Sur, Philippines.

Gino Gonzales was a former student and apprentice of Philippine National Artist Salvador Bernal, who encouraged him to pursue further studies in Set and Costume Design. He attended the Masters of Fine Arts program in Theater Design at New York University with the aid of a Fulbright Scholarship and an Asian Cultural Council grant. He was also given the Meier and Seidman awards for excellence by NYU’s Department of Design in 2001. He has designed sets and costumes for over 100 theatre productions in Manila, Singapore, China, Taiwan, Japan, and New York. He has done design work for television, film, and museum exhibitions as well. He was awarded the World Stage Design bronze medal for his set design for the Philippine Opera Company’s Spoliarium at Toronto, Canada in 2005. He later received the WSD silver medal for the costume design of Dulaang U.P.’s Measure for Measure at Taipei, Taiwan in 2017. In 2015, he co-authored a book entitled “Fashionable Filipinas: A History of the Philippine National Dress 1860–1960” with Mark Lewis Higgins. He was also lecturer at the Fine Arts Program at the Ateneo de Manila University and the University of the Philippines. He is currently the Artistic Director of TERNOCON, a terno-making convention and competition designed to encourage the proper construction and use of the Philippine National Dress.

Kasalukuyang nagtatapos ng MA Literature (Filipino) sa Pamantasang Ateneo de Manila si Sharmaine Hernandez. Bilang pagbubuklod ng kaniyang interes sa mga larang ng agham at panulaan, patuloy niyang tinatahak at kinikilala ang landas ng ecofeministang pagsusuring pampanitikan. Kung hindi abala sa pagtuturo ng panitikang Filipino sa parehong pamantasan, sumusubok din siyang magturo at magsalin sa wikang Indones.

Clotilde Jacquelard specializes in Colonial Latin American Studies, particularly in connection with the Philippines during the first globalization of the early modern period (16th and 17th centuries). She is the author of De Séville à Manille, les Espagnols en Mer de Chine (1520–1610) (2015). Among her fields of interest is the Asian perception in Spanish modern historiography and missionary documentation.

Gina Alagon Jamoralin is the Assistant Secretary at the Office of International Economic Relations (OIER), Office of the Undersecretary for Multilateral Affairs and International Economic Relations (OUMAIER) Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA), Manila. Prior to her current appointment, she was an administrator of various offices of the DFA. She has a doctorate in economics from the University of Santo Tomas and a recipient of the Most Distinguished Public Service Medal from the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on 23 January 2018.

Emanuel Bernardes Joaquim is the current Chargée d’Affaires a.i. at the Embassy of Portugal to Indonesia, the Philippines, Brunei Darussalam and ASEAN, where he has been assigned since September 2019. He has been in the Diplomatic Service since December 2015. Before that, he was a Researcher for the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI-Nova), working on a PhD Thesis on the Asia-Pacific, among other projects. He has a BA and an MA on Political Science and International Relations, both at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

Regalado Trota José studied anthropology and Philippine Studies (art history) at the University of the Philippines. His research, writings, and advocacy focus on church cultural heritage of the Hispanic Philippines. Presently, he is the archivist of the University of Santo Tomás in Manila. He also teaches at the UST’s Cultural Heritage Studies Program. His latest book, which came out early this year, is Simbahán: An Illustrated Guide to Fifty of the Philippines’ Must-Visit Catholic Churches.

Patricia May B. Jurilla is a Professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines in Diliman, where she teaches literature and book history.  She earned her Ph.D. on the History of the Book in the Philippines from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. The first formally trained Filipino book historian, she has authored several books and articles on Philippine bibliography, printing, and publishing.

Patricia P. Lambino is Assistant Professor at the Department of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines, where she teaches an undergraduate introductory course on theology, Ignatian discernment, and graduate courses on Christology and religious education. She received her Ph.D. from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. where she wrote on inculturation from the vantage point of catechetical history. Her research areas include religious education and catechesis, contextual theologies, popular religiosity, and evangelization.

Born and raised in Manila, Vina Lanzona attended the Ateneo de Manila University before pursuing her graduate studies at the New School for Social Research in New York and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently an Associate Professor in History at the University of  Hawai'i at Mānoa. 

Ricardo Lima is Web Summit’s Team Lead in Lisbon, Portugal. He is responsible for the management of the Lisbon startups team, and for the selection of startups that will participate at Web Summit’s events. He is deeply immersed in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Portugal and globally, with a great understanding of industry trends. 

Ricardo studied computer science in ISCTE-IUL and also had a stint at Aeronautical Sciences in Universidade Lusófona; he worked with AIESEC - a student-run organisation- moving from head of the office at ISCTE to be the national coordinator of internships. Ricardo joined Web Summit as startup coordinator before being promoted to Startups Team Lead in Lisbon.

Ruth de Llobet is currently an Assistant Faculty Fellow of History at NYU Shanghai in China. She holds a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Formerly, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at KITLV, Leiden, the Netherlands, a FASS Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore, and a former postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Global Asia at NYU Shanghai. Previously, she taught at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain. Her research interests include Southeast Asian history, the political and constitutional history of the Philippines, Asian interconnections, networks, colonial elites, and the age of revolution in an Asian and global context. 

On those subjects, she has published several articles, including: "El poeta, el regidor y la amante: Manila y la emergencia de una identidad criolla filipina" (2009), “Chinese Mestizo and Native’s Disputes in Manila and the 1812 Constitution: Old Privileges and New Political Realities, 1813–1815” (2014); “Luis Rodríguez Varela: Literatura panfletaria criollista en los albores del liberalismo en Filipinas, 1790–1824” (2018), as well as “Spanish Filipinos in Spain’s Constitutional Assembly (1810–1814): Trade and Politics in a Hispanic Border in Southeast Asia” (forthcoming 2021). She is one of the co-authors of the book Los Roxas. Filipinas en el siglo XIX a través de una familia hispano-filipina (2020) and is currently working on two manuscripts.