Andrei Smolyakov is a Professor in the Department of Physics and Engineering Physics at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. He received his MSc. (Diploma of Engineer-Physicist) and Ph.D. (Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences) degrees in 1983 and 1986, respectively, both from Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Russia. His research interests include basic plasma physics with applications to magnetic fusion, laboratory plasmas, and plasma for electric propulsion. He is a Fellow of American Physical Society, Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a Professional Engineer registered in the Province of Saskatchewan. He is a member of the editorial boards for several plasma physics journals and is an Associate Editor for Physics of Plasmas of AIP 

Dr. Luis Chacón is a 2025 Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), a 2024 Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Fellow, a 2021 Ernest O. Lawrence Laureate, a 2020 Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), and a Senior Scientist in the Theoretical Division at LANL since 2012. Dr. Chacón received an MS degree in Industrial Engineering from the Polytechnic University of Madrid (UPM) in 1994, MS and PhD degrees in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1998 and 2000, respectively, and a PhD degree from UPM in 2001. His research focuses on multiscale algorithm development for fluid and kinetic modeling of plasmas, with applications to basic plasmas, inertial confinement fusion, and magnetic fusion, resulting in 139 publications that have been cited about 5600 times with an h-index of 45. Dr. Chacón was an Associate and Executive Editor of the Journal of Computational Physics from 2013-2022 and 2015-2021, respectively, and Guest Editor of the SIAM Journal of Scientific Computing multiple times since 2016. Dr. Chacón has organized numerous conferences and workshops, including the International Sherwood Fusion Theory Conference (Chair, 2011-12), the Copper Mountain Meeting on Iterative Methods (member of the Scientific Committee since 2016), the Kinetic Effects in Inertial Confinement Fusion Workshop (Chair, 2018), the International Conference of Numerical Simulation of Plasmas (Chair, 2019), and the Joint Institute for Fusion Theory US-Japan Workshop on Multiscale Simulation of Plasmas (US co-Chair, 2019). 

Mayya Tokman is a Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Merced. Her research expertise spans numerical analysis, scientific computing, and mathematical modeling with a particular focus on the development of exponential time integrators for large, stiff nonlinear systems of differential equations. Her work has been applied to various fields, including plasma physics, weather prediction and climate modeling. As a founding faculty member at UC Merced, Dr. Tokman has played an active role in building the university's academic and research programs and held several administrative positions including department chair of applied mathematics. She founded and continues to lead the UC Merced CalTeach program for future STEM educators and has been serving as a UC systemwide executive chair for CalTeach.  Dr. Tokman earned her Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics from Caltech in 2001 and her B.S. from UCLA in 1995. Before joining UC Merced, she held postdoctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley.  Outside of her university roles, her professional experience includes serving as an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. Department of State and co-founding and managing the Kids Discovery Station (KiDS), a children’s museum in Merced.