Professor Chris Pearce is Vice Principal for Research at the University of Glasgow and holds the Royal Academy of Engineering / EDF Energy Research Chair. His major research interests are in computational mechanics, these currently include multi-scale mechanics and modelling of heterogeneous materials, modelling of fracture, modelling of coupled problems, computational biomechanics and high-performance computing. His work with EDF Energy focuses on the rational and accurate assessment of structural integrity, delivering new approaches for modelling fracture propagation and multi-physics problems. These will improve predictions, and reduce the uncertainty of crack propagation in the reactor core’s irradiated graphite bricks, and in pipes carrying coolant at high pressure/temperature and the behaviour of the prestressed concrete reactor pressure vessels.

Stéphane Bordas is Professor of Computational Mechanics and Data Science at the University of Luxembourg. He is Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and his major research area is concentrated particularly on development of methods (enriched/extended finite elements, meshfree methods, smooth strain finite elements) to reduce the mesh generation burden when treating complex or evolving geometries/topologies.

James Sprittles is Professor in the Mathematics Institute at the University of Warwick who is interested in the computational modelling of small-scale flows. His recent fundamental research has focussed on the influence of gas kinetic effects and thermal fluctuations on droplet dynamics, with more applied interests in multimaterial 3D printing and thermal management.

Alberto Guagadnini is Professor of Hydraulic Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. His main research activity is related to stochastic inverse modelling, process assessment and system characterization under scarce information and in the presence of multiple sources of uncertainty, and robust quantification of uncertainty. He is recipient of the Chaire Gutenberg and Prix Gutenberg 2018 (Award by Cercle Gutenberg and Région Grand-Est, France, for research on Climate change and water cycle in Upper Rhine Basin) and elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (2021).

Dr. Jinlong Fu is a postdoctoral researcher at the Zienkiewicz Centre of Computational Engineering (ZCCE) at Swansea University. He obtained his PhD degree in computational mechanics from Swansea University in 2021, and he won the best PhD thesis prize in the UK Association for Computational Mechanics (the Roger Owen Awards 2021). Jinlong has a multidisciplinary research background with research experience at the interface of data science, numerical simulation, physics-based modelling, and artificial intelligence (AI). His broad research interests focus on pore-scale flow modelling, computational fluid dynamics, model order reduction and high-performance computing. The goal of his research is to model and simulate physical systems at different scales by integrating simulation, modelling and AI; and to provide strategies for system learning, prediction, optimization and decision-making in real time.