- Antonio Acìn (ICFO): ICREA Research Professor at ICFO-The Institute of Photonic Sciences. He has a degree in Physics from the Universitat de Barcelona (UB) and in Telecommunication Engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. He got his PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2001 from the UB. After a post-doctoral stay in Geneva, he joined ICFO in 2003. At ICFO, Acín leads the Quantum Information Theory group. The group activities focus on quantum information theory and quantum communication, with an emphasis on quantum cryptography, but also cover other fields such as quantum optics, many-body physics, quantum thermodynamics, of the foundations of quantum physics. His research has been awarded with 4 grants from the European Research Council: 1 Starting, 1 Proof of Concept, 1 Consolidator and 1 Advanced Grant, the latter starting in 2020. He also received an AXA Chair in Quantum Information Science in 2016. Finally, in 2024, he was awarded with the "Rey Jaume I" prize for basic research.
- Maria Chiara Braidotti (Univ. Glasgow)
- Tommaso Calarco (Jülich & Univ. Bologna): Director of Institute for Quantum Control (PGI-8), Professor at the University of Cologne and at the University of Bologna. Prof. Dr. Tommaso Calarco has been a full professor at the University of Cologne since 2018 and at the University of Bologna since 2023. He received his PhD at the University of Ferrara and started to work as a postdoc in the group of P. Zoller at the University of Innsbruck. He was appointed as a Senior Researcher at the BEC Centre in Trento in 2004 and as a Professor for Physics at the University of Ulm in 2007, where he then became Director of the Institute for Complex Quantum Systems and of the Centre for Integrated Quantum Science and Technology. He has authored in 2016 the Quantum Manifesto, which initiated the European Commission’s Quantum Flagship initiative, and is currently the Chairman of one of the Flagship’s Governing Bodies: The Quantum Community Network (QCN). In 2020, together with the QCN, he has launched an initiative towards the creation of a consortium of European quantum industries, which has been legally established in 2021 under the name of European Quantum Industry Consortium (QuIC).
- Ivo Pietro Degiovanni (INRIM): Senior Researcher at Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRIM). He has developed his scientific competences in the fields of Quantum Photonic Technologies, Quantum Metrology, and Quantum Communication. He has been the Chairman of the EURAMET European Metrology Network for Quantum Technologies (EMN-Q) since 2019. He has served as a Member of the "Consiglio di Direzione Scientifica" of INRIM from 2017 to 2023. He coordinated or has been INRIM principal investigator in several European and National research projects. He had served as a Member of the Strategic Research Agenda Working Group (SRA-WG) of the EU Quantum Flagship (team: "Sensing and Metrology") since 2018 up to 2022. He has served as Member of the EU Quantum Flagship - Quantum Coordination Board (Core Group) and as Vice-Chair of the EU Quantum Flagship - Quantum Coordination Board (Thematic Committee on Quantum sensing) since 2023. He is Associate Editor of the European Physical Journal D (EPJ D) and European Physical Journal Quantum Technology (EPJ QT). He has been Lecturer of the course "Quantum Communication" at University of Torino (Torino Graduate School in Physics and Astrophysics) since 2014.
- Michael Doser (CERN): Senior research physicist at CERN with a focus on antimatter and quantum sensing, and former deputy department head of CERN's physics department. He was spokesperson of the AEgIS experiment, whose goal is to measure the gravitational interaction between matter and antimatter, which requires building bridges between particle physics and other research fields, such as atomic physics, gravitation, material science or physical chemistry, from 2012 to 2022, and is currently putting together a new global collaboration on R&D on quantum sensors for particle physics. Michael is editor for Physics Letters B and formerly for Review of Particle Physics.
- Nicole Fabbri (INO-CNR): Senior Resercher at CNR-INO, the Italian Institute National of Optics of the National Research Council, and at LENS the European Laboratory for Non-linear Spectroscopy. Here, she leads the Quantum Diamond Nanoengineering Laboratory. She is also responsible of the CNR Inter-department Research Unit of DSFTM and DISBA at Università Campus Biomedico in Rome. PhD in 2011 at the University of Florence in the Quantum Gases group, with experience at MIT in the Cappellaro's group, she currently works on the manipulation and control of solid-state spin qubits (color centers), both for the realization of practical quantum devices such as quantum-enhanced sensors, and for fundamental studies, especially on quantum thermodynamics. In the field of quantum sensing, Nicole Fabbri coordinates the European collaborative research Projects MUQUABIS and Q-LAMPS, and the National Project PRIN2022 QUASAR. She also coordinates the Work Package on Quantum Sensing of the PNRR Integrated Infrastructure Initiative in Photonic and Quantum Science (I-PHOQS). She is member of the Quantum Coordination Board of the Quantum Flagship and chair of the European Interest Group on Diamond for the Quantum Chips Act. She teaches Ph.D. courses for the Ph.D programs in Atomic and Molecular Photonics and in Physics at University of Florence, and for the Ph.D. program in Quantum Technologies at University of Naples. She is also part of the Academic Board of the National Doctorate in Artificial Intelligence at Università Campus Biomedico in Rome.
- Ashley Lyons (Univ. Glasgow): Research Fellow with the Royal Academy of Engineering and lecturer in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Glasgow. Dr Lyons obtained his PhD from Heriot-Watt University in 2017 under the guidance of Prof Daniele Faccio with his thesis entitled "Two Photon Quantum Metrology". Dr Lyons was awarded his fellowship and a permanent position at Glasgow in 2021, his research interests primarily lie in quantum sensing and computational imaging using time-of-flight information. He currently leads the Scottish Funding Council's Alliance for Research Challenges in Quantum Technologies, a 4 year programme designed to create new cross-discipline networks across Scotland.
- Morgan Mitchell (ICFO): Born in 1968 in Palo Alto, California, USA, Prof. Mitchell earned his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1999 with a thesis on the quantum optics of photon-photon interactions. In the group of Serge Haroche at the Ecole Normale Superieure he advanced cavity quantum electrodynamics with cold atoms and microfabricated optical resonators. At Reed College he built the first diode-laser based entangled photon sources, and in the group of Aephraim Steingberg in Toronto he demonstrated the first multi-photon NooN states and quantum process tomography. He joined ICFO in 2004 and ICREA in 2011. His leads the research group Atomic Quantum Optics at ICFO and coordinates the Quantum Technologies Emergent Community in Catalonia (QuantumCAT). He was awarded an ERC Starting Grant in 2011, an ERC Proof-of-Concept Grant in 2016, an ERC Advanced Grant in 2023 and has been recognized with a Vanguardia de la Ciencia award in 2012, Ehrenfest Prize and Kavli Publication Prize. Research interests: Prof. Mitchell leads the Atomic Quantum Optics group at ICFO, which uses experimental quantum optics and atomic physics for quantum technology and quantum foundations. The group works with single neutral atoms as single quantum systems, spinor Bose-Einstein condensates and high-density atomic vapours as extreme sensors, and has invented several sources of atom-resonant squeezed and entangled light. Major projects include chip-scale atomic magnetometers for magnetic brain imaging (Quantum Technologies Flagship and EIC Transition projects), quantum enhancement protocols for state of the art optical lattice atomic clocks, quantum random number generators for loophole-free Bell tests and device-independent quantum technologies, and coordination of The BIG Bell Test, a world-wide collaboration in foundations of physics. In 2017 Prof. Mitchell co-founded the Quside Technologies to deliver state of the art quantum random number generation for communications and data security applications.
- Simone Montangero (Univ. Padova): Full Professor at University of Padua where he directs the Quantum Computing and Simulation Center. He is Honorary Professor at Ulm University and co-leads the Quantum Computing Spoke of the Italian National Center for HPC, Big-Data and Quantum Computer. He has been a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Science Foundation, a Humboldt Fellow, and a IQOQI visiting fellow of the Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information of the Austrian Academy of Science. He is a member of the Quantum Coordination Board of the Quantum Flagship and of the Research Council of the National Metrology Institute of Italy - INRiM.
- Matteo Rossi (Algorithmiq): quantum physicist working in the field of quantum information and computing. He completed a PhD in quantum physics at the University of Milan in 2017, and after that held postdoctoral positions at the University of Turku and Aalto University, in Finland. He is currently a docent at the University of Helsinki. His main expertise is in quantum computing and simulation, quantum estimation theory and open quantum systems. In 2020 together with Sabrina Maniscalco and others, he cofounded Algorithmiq, a quantum software startup focusing on methods for solving quantum chemistry problems on near-term and fault tolerant quantum computers.
- Fabio Sciarrino (Sapienza Univ. Roma): Full Professor at the Physics Department of the University of Rome La Sapienza. He is Principal Investigator of the Quantum Information Lab, Department of Physics, Sapienza University of Rome (www.quantumlab.it). His main expertise is experimental quantum optics, computation and quantum information, and foundations of quantum mechanics. In recent years his research activity has focused on the implementation of quantum information protocols via integrated photonics circuits.
- Alessandro Sebastianelli (ESA): Received the degree cum laude in electronic engineering for automation and telecommunications from the University of Sannio, Benevento, Italy, in 2019, where he also pursued the Ph.D. degree in Information Technologies for Engineering. His research topics mainly focus on remote sensing and satellite data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI) techniques for Earth observation, data fusion and quantum machine learning. He has coauthored several articles to reputed journals and conferences for the sector of remote sensing. Ha has been a Visited Researcher with Φ-lab, European Space Agency ESA/European Space Research Institute ESRIN, Frascati, Italy, and still collaborates with. He has won an ESA OSIP proposal in August 2020. He received an IEEE award for one the best 3 thesis in geoscience and remote sensing. Currently he works as Research Fellow in Quantum Computing for Earth Observation at the European Space Agency (ESA) Φ-lab.
- Alessandro Zavatta (CNR-INO): Senior Researcher at the National Institute of Optics (INO) of the National Research Council (CNR), and he is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Florence. He is responsible for the CNR-INO unit of Trieste and coordinates the CNR's quantum communication and information (QCI) laboratory with branches in Florence and Trieste. He co-founded QTI as a spin-off company of the CNR, where he currently holds the position of President and the role of operations and innovation director. His scientific activity falls in the fields of quantum technologies and secure quantum communications. He has obtained several national and international funding and co-authored over 100 scientific publications in the most important international peer-reviewed journals.
