Hendrik Floris Cohen

H. Floris Cohen is a historian of science. Educated in a history department, he turned to the history of science for two reasons. He kept wavering over what to prefer, science or the humanities, so he opted for both. He also became convinced that, if we wish to understand the making of the modern world we live in, we must seek above all to grasp how modern science came into being. Just about all his scholarly researches from the late 1970s onward have been directed toward that end. In his book How Modern Science Came Into the World. Four Civilizations, One 17th Century Breakthrough, he claims to have solved the problem. He has recently returned to that still larger problem of how the world got modern, with a view to helping resolve it as well. The book's provisional title is 'How Our World Has Become Modern: A Threefold Revolutionhendri, and he has meanwhile completed three of the eight chapters currently foreseen.

Xiao-Shan Yap

Dr. Xiao-Shan Yap is Assistant Professor of Earth-Space Sustainability at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Faculty of Geosciences at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Yap is Principal Investigator and the director of a five-year research program (2024 - 2029) on 'Planetary stewardship in view of earth-space sustainability' (PLANETSTEWARDS), supported by a 1.5 million euro 'Starting Grant' from the European Research Council (ERC). She pioneered the concept of 'earth-space sustainability', which advocates tackling challenges on Earth and in space in an integrative way as anthropogenic activities expand into outer space. The PLANETSTEWARDS Project aims at developing stewardship-oriented governance frameworks to address environmental integrity and justice on a multi-planetary level.

Edwin Auguste Valentijn

Prof. Dr. Edwin A. Valentijn is professor of Astronomical Information Technology at the Kapteyn Astronomical: Institute, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research focusses on dark matter and Big Data information systems handling astronomical imaging surveys. In 2002 he founded, and he still leads, the astronomical data centre OmegaCEN; since 2008 he has coordinated the Target initiative to port astronomical technologies to other disciplines. Valentijn founded the Target Holding company and the NL data center for the Euclid satellite. Currently he leads the Target Field Lab with research programmes on Virtual reality and Facts and Fakes recognition. Valentijn initiated and is creative director of a digital planetarium, DOTliveplanetarium, in Groningen,

Nora Luetzgendorf

I am an astrophysicist working for the European Space Agency, stationed at the European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), Noordwijk, The Netherlands. I am Lead Project Scientist for the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) Mission. For my science I’m interested in Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in dense stellar systems such as Globular Clusters and Nuclear Star Clusters. Most of my work during my PhD was concentrating on the dynamical states of the centers of galactic Globular Clusters to look for signatures massive central black holes. Later on I shifted my work also towards black holes in the centers of nearby galaxies and our own Milky Way. I have been working with observational data (mostly Integral Field Units), N-body Simulations and AMUSE simulations.

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