Symposia

Dr. Florian Kongoli holds 3 degrees: a Bachelor of Science, a Master of Science/University of Montreal, Canada and a Doctor of Science Degree/Tohoku University, Japan. Since 1996 he is CEO of FLOGEN Technologies Inc.,(www.flogen.com) a Sustainable High Tech applied research institute
incorporated in Canada and USA that today have offices and representations in more than 15 Countries around the the world while carrying out high tech projects in more than 40 countries.

Since 2007 he is Chairman of FLOGEN STAR OUTREACH (www.flogen.org), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to (1) achieving sustainability through science and technology, (2) raising the profile of science and engineering in the society and (3) properly honoring scientists and engineers.

Since 2003 Dr Kongoli has been President of the Organizing Committee of the Sustainable Industrial Processing Summits (SIPS) held every year in several countries around the world with an average participation of 500 authors from academia, industry, government and the entrepreneurship world representing an average of 80 countries.

Dr Kongoli has about 25 years of rich scientific and applied technology experience through direct involvement in numerous invited engagements in all continents. He has managed, involved, or actively participated in about 200 projects, 40 types of reactors, 10 industries, in 45 countries and in 6 continents. Dr. Kongoli has published 113 books and more than 200 scientific articles. He has delivered in numerous countries around the world about 220 plenary, keynote and invited presentations as well as articles, technical reports and research presentations. He has served in many leadership positions in national and international organizations and in many Professional Award Councils such as the Industrial Achievement Award Committee of International Federation of Automatic Control. He is Editorial Board member of several International Journals.

He is an elected Honorary Member of the Lorraine Academy of Sciences and Elected Member of Euro Mediterranean Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded in 2017 the title "The Environmental Tech CEO of the year 2017" by CEO-Monthly UK magazine. He was awarded Certificate of Appreciation in recognition of his contribution toward sustainable development through FLOGEN Sustainability Framework by Tomas Bata University in Zlin (Czech Republic)/Faculty of Applied Informatics. He is honorary Citizen of Rio de Janeiro and Laureate of Gold Medal of the City of Nancy, France. In 2022 he was honored by the Congressman elect of Rio de Janeiro State, Alan Lopes, who will propose to the State Congress to adopt FLOGEN Sustainability Framework developed by Dr. Florian Kongoli in the state law for evaluating any proposed public or private project in the state. Also, in 2022 he was invited to give the Opening Sustainability Plenary Lecture at the United Nation Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on 11 February 2022 about FLOGEN Sustainability Framework at the International Year of Glass 2022.

He has participated in business and government delegations in numerous countries accompanying Prime Ministers, Ministers and other government officials.
A more detailed biography can be found at: http://www.flogen.com/elt/pdf/Kongoli_Short-CV.pdf

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Seiji Fujimoto is an Assistant Professor at the David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics, University of Toronto. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Tokyo (2019) and previously held postdoctoral positions at the Niels Bohr Institute and the University of Texas at Austin. His research investigates the formation of the first galaxies and supermassive black holes in the early universe, using the world's largest telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and ALMA. He leads major international observing programs, including VENUS (a 300-hour JWST Treasury Survey) dedicated to tracing the formation pathways of the first galaxies, black holes, and stellar explosions.

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Megan got her Bachelor's degree in Physics and her Master's degree in Nanoscience, and she is now an Astrophysics PhD Candidate at the School of Earth and Space Exploration at ASU with advisor Alexandra Navrotsky. She is a member of The Navrotsky Eyring Center for the Materials of the Universe (MotU), part of ASU's Advanced Materials Initiative, and the Navrotsky Laboratory Group. Her research interests include the first condensates of the solar nebula as well as exoplanet atmospheres, with an emphasis on the need for more experimental work in the field of cosmochemistry.

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Ray Lucas has worked in a wide variety of roles at the Space Telescope Science Institute, beginning by helping to create the original Guide Star Catalog and All-Sky Digital Sky Survey (initial version of the STScI MAST Data Archive), followed by helping the international peer review (Telescope Time Allocation) committees selecting Hubble Space Telescope programs for the first 6 years, and assisting peer-review selected observers (GOs) and Guaranteed Time Observers (GTOs) in observing program design for taking data in the best ways needed for achieving their scientific goals. As he transitioned to the Instruments Division at STScI, he attended the first National Virtual Observatory summer school at the Aspen Center for Physics and conceived an idea and led a team which was awarded the first prize for science, and later was the PI of a related program which he was asked to present at the IAU meeting in Prague. Ray has worked in the STScI instrument group supporting the Hubble Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and also served as a member of the ACS staff doing astronaut EVA (spacewalk) Support in the last HST Servicing Mission, and also was a member of the teams doing pre-launch instrument testing on ACS upgrades and Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) camera testing at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and James Webb Space Telescope NIRCam testing at Lockheed in Palo Alto, California. His own greatest interests are in extragalactic astronomy, including galaxy interactions and mergers, and galaxy evolution from the earliest, most distant galaxies in the early universe to higher-resolution studies of those nearer in space and time. Ray has been the PI of a large VLA (Very Large Array) observing program studying radio galaxies, has been a visitor at a number of major ground-based observatories around the world, and, among others, has observed interacting and merging galaxies using a number of ground-based telescopes including at CTIO in Chile and the Observatory of El Roque de Los Muchachos of the IAC on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Ray also helped design Hubble First Servicing Mission observations of the distant galaxy cluster CL0939+4713 that demonstrated HST's better-than-anticipated ability to study morphologies of distant galaxies and helped lead to the original Hubble Deep Field. Ray was subsequently a co-Investigator on the STScI community programs on the Hubble Deep Field-North (HDF-N), Hubble Deep Field-South (HDF-S), Hubble UltraDeep Field (HUDF), Hubble Frontier Fields (HFF), and is a team member of the JWST Early Release Science (ERS) program on galaxy evolution and the distant, early universe, CEERS. He has also been a co-Investigator on HST observations of collisional ring galaxies including the Cartwheel Galaxy, Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs), various smaller and large HDF follow-up GO programs including GOODS and CANDELS, and is currently a co-I on many JWST programs on distant galaxies and the early universe, including among others, CAPERS and VENUS, the latter studying gravitationally-lensed objects behind massive foreground galaxy clusters.

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Michel Mayor (born 1942, Lausanne, Switzerland) is a Swiss astronomer who was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery with Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz of the first known extrasolar planet orbiting a Sun-like star. Mayor and Queloz received one half of the prize; the other half was awarded to Canadian-born American physicist James Peebles.

Mayor received a master’s degree in physics from the University of Lausanne in 1966 and a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Geneva in 1971. He spent the rest of his career at the University of Geneva, becoming a professor in 1988 and director of the Geneva Observatory in 1998. He became a professor emeritus in 2007.

Mayor’s early research focused on binary stars, open and globular clusters, and the structure and evolution of the Milky Way Galaxy. In 1994 he and graduate student Didier Queloz began observing 142 stars at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France. They were using a new spectrograph called ELODIE that would provide accurate measurements of a star’s radial velocity (that is, its velocity toward or away from the observer). When a planet orbits a star, the planet and the star orbit around their common centre of mass, and the star’s motion around the centre of mass can be seen as a shift in the star’s spectral lines. ELODIE could detect changes in a star’s radial velocity of 13 metres per second, which is about the same amount of radial velocity change that the Sun is moved by its largest planet, Jupiter. Because Jupiter takes nearly 12 Earth years to orbit the Sun, Mayor and Queloz were not expecting quick results.

Observations of the star 51 Pegasi began that September. In January 1995 Mayor and Queloz detected a planet, 51 Pegasi b, with a mass about half that of Jupiter and a period of 4.23 days, which they confirmed and announced later that year. The existence of 51 Pegasi b, a planet unlike any in the solar system, surprised astronomers, and its discovery opened up a new field of astronomy, the study of extrasolar planets. Over more than two decades after Mayor and Queloz discovered 51 Pegasi b, thousands of extrasolar planets became known.

Mayor and Queloz collaborated on further searches for extrasolar planets. Beginning in 1998, they used the CORALIE spectrograph at La Silla Observatory in Chile to search for planets around 1,647 nearby stars. The CORALIE project has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates. Mayor was the principal investigator of the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher (HARPS) project, which used a spectrometer at La Silla to observe radial velocity changes of 30 cm per second. HARPS began observations in 2003 and has found more than 100 extrasolar planet candidates, including several “super-Earths,” rocky planets that are more massive than Earth.

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Dr. Maria Polletta is a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Space Astrophysics and Cosmic Physics (INAF/IASF) in Milan, Italy. Previously, she held positions at the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris (France) as a Marie Curie Fellow, as well as at the University of California San Diego and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) in Pasadena (USA), following the completion of her PhD at the University of Geneva (Switzerland).

Her research focuses on understanding how the environment affects the evolution of galaxies, with particular emphasis on galaxy clusters and protoclusters. She has pioneered the study of heavily obscured active galactic nuclei and starburst galaxies, using observations from major infrared facilities including the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO), the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), complemented by X-ray observations and ground-based millimeter interferometry.

Her work is based on the analysis of multiwavelength datasets and has led to the development of a widely used library of galaxy spectral energy distribution templates spanning a broad range of the electromagnetic spectrum, now extensively employed in extragalactic photometric studies. Her research strategy combines the statistical power of large cosmological surveys with detailed investigations of exceptional individual systems.

She has contributed to several major international observational programs, including the Spitzer Wide-area Infrared Extragalactic Survey (SWIRE), the XMM-Newton Large Scale Structure Survey (XMM-LSS), the VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS), the Planck High-z (PHZ) source program, the JWST Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science (PEARLS) project, and, more recently, the Emission-line Mapping of the galaxy POpulation in the cosmic WEb enviRonments (EMPOWER) survey.

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Rogier Arnold Windhorst (born 1955) is an astronomer and a professor of physics and astronomy at Arizona State University. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy in 1984 from the University of Leiden and did post doctorate work at Mt.Wilson and Las Campanas Observatories. He currently serves as associate chair at Arizona State and is among six Arizona state faculty who were awarded Regents Professor appointments in 2006; he presides over the School of Earth and Space Exploration at the university.[1] In 2008, he became Foundation Professor of Astrophysics at Arizona State University and co-director of the ASU Cosmology Initiative.[2]

Windhorst has authored over 100 published scientific papers and has given over 125 lectures at seminars. His research has led to new understandings of how the universe first began. He also studies black holes. His research focuses on Astrophysics and Space Science, and he is the principal investigator of the Hubble Space Telescope mid-UV bright galaxy survey.[3] He is one of the six Interdisciplinary Scientists worldwide for the James Webb Space Telescope, and member of the JWST Flight Science Working Group. Windhorst is involved in planning the JWST science performance, and in critical oversights of its entire design and construction phase.

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Prof. Yan is an observational astronomer who has a broad interest in galaxy formation and evolution, and is an active user of a variety of ground-based and space-based telescopes and their archives. Currently his interests largely focus on three subjects: (1) searching for and understanding galaxies in the early universe when it was only less than ~ 1 billion years after the Big Bang (or in other words, ~ 13 billion years ago), (2) investigating the mass assembly history of galaxies over cosmic time, and (3) understanding the dust-embedded star formation processes in galaxies near and far. He is part of the Webb Medium-Deep Survey (WMDF), a JWST GTO program. In the past, he led "Hubble Infrared Pure Parallel Imaging Extragalactic Survey” (HIPPIES), which used the data obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope. He was also deeply involved in a number of other space-based survey programs, such as the “Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey” (GOODS) and the “Spitzer Extended Deep Survey” (SEDS), and most recently the “Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey” (CANDELS).

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