Martina Hirayama is Head of the State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) at the Swiss Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research. She studied Chemistry at the ETH Zurich, the University of Fribourg and Imperial College London, graduating from ETH Zurich with a doctorate in technical sciences (Dr. sc. Techn). She went on to do postgraduate studies in Business Economics at the ETH Zurich, and completed her thesis in 1997. She then worked in the ETH Zurich’s Department of Materials, becoming head of the Polymer Chemistry Group in 2001. During this time, Ms Hirayama co-founded a start-up in new coating technologies, and was CEO of the company until 2008. In 2003 she began lecturing in Industrial Chemistry at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences Winterthur ZHW (now ZHAW), where she developed and headed the field of polymer materials and obtained her professorship. From 2007 to 2010 she developed the ZHAW’s Institute of Materials and Process Engineering. From 2011 to 2018 she was Director of the ZHAW School of Engineering, a member of the university’s executive board and from 2014 head of International Affairs. From 2012 to 2018 Martina Hirayama was president of the board of the Federal Institute of Metrology METAS, from 2011 to 2018 vice president of the Innovation Promotion Agency Innosuisse board (until 2017 the Commission for Technology and Innovation) and from 2016 to 2018 a member of the Swiss National Science Foundation board. She was also on the boards and executive committees of several other organisations, namely the Swiss Study Foundation, the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences SATW, the Zurich Chamber of Commerce, and the Kuratorium of the Freiburger Materialforschungszentrum at the Albert-Ludwigs University in Freiburg (Germany). Moreover, she acted as an expert for the National Research Fund Luxembourg (FNR) and the European Commission.

Kamila Markram is the CEO and Co-Founder of Frontiers, with a vision to make research openly and widely available for the benefit of humanity. Kamila obtained a MSc in Psychology from the Technical University Berlin and completed her Master’s thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for Brain Research, Germany in 2003. She obtained an award-winning PhD degree in Neuroscience at EPFL, Switzerland. During her postdoctoral studies at the EPFL she co-developed the “Intense World Theory of Autism,” which proposes that autism results from a “super-brain” that perceives, absorbs, and feels too much – causing autistic people to withdraw from an overly intense world. The theory resonated beyond the research community, featuring in popular science magazines and documentaries, and published as a book, The boy who felt too much, in 2018. She was named a L’Hebdo Forum 100 personality, a finalist for the 2016 Ernst and Young Entrepreneur Award and the 2017 EU Prize for Women Innovators, and a Special Prize Winner at the Vaud International Business Awards in 2021.

Carlos Peres is from Belém, in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. He leads the Amazon Ecology and Conservation Research Group at the University of East Anglia (UK). His research with the non-profit conservation organisation Instituto Juruá has focused on how best to protect tropical floodplain and forest ecosystems in marginalised tropical regions with poor governance, while rewarding the local stakeholders who proverbially “hold the fort”. The aim of this “win-win” conservation-development programme is to demonstrate that it is possible to implement bottom-up initiatives that both protect virtually intact natural ecosystems in the Amazon and improve multiple dimensions of local livelihoods, including education, healthcare and access to markets, sustainable income, and information technology. He won the prestigious Frontiers Planet Prize 2023 of one million Swiss francs for his biodiversity research in the Amazon.

Marie-Laure Salles is the Director of the Geneva Graduate Institute since September 2020. Before joining the Institute, she was Dean of the School of Management and Innovation at Sciences Po Paris, a school she launched in 2016. Before that, she was a Professor at ESSEC Business School, where she was also, in turn Dean of the Faculty and Associate Dean for the PhD Programme. With a PhD in Sociology from Harvard University and a habilitation à diriger les recherches from Dauphine University in Paris, Marie-Laure Salles was, until her arrival in Geneva, Professor at the Centre de sociologie des organisations (CSO) at Sciences Po Paris. Her research interests range from the role of social networks in the transnational diffusion of rules, practices, and ideas to the historical transformation of capitalism and national institutions, with a particular interest in the evolving nature of the social responsibility of firms and the changing conditions of transnational dynamics of economic governance in the context of globalization. She has published broadly on those issues in top academic journals and books and has received several awards, including the prestigious Max Weber Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the American Sociological Association in 2000. Marie-Laure Salles has been a visiting professor in prestigious academic institutions in the United States and Europe. She holds a PhD honoris causa from Stockholm University and was made a Knight in the Legion of Honour by the French Government in 2017.

Benjamin Bollmann is CEO of Swissnex in Brazil since January 2025. He was previously CEO of Swissnex in Boston and New York, and Consul of Switzerland in Boston. He is the Chair of Swissnex’s CEO Committee, which coordinates strategic priorities across the global Swissnex network. Under his leadership, Swissnex has launched several long-term initiatives such as Project Quantum, Climate Collider, and more recently Swissnex for the Planet. Until 2020, Benjamin was Deputy CEO at Swissnex in San Francisco, where he led interdisciplinary programs ranging from science communication to humanitarian technologies and human rights in the digital age. Before joining Swissnex in 2015, he worked as a journalist and communications consultant at the interface of science and design in Switzerland. He is a graduate of ETH Zurich and has conducted research in neuroscience and artificial intelligence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.