Prof. Giulio Cerullo, Politecnico di Milano, giulio.cerullo@polimi.it

Giulio Cerullo is a Full Professor with the Physics Department, Politecnico di Milano, where he leads the Ultrafast Optical Spectroscopy laboratory, and currently a Miller Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley. Prof. Cerullo’s research activity concerns on the one hand pushing our capabilities to generate and manipulate ultrashort light pulses, and on the other hand using such pulses to capture the dynamics of ultrafast events in molecular and solid-state systems. He has published over 550 papers which have received >38000 citations (H-index: 96 on Scopus). He is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America, of the European Physical Society, of the Accademia dei Lincei and of Academia Europaea and past Chair of the Quantum Electronics and Optics Division of the European Physical Society. He has been General Chair of the conferences CLEO/Europe 2017, Ultrafast Phenomena 2018 and the International Conference on Raman Spectroscopy 2024. He was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant in 2012 and an ERC Synergy Grant in 2025. In 2023, he received the Quantum Electronics Prize of the European Physical Society. He is the co-founder of two spin off companies (NIREOS and Cambridge Raman Imaging).

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Prof. Simone Cialdi, Università di Milano, simone.cialdi@unimi.it

Simone Cialdi obtained his degree in Physics from the University of Pisa in 1997 and his PhD in Physics from the University of Milan in 2001. He has been Associate Professor at the Department of Physics of the University of Milan since 2019. He is the lecturer of the Master’s degree courses Laser Physics Laboratory, Quantum Optics Laboratory, and Nonlinear Optics and Quantum Photonics. His research activity spans experimental quantum optics, nonlinear optics, laser systems, squeezed states of light and integrated quantum photonics. He established advanced laboratories for quantum optics and laser physics at the University of Milan and LASA. He is currently the principal investigator of the INFN project T4QC, focused on the development of a loop-based optical quantum computer.

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Prof. Matteo Clerici, Università dell’Insubria, matteo.clerici@uninsubria.it

Matteo Clerici has been an Associate Professor at the University of Insubria in Como, Italy, since October 2023. There, he co-leads the Quantum and Ultrafast Photonics group and is the founder and Director of the Como Lake Institute of Photonics. Previously, he was Professor of Photonics at the University of Glasgow, where he founded the Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics group in 2015 and subsequently led it. His research focuses on ultrafast nonlinear optics, terahertz photonics, and infrared quantum technologies, encompassing fundamental light–matter interactions and the development of novel sources, detectors, and spectroscopic techniques. He has published over 80 peer-reviewed papers and is the inventor of three granted patents. In 2025, he was elected a Fellow of Optica for pioneering experiments in ultrafast and quantum optics in the infrared spectral region. He is a Senior Member of URSI, a Topical Editor of *Optics Letters*, and has served as Program Chair and General Chair of the Integrated Photonics Research conference.

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Prof. Alfred Leitenstorfer, University of Konstanz, Germany, alfred.leitenstorfer@uni-konstanz.de

Alfred Leitenstorfer obtained his PhD in Physics from Technical University of Munich in 1996. Subsequently, he worked as a Postdoctoral Member of the Technical Staff at Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, NJ. After returning to TUM in 1998, he received his Habilitation degree in Experimental Physics in 2000. From 2001 to 2002, he held a non-tenured position as an Associate Professor at LMU Munich. In 2003, Leitenstorfer was appointed Full Professor of Experimental Physics at University of Konstanz where he also heads the Center for Applied Photonics since 2004. He received the Rudolf Kaiser and Arnold Sommerfeld Prizes in 2000, the Ludwig Genzel Prize in 2010, the Kenneth J Button Prize in 2020 and the DPG Technology Transfer Award in 2023. In 2011, Alfred Leitenstorfer was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant and since 2013, he is a Fellow of the Optical Society (now Optica). His research interests comprise femtosecond technology and optical phase control, ultrafast phenomena in condensed matter as well as fundamental quantum physics at elementary scales of time and space.