Thijs van Kolfschoten (1952) is emeritus professor in mammalian palaeo- and archaeozoology and Quaternary biostratigraphy. He studied Geology and Biology and obtained his Ph.D. in Palaeontology at the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Utrecht (The Netherlands). After a research position at the Institute of Palaeontology, University of Bonn (Germany), he moved 1992 to the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University, where he retired in August 2018.Since October 2018, he has been, in addition, a Guest Professor at Shandong University in China.

Professor Robert (Bob) Wasson is a geomorphologist and Quaternarist with a PhD from Macquarie University, and postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Auckland and the Australian National University (ANU). He has held senior positions in Australia's SIRO, becoming the head of the Canberra Laboratory of the Division of Water Resources. At the ANU he was head of the Geography Department, Director of the Centre for Environmental and Resource Studies, and Dean of Science. At Charles Darwin University he was Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and International. He was a senior academic at the National University of Singapore in the Geography Department, Asia Research Institute, and Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy.

Malay Mukul is a Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, who obtained his PhD from the University of Rochester, NY, USA, for his work on the Cordilleran fold-thrust belt in North America. He has been working in the Himalaya for the last 25 years. His work in the Himalaya spans multiple space and time scales and integrates the disciplines of structural geology, tectonic geomorphology, neotectonics, and active tectonics, using digital topography, numerical modelling and GPS Geodesy. He has recently started applying insights from these studies to better understand Himalayan natural hazards from a process-oriented

Daniel Olago, a Rhodes Scholar, is Professor of Environmental Geoscience at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, where he has served as head of the Department of Earth and Climate Sciences and Director of the Institute for Climate Change and Adaptation. His research interests span the broad field of environmental geoscience - past, present, and future - including water, climate change, environment and human linkages. He has been involved in capacity-building activities on global environmental change for a diverse range of stakeholders at the grassroots, practice, management, and policy levels. He was a Lead Author for the most recent 6th IPCC Report, Africa Chapter, and the 4th report, Palaeoclimate Chapter.

Professor Michat Stowinski is a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at the Institute of Geography and Spatial Organization of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, where he leads the Department of Past Landscape Dynamics. He served as Deputy Director for Science from 2018 to 2022 and as Director of the Institute from 2022 until March 2026. His research explores how climate variability, human activity, and extreme events shape the structure, Functionality and resilience of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. By combining ecological and palaeecological approaches, he investigates how environmental systems respond to change, with particular attention to time lags,critical thresholds, internal feedbacks,and long-lasting ecological legacies.

Qiaomei Fu, Deputy Director and Senior Researcher at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. By developing innovative key paleogenomic technologies, she has enabled large-scale ancient DNA analyses and obtained the highest-quality Pleistocene proteins worldwide to date. She has led research on the interaction and environmental adaptation of modern and ancient humans in East Asia, achieving groundbreaking progress in the study of East Asian population evolution. By reconstructing the population evolutionary map of East Asia over the past 400,000 years, her innovative research has revealed new insights into human evolution, migration, and adaptation during the Quaternary period.