Keynote Speakers

Roman Sobolewski is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Physics, and Materials Science, as well as a Senior Scientist of Laser Energetics at the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY, USA. He received his PhD and DSc (Habilitation) degrees in Physics from the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warszawa, Poland, in 1983 and 1992, respectively. In 2006, he was granted the State Professorship of the Republic of Poland. In 2015, he was named a Distinguished Fellow of the Kosciuszko Foundation Collegium of Eminent Scientists of Polish Origin and Ancestry. His current research interests are concentrated on ultrafast phenomena in condensed matter and novel nanostructured electronic and optoelectronic semiconductor and superconductor devices and materials.

Prof. Sam H.-Y. HSU is an Associate Professor at City University of Hong Kong. He obtained his PhD degree under supervision of Prof. Kirk S. SCHANZE at University of Florida. After that, he received the two-year appointments with Prof. Allen J. BARD and Prof. Edward T. YU at University of Texas at Austin in which he completed many outstanding multidisciplinary projects. The area of his expertise stretches from material design to new related disciplines involving material characterization and diverse applications, such as solar fuels, organic and inorganic photovoltaic cells, wastewater treatment and food waste management.

Prof. Zilberman holds an appointment of Full Professor at the Department of  Biomedical Engineering and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering of Tel Aviv University. Her research interests are polymeric biomaterials, active implants and scaffolds for tissue engineering, and drug- delivery systems. During 2015-2020 she served as the president of Israel Society for Medical and Biological Engineering (ISMBE). She published more than 120 articles in the top Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering and Polymers journals, invented over 30 patents, and delivered about 250 presentations (including invited talks keynote and plenary lectures).

Prof. Daoud is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at City University of Hong Kong. He graduated from the University of Technology Graz, Austria, with a Dipl-Ing degree (BS and MS) in Chemical Engineering and received his PhD in flexible bilayer photovoltaic cells from the University of Sheffield, UK. Prof. Daoud’s current research is mainly focused on the areas of energy harvesting and smart wearable technologies. His group is developing approaches for harvesting free or waste energy, such as light and kinetic energies. Being intermittent sources, it is equally important to find storage solutions for this form of energy. Therefore, the group is interested in the modelling and design of compatible batteries. He has received international renown and several awards for his pioneering research on wearable solar and kinetic energy harvesting technologies. His research has featured in Nature (2004) and Science (2008) and broadcasted through interviews by major international media, such as Reuters (2014), BBC (2015) SCMP (2017), Physics World (2021) and PV Magazine (2022). He has been invited to present Plenary and Keynote lectures at international conferences and is currently serving as the Chief Editor of Wearable Electronics, Frontiers in Electronics and Editorial/Advisory Board of Journal of Power Sources Advances and Industrial Chemistry & Materials.

Prof. Abbas Milani is Professor at the University of British Columbia, and a Tier 1 Principal’s Research Chair in Sustainable and Smart Manufacturing. His research focuses on modeling, simulation, and multi-criteria optimization of composite materials and their manufacturing processes using Industry 5.0 technologies. He is the Founding Director of the UBC Materials and Manufacturing Research Institute, Technical Director of the Composites Research Network, and Lead of the NSERC CREATE Immersive Technologies Program in Canada. To date, his research has resulted in over 500 publications, including 8 books. In 2020, Dr. Milani was inducted into the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists.

Diploma in Crystallography 1970, University of Bonn, Dr. rer. nat. 1974, University of Saarland, Habilitation 1980, University of Marburg, Professor of Mineralogy (Chair) 1985, University of Salzburg. Main research fields: Mössbauer spectroscopy, optical absorption spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, HT-synthesis, crystal chemistry of various silicates, phosphates, and oxides, mixed valence of transition metal compounds, solid-state battery materials.

Patrik Dobro? is an associate professor at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University in Prague. His research mainly focuses on understanding fundamental aspects of dislocation- and twinning-related plasticity in metals using advanced in-situ techniques. In particular, a combination of the acoustic emission (AE) technique offering information from the entire sample volume with a very high time and spatial resolution and electron microscopy observations or ultra-high-speed digital imaging is used with favor.

He works as an associate professor at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Ústí nad Labem, where, in addition to teaching Physics of Metals and Technical Physics and working with students, he is engaged in research and publishing activities. He has written several publications and university textbooks. He is the author of professional papers in scientific and professional journals and proceedings at home and abroad, and he also teaches classes for foreign students at the University. Also is author of several technical patents ativly applied into technical pactice. His research activities are focused on the analysis and preparation of micro- and nano-sized particles suitable for coating metal alloys and mechanical alloying.

Lia Krusin-Elbaum is a Professor of Physics at The City College of New York since 2010. Her Ph.D. degree is in Condensed Matter Physics (NYU, 1979) and she was a scientist at the IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, NY (1979-2010). Dr. Krusin-Elbaum is a recipient of ten IBM Invention Achievement Awards and holds over 27 US patents. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society (1993-) and was elected (2022) to serve on the USDOE Basic Energy Sciences Advisory Committee. She is a co-lead of the Columbia U. NSF-MRSEC PAQM (2020-) and of the NSF-CREST IDEALS Centers (2015-).

Dr. Wen Zhong is a Professor in the Department of Biosystems Engineering and the Department of Medical Microbiology at the University of Manitoba. She earned her Ph.D. from Donghua University in China and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of California, Davis. Her research focuses on functional biomaterials and high-performance hydrogels for applications in biomedical engineering, wound healing, biosensing, and sustainable environmental technologies. Dr. Wen Zhong has published her work in journals like Advanced Science, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, ACS Nano, and Biomaterials.

Dr. Xing is a Professor at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg. He specializes in hydrogels and nanomaterials for tissue engineering, bioadhesives, hemostasis, biofabrication, and implantable flexible biosensors. With over 200 publications in journals such as Nature Biomedical Engineering, Nature Communications, Science Advances, Advanced Materials, his work on superelastic hydrogels for myocardial infarction, burns, and tissue regeneration has received notable recognition, including features in Nature Reviews Cardiology, ACS headline news and the Royal Society of Chemistry. He developed a hydrophobic polymer entanglement system for bio-glues and hemostasis, highlighted by Matter, and proposed a bioglue combining adhesion and hemostatic functions, featured in Science and Nature Review Materials. His research on sustainable materials has been covered by Time, Fortune, CBC and CTV. Dr. Xing is an elected fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

Giuseppe Nenna received his Ph.D. in ‘New Technologies for Materials, Sensors and Imaging’ from Naples University “Federico II” in 2009. He is working as a senior researcher at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA). His activities are focused on Optics and Electronics, to study radiation-matter interaction, develop new optics elements and optoelectronic devices. He was involved in several Italian and European projects related to photonics, optoelectronic, sensors and photoresponsive materials. He participated in the creation of several patents based on optical instruments or optoelectronic systems.

Prof. Ma (FCIC, FRSC, FIAAM), Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) in Advanced Functional Nanocomposites, has been a prof. at INRS since 2006. Her group works on the development of nanomaterials for energy, environment and biomedical applications. She has co-authored >200 articles (H-index: 78) and delivered >170 invited speeches at conferences/universities/government laboratories. She is an associate editor of ACS Appl. Nano Mater. and also serves on multiple editorial boards. Her awards include election as Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada (2026), Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (UK, 2023), and Clara Benson Award from the Chemical Institute of Canada.

Dr. Roger Bresolí (35) is a Ramon y Cajal fellow at Institut Químic de Sarrià (IQS School of Engineering; Universitat Ramon Llull). He has published 49 peer-reviewed papers, 6 book chapters, and 1 patent, with an h-index of 20 (>1100 citations; 21 as corresponding author; WOS 24/11/2025). He has contributed to 46 national and international conferences and delivered over 10 invited talks. Roger has led or participated in 18 competitive projects (10 as PI, >€1.35M) and currently co-supervises 5 PhD theses.

Hendrik Heinz is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he bridges chemical, biological, and materials engineering. He explores how atoms build the world—simulating biomaterials and nanomaterials from the tiniest scales to the microscopic, with the help of advanced data science. As leader of the Interface force field project, he develops precise models for materials from minerals and alloys to proteins and polymers. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and the International Association of Advanced Materials, he has earned honors from NSF, NASA, and global societies, and shared his expertise as a visiting professor in Europe and Japan.