Dr. Prasant Mohapatra is serving as the Vice Chancellor for Research at University of California, Davis. He is also a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Computer Science and served as the Dean and Vice-Provost of Graduate Studies during 2016-18. He was the Department Chair of Computer Science during 2007-13. In the past, Dr. Mohapatra has also held Visiting Scientist positions at Intel Corporation, Panasonic Technologies, Institute of Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, and National ICT Australia (NICTA).
Dr. Mohapatra received his doctoral degree from Penn State University in 1993, and received an Outstanding Engineering Alumni Award in 2008. He is also the recipient of Distinguished Alumnus Award from the National Institute of Technology, Rourkela, India. Dr. Mohapatra received an Outstanding Research Faculty Award from the College of Engineering at the University of California, Davis. He received the HP Labs Innovation awards in 2011, 2012, and 2013. He is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of AAAS. Dr. Mohapatra's research interests are in the areas of wireless networks, mobile communications, cybersecurity, and Internet protocols. He has published more than 400 papers in reputed conferences and journals on these topics. Dr. Mohapatra's research has been funded through grants from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Defense, US Army Research Labs, Intel Corporation, Siemens, Panasonic Technologies, Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, and EMC Corporation.

Gwénaël Rapenne was born in the “three borders region”, Belfort (France). He studied chemistry at Université Louis Pasteur, Strasbourg including one exchange semester at University of Cambridge (UK), after which he completed his Ph.D. work with Dr. Jean-Pierre Sauvage Nobel Prize (2016) on double helices and molecular knots (1998). He then spent a year working on Fullerenes with Prof. François Diederich at ETH Zürich (Switzerland) as a Lavoisier postdoctoral fellow. In 1999, Dr. Rapenne joined the University Paul Sabatier (UPS) in Toulouse (France) as an Assistant Professor and obtained his Habilitation in 2006 (Associate Professor). In 2011, he was promoted to Full Professor, first class in 2015 and Distinguished Professor in 2019.
At the origin of an active and balanced exchange program between UPS and NAIST from 2008 and involved in an International Collaborative Laboratory UPS-NAIST from 2014, he accepted in 2018 a Professor position in NAIST in the frame of a crossed-position with UPS Toulouse. From that time he shares his time between his lab at CEMES (UPS) and at NAIST. Rapenne is known for his achievements in the design, synthesis and studies on molecular machines and motors studied at the single-molecular level. His research expertise ranges from multistep organic synthesis including polyaromatic compounds, fullerene functionalization and coordination chemistry to the complete set of classical characterization methods of molecular chemistry. He is the author of 95 papers in international peer-reviewed journals (h 32, >2600 citations).