Frédéric Demoly is a Full Professor and Director of a CNRS department in the ICB Institute, Belfort-Montbeliard University of Technology (UTBM). His current research mainly focuses on computational intelligence-driven design for assembly, multi-material additive manufacturing, and 4D printing. As principal investigator, he leads multiple research projects, including the CNRS pre-maturation GenIsis on hybrid 4D printing technology, ANR VOXWRITE which develops a new voxel-based writing technique, and PEPR DIADEM ARTEMIS focused on the exploration and discovery of smart material composition and arrangement. In 2023, he was awarded an innovation chair at the Institut Universitaire de France (IUF) for this pioneering work in design for 4D printing. More recently, he founded TRANS4M, a French research network supported by CNRS and dedicated to smart materials and transformable structures through 4D printing.

Prof. Hidemitsu Furukawa is a leading researcher in soft matter engineering and 4D printing. He is currently Professor and Head of the Soft & Wet Matter Engineering Laboratory at Yamagata University, where he also serves as Special Adviser to the Executive Directors and Special Assistant to the Dean for Research. With a background in polymer physics, his research spans gel materials, soft robotics, and sustainable digital manufacturing.

Prof. Furukawa leads several national R&D initiatives, including the Moonshot Agriculture Research Project, the NEDO Leading Research Program / Material & Bio Innovation, and the SIP (Strategic Innovation Promotion Program) Virtual Economy Project. He is also the founder and president of the Soft 3D Co-Creation Consortium, which promotes academic–industry collaboration in emerging technologies. His mission is to realise a sustainable future through co-creative, intelligent, and responsive soft material technologies.

Dr. Howon Lee is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Seoul National University (SNU). He received his BS and MS from SNU, and PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, all in mechanical engineering. He then held a Battelle/MIT Postdoc Fellow position at MIT from 2012 to 2013. Before joining SNU in 2021, he was an assistant professor at Rutgers University – New Brunswick. He was awarded the Battelle/MIT Postdoctoral Associate Fellowship (2012), the ASME Haythornthwaite Young Investigator Award (2016), the World Congress Micro and Nano Manufacturing Best Paper Award (2018), and Materials Horizons Outstanding Paper Award (2019).

Dr. Ge Qi is a tenured full professor, and associate department head for research at Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech), Shenzhen, China. He severs as the director of Shenzhen Key Laboratory for Additive Manufacturing of High-Performance Materials, as well as editors of International Journal of Extreme Manufacturing, Microsystems & Nanoengineering. Before joining SUSTech, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an Assistant Professor from Singapore University of Technology and Design. Dr. Qi Ge’s research interests include 4D printing and its applications to soft robotics and flexible electronics. He has published more than 100 research papers including the high impact papers published in the top journals such as Science Advances, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials. Among them, 17 papers are ESI highly cited papers. Dr. Ge’s Google Scholar Citation is more than 14000 times, and he is recognized as Elsevier Most Cited Chinese Researcher.

Dr. H. Jerry Qi is the Woodruff Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology and is the site director of NSF IUCRC on Science of Heterogeneous Additive Printing of 3D Materials (SHAP3D). He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Tsinghua University and a ScD degree from MIT. After one-year postdoc at MIT, he joined University of Colorado Boulder in 2004 and moved to Georgia Tech in 2014.

Dr. Qi’s research is in the broad field of nonlinear mechanics of polymeric materials and focuses on developing fundamental understanding of multi-field properties of soft active materials through experimentation and constitutive modeling then applying these understandings to application designs. He has been working on a range of soft active materials, including shape memory polymers, light activated polymers, covalent adaptable network polymers. In the past decade, he has been working on integrating active materials with 3D/4D printing. He is a recipient of NSF CAREER award (2007), Sigma Xi Best Faculty Paper Award (2018), Gerhard Kanig Lecture by the Berlin-Brandenburg Association for Polymer Research (2019), the James R. Rice Medal from Society of Engineering Science (2023), the T. H. H. Pian Award from International Conference on Computational & Experimental Engineering and Sciences (2024), and the ASME Warner T. Koiter Medal (2024). He was listed as one of the highly cited researchers by Clarivate in 2024.

Carlos Sánchez-Somolinos, PhD in Physics from the University of Zaragoza, Spain, completed a postdoc at Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands, working on photopolymers for display applications. Currently, he is a Research Scientist at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), where he heads the Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory. His expertise and current scientific objectives are focused on developing materials and their processing through advanced manufacturing techniques in the pursuit of surfaces or functional systems of interest in optics, biomedicine, and soft robotics. In this last field, he has developed innovative material preparation methodologies, among which stands out the 4D printing of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs), a pioneering technique that introduces smart character into 3D-printed structures, programming the material's response to external stimuli through additive manufacturing. Related to this development, he has been the coordinator of the H2020-FET-OPEN project PRIME, and the Network of Excellence H2020-MSCA-ITN STORM-BOTS in LCE soft robotics.

Dr. Dong Wang is a tenured Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He received his bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Zhejiang University in 2010 and his Ph.D. from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2015. He served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the National University of Singapore from 2014 to 2015, and at the Singapore University of Technology and Design from 2016 to 2018. From 2015 to 2016, he was a visiting scholar at the Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, USA. Dr. Wang’s research focuses on the structural design and 3D printing of soft robotics. He has published over 50 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals, including Science Advances, Nature Communications, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and Additive Manufacturing. His work was selected as an honorable mention for the 2024 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award. He serves as an Associate Editor for Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences and the Journal of Polymer Materials, and as a Guest Editor for Materials Today. He has also served as a session chair at international conferences, including ICIRA 2022, ICIRA 2023, and ICCES 2024 (Singapore).