Dr. Jie Zhang, a distinguished physicist, has made significant contributions in the fields of high-energy-density physics and inertial confinement fusion. Because of these, he was elected academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003, academician of the German National Academy of Sciences in 2007, Fellow of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) in 2008, foreign member of the Royal Academy of Engineering in the United Kingdom in 2011 and foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States in 2012. In 2015, he was awarded the prestigious Edward Teller Medal, the most important international award in inertial confinement fusion and high-energy-density physics. In 2021, he was awarded the Future Science Prize in Physical Sciences.

Gérard Mourou received his PhD from Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1973. He and his student Donna Strickland co-invented chirped pulse amplification (CPA) technology and shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics. This technology made it possible to apply ultrafast lasers to many new areas, such as eye surgery, precision manufacturing, particle physics and nuclear fusion. Gérard Mourou is the founding Director of the Center for Ultrafast Optical Science (CUOS) at the University of Michigan and the initiator of the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) in Europe.

Vladimir Tikhonchuk, Professor Emeritus at Centre Lasers Intenses et Applications, University of Bordeaux, France, and senior researcher at the Extreme Light Infrastructure ERIC, ELI-Beamlines Facility, Czech Republic. His research is in the domain of high energy density physics and nonlinear optics, including inertial confinement fusion (ICF), dynamic processes in laboratory astrophysics, laser–plasma interactions, excitation of parametric instabilities, generation of magnetic and electric fields, acceleration of charged particles and energy transport.