Professor Leon Chua is widely recognised as the father of nonlinear circuit theory and cellular neural networks (CNN) and is the inventor of the memristor theory. He received his MS and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Illinois at Champaign - Urbana. Since 1970, he has been at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is currently a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences.

He was the first recipient of the IEEE Gustav Robert Kirchhoff Award in 2005 and was awarded the IEEE Neural Networks Pioneer Award in 2000. Elected an IEEE Fellow in 1974, he has received many international prizes, including the IEEE Browder J. Thompson Memorial Prize, the IEEE W. R. G. Baker Prize, the Frederick Emmons Award, the M. E. Van Valkenhurg Award (twice), and the 2005 Francqui Award from Belgium. He has been awarded seven USA patents and 12 Honourary doctorates from universities in Europe and Japan.He was elected a foreign member of the European Academy of Sciences and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In 2010, he was awarded a John Guggenheim Fellow and The Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship and in 2011 he was awarded a Royal Academy of Engineering Distinguished Visiting Fellowship with Dr Prodromakis hosting him at Imperial College London. Recently, he was awarded a prestigious Diamond Jubilee Visiting Fellowship with the University of Southampton to prolong synergies with Dr Prodromakis' research team.

Neil Alford received his BSc from St Andrews University and spent three years working in SE Asia and S America in the Oil Exploration Industry. He returned to the UK to carry out his PhD at Queen Mary College in the area of fracture mechanics of cement mortars. He carried out post doctoral work at Oxford University in collaboration with ICI developing high strength cement. He joined ICI Corporate Laboratory in 1981 and was involved with projects concerning macro defect free cement, viscous processing of ceramics and the properties of perovskite ceramics, specifically High Temperature Superconductors (HTS).  The application of HTS to microwave devices was a major area and part of this activity has been now transferred to industry for cellular communications. 

He joined London South Bank University in 1994 and developed HTS Magnetic resonance receive coils, microwave dielectrics, novel signal transformers and ferroelectric thin films. Recent work on microwave dielectric materials has resulted in the development of ultra low loss alumina resonators and an understanding of the defect chemistry of TiO2 which has allowed the production of very high Q and high dielectric constant materials. This technology has been patented and transferred to industry. His current research is targeted towards Energy Materials and he currently leads an EPSRC Programme Grant in Energy Materials. This is closely linked to the nanotechnology effort at Imperial College.

In 2011  he and colleagues Mark Oxborrow and Jon Breeze discovered that a Bragg resonator with sapphire plates of aperiodic thickness could achieve an extraordinarily high Q factor for the resonator. This led them to the discovery that it was possible to construct a MASER operating at room temperature and in the earth''''s magnetic field. This research was published in Nature doi:10.1038/nature11339.  

Technology transfer is a key component of the work undertaken by his group and collaborations with industry are encouraged and actively pursued. In January 2007 he and his research group moved to Imperial College. In 2008 he was awarded the Griffith Prize and Medal. He is currently Head of the Department of Materials and Deputy Principal (Research) in the Faculty of Engineering.

Prof. Nicholas Harrison (FRSC, FinstP) is a British physicist, Professor of Computational Materials Science at Imperial College London. His work is concerned principally with the use of quantum mechanics to predict the properties of materials at the nanoscale.

He received his first degree from Birmingham University and performed the research that lead to his PhD within the Theory and Computational Science department at Daresbury Laboratory. In 1993 he was a visiting scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington State USA returning to Daresbury as head of the Computational Materials Science Group in 1994.

In 2000 he became the Professor of Computational Materials Science at Imperial College London. He was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 2004 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2008. He is head of the Energy Programme of the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council.

Giacomo is an engineer by training, but have always been interested also in physics, computer science, and neuroscience. He combines these disciplines by studying real and artificial neural processing systems, and by building hardware neuromorphic cognitive systems, using full custom analog and digital VLSI technology.

The neuromorphic cognitive systems developed within Giacomo's group are aimed at bridging the gap from simple reactive sensory-motor systems to ones that can learn and reason about the actions to take, in response to the combinations of external stimuli, internal states, and behavioral objectives.

These are typically real-time behaving systems comprising multi-chip, multi-purpose spiking neural architectures. They are used to validate brain inspired computational paradigms in real-world scenarios, and to develop a new generation of fault-tolerant event-based computing technologies.These are typically real-time behaving systems comprising multi-chip, multi-purpose spiking neural architectures. They are used to validate brain inspired computational paradigms in real-world scenarios, and to develop a new generation of fault-tolerant event-based computing technologies.

Prof Eleni Vasilaki is Professor of Computational Neuroscience & Neural Engineering, and head of the Machine Learning group at the University of Sheffield. She is also the Director of Research and Innovation of her department. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Sussex, partially funded by EPSRC. She has held previous post-doctoral appointments in the group of Prof. W. Senn at the University of Bern and in the world-leading group of Prof. W. Gerstner at EPFL, Switzerland.

Vasilaki’s research focuses on understanding how learning occurs in biological systems and on exploiting this information in building artificial adaptive systems. Vasilaki studies learning mechanisms when little or no specific instructions of how to achieve the goal are available, known as Unsupervised and Reinforcement Learning. She investigates how such mechanisms can be supported by brain (neuron) functions rather than abstract mathematical frameworks. This type of modelling can inspire analogue hardware design techniques, since specific constraints (such as sensory noise, resolution and energy consumption) are shared by biology and other media, for instance VLSI silicon-based electronics.

Ali is a Senior Experimental Officer within the Zepler Institute, Southampton Nanofabrication Centre at the University of Southampton. Previously he was Research Associate within the Centre for Bio-inspired Technology at Imperial College London (UK). He has also worked at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) in the different projects related to micro-actuators, micro-sensors and Carbon Nanotubes nano-switches.

He holds a diploma in microfabrication from DIMES. He obtained PhD from Compiegne University of Technology (France) in advanced mechanics and applications, where he developed a fibre optic sensor. During his PhD, he was a Research Visitor at Braunschweig University of Technology (Germany); he worked mainly in the cleanroom. Ali's current main research interests are: micro-/nano-fabrication, optimisation, metrology and characterization of memristors and memristive devices.

Daniela is a Research Fellow, within the Nano Research Group of the Electronics and Computer Science School at the University of Southampton. She received her PhD in Chemistry at the University of Kent, Canterbury, working on functional materials for biomedical applications. Since completing her PhD, she has worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cagliari, Italy on synthesis and characterization of several metals/alloys and functional oxide nanoparticles dispersed in either an aerogel silica matrix or a 3D mesostrucured templated silica matrix.

Daniela has extensive experience on advanced structural characterization at the atomic- and nano-scale level of nanostructured solids and amorphous materials using a broad range of complementary techniques including Electron Microscopy, X-ray diffraction, X-ray absorption Spectroscopy, High Energy X-ray Scattering and Small Angle X-Ray Scattering at synchrotron radiation facilities.

Spyros Stathopoulos was born in Athens in 1987. He obtained his Applied Physics diploma in 2009 and his MSc in Microelectronics and Nanotechnology in 2011, both from the National Technical University of Athens. In 2015 he received his PhD from the same institution for his work on the effects of infrared laser annealing in the electrical characteristics of silicon and germanium. As of 2016 he is with the Zepler Institute, University of Southampton, UK working on the development and characterisation and memristive devices. His main research interests are synthesis, characterisation and applications of nanoparticles and thin films for the realization of novel devices and also modelling and applications of CW infrared laser radiation for the thermal treatment and electrical activation of semiconductors and devices.

Alexander is a biomedical engineer by training with research interests spanning electronics design, neuromorphic engineering and neuroscience. He has received his MEng and PhD degrees from Imperial college in London, the latter funded by the EPSRC.

His work is centred around studying how memristors can be used in the creation of chiefly bio-inspired circuits. The aim is to ultimately create machines that depart from the Von Neumann principles of operation and use brain-like computational strategies: massive parallelism, reliable computation with large numbers of inherently unreliable elements, associativity etc. as well as exhibit learning.

Maria has a Material Science background with an interest in Nanomaterials and more precisely in metal oxide thin-films. During the past years she utilised mostly wet chemical growth methods as the previous projects were related to thin-films for field emission displays, gas separation and gas sensing mediums. Her PhD research project leverages her previous work and is focused to functional oxides for memristor applications.

Isha is a PhD student within the Nano Research Group of Electronics & Computer Science School at University of Southampton. She received her MSc, NanoElectronics (2012) from University of Manchester, UK in which she worked on Transparent Thin-Film Transistors Based upon Tin-Oxide & IGZO.

She received her B.Tech, Electronics & Telecommunications Engineering (2011) from University of Pune, India. During her Engineering she was awarded Business Management Certificate (2010-11) from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. She worked as a Research Assistant in Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore focusing on Organic Thin Film Transistors.

The aim of her PhD is to develop novel bio-Inspired nano-sensors using memristors.

Georgios Papandroulidakis received his M.Eng. and M.Sc. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) from Democritus Univ. of Thrace (DUTh), Greece. He is currently a Ph.D student at the Zepler Institute of Univ. of Southampton. His thesis emphasis is on design of novel reconfigurable and hybrid nano-electronic computer architectures comprising memristive/MOS circuits and systems. His research interests include areas such as unconventional computing, processor-in-memory architectures and memory and in-memory post von-Neumann memristive computing.