Professor Manfred Bischoff

University of Stuttgart, Germany

Manfred Bischoff graduated in civil engineering at the University of Stuttgart in 1993 and obtained a doctoral degree at the Institute for Structural Mechanics at the same university under the supervision of Ekkehard Ramm in 1999. After a one-year stay as visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, he worked as vice chair at the Chair of Structural Analysis at the Technical  University of Munich. In 2005 he received his habilitation and the venia legendi in “Statik”. Since April 1, 2006, he is full professor and head of the Institute for Structural Mechanics at the University of Stuttgart. Since October 2021 he is also Vice Rector for Research at the same university and he is currently president of the German Association for Computational Mechanics. His scientific work comprises all fields of computational mechanics and non-linear structural mechanics, with focus on finite element technology, shell theory and dynamics. He has received a number of international awards, among them the IACM Young Investigator Award and the Fellow Award of IACM.

Professor Flyura Djurabekova

University of Helsinki, Finland

Professor Flyura Djurabekova focuses in the field of Materials in Extreme Environments. She is the Head of Materials Physics Division at the Department of Physics of the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is leading scientifically a computational material physics group of about 35 persons. The group is involved in development of multiscale modelling of various phenomena, including the machine-learning approaches to develop interatomic potentials and simulate diffusional processes.

She authored more than 250 publications, 6 review articles and 6 book chapters. The h-index is 34. She has graduated over 25 PhDs, and two members of her group became professors (one associate, one full professor). In 2026, she was awarded the title of Honorary Doctor of the University of Tartu, Estonia. She is one of the initiators of the successful series of international annual workshops “Mechanisms of Vacuum Arcing”. She is the international committee member in three major conferences in the field of radiation effects in materials, leading the international committee of one (Radiation Effects in Insulators). She is an editorial board member of two international journals.