Dr Marie-Luise Wolff studied English and musicology in Germany, England and the USA, and obtained her doctorate from the University of Cologne. She began her career in industry in 1987 at Bayer AG in the corporate communications department. From there, she moved to Sony Germany, where she headed the marketing division.

In 1996, Dr Wolff joined VEBA AG, a predecessor company of E.ON AG, as Head of Corporate Communications. Between 2002 and 2006, she was responsible for corporate strategy at E.ON Sales & Trading GmbH in Munich. In 2006, she was appointed Managing Director of the newly founded E.ON sales company, E WIE EINFACH Strom und Gas GmbH. From October 2009 to June 2013, Dr Wolff was a member of the Executive Board of Mainova AG. She was responsible for energy procurement, trading and sales.

She served as Chair of the Executive Board of ENTEGA AG Darmstadt until the end of 2025. During her time at ENTEGA, she was active in numerous committees and associations – including as a board member of the German Association of Energy and Water Industries, as a member of the Board of Trustees of the German Academy for Language and Literature, as a member of the Members’ Representative Council of Gothaer Versicherungsbank VVaG, as Vice-President and Chair of the Committee for Environment and Energy at the Darmstadt Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and as a member of the Board of Trustees of the Schader Foundation.

Dr Kai Beckmann, born in Hanau in 1965, studied computer science at Darmstadt Technical University from 1984 to 1989 and completed his PhD in economics in 1998 whilst working full-time. Kai Beckmann began his career at Merck in 1998 as an IT systems consultant.

From 2007, Kai Beckmann served as Merck’s first CIO, heading up the Corporate Information Service department. As Chief Administration Officer, he was also responsible for the Group functions of Group Human Resources, Group Business Technology, Group Procurement, In-house Consulting, Site Operations and Merck Business Services, as well as Environment, Health, Security and Quality. From 2017 to 2026, he was in charge of the Electronics business division. Kai Beckmann has been a member of Merck’s Executive Board since 2011 and has served as its Chairman and Group CEO since May 2026.

In addition to his role at Merck, Kai Beckmann held several external positions. He had been a member of the Supervisory Board of Bundesdruckerei since 2016 and served as its Chairman from 2023 to May 2026. From 2017 to 2025, he was Vice-President of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA). In addition, he served as President of the Federal Association of Employers’ Organisations in the Chemical Industry (BAVC) from 2017 to 2024. Mr Beckmann is a member of the Senate of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech).

Professor Dr Martina Brockmeier served as President of the Leibniz Association until January 2026 and as Chair of the German Research Council from February 2017 to January 2020.

She is currently a senator of the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech) and has served, among other roles, as a member of the Academic Advisory Council at the University of Heidelberg (2020–2023), the Board of Trustees of the Einstein Foundation (2020–2022) and the GTAP Advisory Board at Purdue University (USA, 1999–2020). As Dean, she also headed the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at the University of Hohenheim (2012–2014).

Following her undergraduate studies and PhD (1993) at Justus Liebig University Giessen, she undertook research stays in the USA (Purdue University) and Australia (University of Adelaide) as part of a DFG postdoctoral fellowship, and completed her habilitation (2002). She holds a professorship in International Agricultural Trade and Global Food Economics at the University of Hohenheim.

Mirjam Bult-Spiering has been a State Councillor in the Advisory Division of the Council of State of the Netherlands since 1 September 2021. The Advisory Division of the Council of State is the independent adviser to the government and parliament on matters of legislation, governance and all matters on which it is required by law to be consulted, such as the budget memorandum. The House of Representatives also seeks the department's advice on draft legislation introduced by one or more members of parliament before it is debated in the House of Representatives. She is also a member of several supervisory boards, such as that of Utrecht University, and chair of the committee for the Regional Investment Fund MBO (DUS-I for the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science).

From 2015 to 2021, she was Vice-President of the University of Twente. Mirjam Bult-Spiering has also been a lecturer and training manager for public-private partnerships at the University of Twente, sector manager for education and science at KPMG, and secretary of the 3TU Federation, the collaboration between the technical universities of Delft, Eindhoven and Twente.

Prof. Dr. Detlef Günther is adjunct professor of Trace Element and Microanalysis at ETH Zurich and has been Vice-President for Research and Corporate Relations from 2015 to 2022.

His research focuses on instrument and method development for high-resolution trace element analysis and the determination of isotope ratios by laser ablation and inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.

His work is documented in ~ 400 research articles and has been awarded the Ruzicka Award (2002), the European Award for Plasma Spectrochemistry (2003), the Fresenius Award (2007), the Lester Strock Award (2007) and the Simon Widmer Award (2015). He was “Einstein Fellow” (2013-2015, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany) and received the “Thousand Talent Fellowship” (Wuhan University, China) in 2013. In 2014 he was elected member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.

Professor Dr Klara Nahrstedt has held the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Chair in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA) since 1995. She obtained her degree in mathematics from Humboldt University in Berlin in 1985. In 1995, she obtained her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania (USA) in the Department of Computer Science and Information Science. Since 2015, Klara Nahrstedt has been Director of the interdisciplinary research institute ‘Coordinated Science Laboratory’ (CSL) at the Grainger College of Engineering, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

From 2007 to 2013, she was chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Multimedia. She has served as vice-chair of numerous international conferences, including ACM Multimedia 2006, IEEE Percom (International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications) 2009, ACM/IEEE IOTDI (Conference on the Internet of Things, Design and Implementation) 2018 and 2019, and IEEE SmartGridComm 2020.

Her research interests include multimedia systems, tele-immersive 3D systems, end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) and resource management in large distributed systems and networks, as well as real-time security and privacy in cyber-physical systems such as the electricity grid. She is co-author of the widely used books ‘Multimedia: Computing, Communications and Applications’ (Prentice Hall) and ‘Multimedia Systems’ (Springer Verlag).

Klara Nahrstedt has received the IEEE Communications Society’s Leonard Abraham Award, a Humboldt Research Fellowship, the IEEE Computer Society Technical Achievement Award, the ACM SIGMM Technical Achievement Award, the Piloty Prize from TU Darmstadt, and the Grainger College of Engineering Drucker Award. She is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, an AAAS Fellow and a member of the German National Academy of Sciences (Leopoldina).

Mr Vinod Philip, born in Kerala, India, in 1974, has been a member of the Managing Board of Siemens Energy AG, a member of the Management Board of Siemens Energy Management GmbH and the sole director of Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, S.A.U. since summer 2024. He has held various management positions within the Siemens Group since 1998.

He holds a Master of Business Administration in General Management & International Business from Rollins College, Florida. Prior to that, he also completed a Master of Science in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Central Florida and a Bachelor of Technology in Materials Science and Metallurgical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai.

Dirk Pollert, born on 5 June 1968 in Detmold, has been Chief Executive of the Association of Hessian Business Organisations (VhU) and the Association of Metal and Electrical Companies in Hesse (HESSENMETALL) since early 2017.

After graduating from Hardtberg Gymnasium in Bonn in 1988, Dirk Pollert began studying law in 1988 at the Universities of Freiburg and Würzburg. After successfully passing the first state law examination in Würzburg in 1993 and the second state law examination in Potsdam in 1995, he began his professional career in 1996 as an in-house lawyer at the Middle Franconia office of the Association of the Bavarian Metal and Electrical Industry (vbm) in Nuremberg.

In October 1998, he took over as Head of Human Resources Policy at Mannesmann Sachs AG in Schweinfurt, where he was also appointed as an authorised signatory. He then moved to Nuremberg in March 2001 to take up the post of Managing Director for Middle Franconia at the Bavarian metal and electrical employers’ associations bayme and vbm, as well as at the Bavarian Industry Association. In May 2004, Pollert moved to Munich and became a member of the executive board and head of regional affairs and marketing for these Bavarian employers’ associations. Three months later, he was appointed deputy managing director.

His main professional activities are complemented by his voluntary work. Since 2011, Dirk Pollert has served as a lay judge at the Federal Labour Court and, since 2007, has been a member of the editorial advisory board of the HR magazine Arbeit und Arbeitsrecht. In addition, he has been Deputy Chairman of the Board of the Hessian Business Education Foundation since 2017 and a member of the Supervisory Board of Bürgschaftsbank Hessen since May 2018. There, he was elected Chairman of the Supervisory Board in July 2021. He has also been a member of the Advisory Board of Wirtschafts- und Infrastrukturbank Hessen since January 2017, a member of the Supervisory Board of Mittelständische Beteiligungsgesellschaft Hessen mbH, and, since January 2023, a member of the Assembly of the Medienanstalt Hessen.

Professor Dr. Ferdi Schüth was born in 1960 in Warstein. He studied chemistry and law at the Westfälische-Wilhelms-University in Münster. He graduated in chemistry in 1984 and received his doctorate in 1988. Until 1989 he worked as a postdoctoral researcher with L.D. Schmidt at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis (USA). In the same year he also passed the first state examination in law. After five years as a research assistant at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, including half a year (1993) at the University of California in Santa Barbara, Ferdi Schüth was appointed Professor of Inorganic Chemistry at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt in 1995. In 1998 he moved to the Max Planck Institute for Coal Research as Director. In 2014 he was appointed Vice President of the Max Planck Society.

In the course of his career, Ferdi Schüth has received various prestigious awards, such as the Stifterverband der Deutschen Wissenschaft prize, the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz-Prize of the DFG as well as the Wöhler, Hamburg Science and Technology and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker Prizes.

In addition, he is a member of various editorial advisory boards, editor of the journal Chemistry of Materials, board member of Dechema, and since 2012 member of the jury of the Deutscher Zukunftspreis, which he currently chairs. He is Professor h. c. at the Dalian University of Technology (China) and founder of the company hte AG (now part of BASF).

Ute Wellstein heads the regional politics department at Hessischer Rundfunk in Wiesbaden. She studied journalism, politics and public law at Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz.