Academic Council :

Professor Edgardo D. Carosella received the Blaise Pascal 2009 in Medicine in recognition of his outstanding work on foetal tolerance during pregnancy. His remarkable discovery has totally changed our understanding of foetal tolerance during pregnancy. He was the first to formally find the answer to the age-old question of why a mother tolerates her semi-allogenic foetus, which bears powerful paternal MHC antigens.
Professor Carosella was the pioneer who demonstrated the protective role of HLA-G molecule on trophoblasts which form a shield protecting the foetus from the immune reaction of its mother and subsequent reject. Thus the pregnancy can continue developing. He has since then described the immunological mechanisms and therapeutic applications of this molecule, of which he is the undisputed international leader. His studies on HLA-G molecule have introduced the concept of an HLA tolerance molecule in the heart of the MHC complex of antigens, previously considered solely as antigens of immune defence and rejection. His discovery will provide a considerable advance in the treatment of pregnancies, organ transplantation and in the immunotherapy of cancer.

Philippe G. Ciarlet was Professor at the University Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris) till 2002, and Head of Laboratory of Numerical Analysis in the same University.
Among other positions, he was also Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris).
Since 2002 he is Chair Professor at the City University of Hong-Kong.
He is member of Academia Europaea, French Academy of Sciences, and various national and international Academies. He received many distinctions (Poncelet Prize, Grand Prize [Prix Jaffe], Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, French Legion of Honor, etc )and is Doctor Honoris Causa of several Universities.

Dr. Emmanuel E. Gdoutos is Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and Director of the Laboratory of Applied Mechanics at the Democritus University of Thrace, Greece, and Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University. He is editor-in-chief of "Strain - An International Journal for Experimental Mechanics," and President of the European Structural Integrity Society (ESIS), and the Greek Group of Fracture. He served as Chairman of the European Association for Experimental Mechanics (EURASEM). He is Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens, the most prestigious academic institute in Greece, member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Member of Academia Europaea, Foreign Member of the Russian Academy of Engineering, Fellow of the Society of Experimental Mechanics (SEM), the American Academy of Mechanics (AAM), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS), and Honorary Member of the Italian Group of Fracture. He received the award of merit from the European Structural Integrity Society and the Theocaris and Lazan awards from the Society of Experimental Mechanics of USA. He received M.S. and Ph.D. from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece.

Michael Griebel was born in Augsburg, Germany, in 1960. He studied Computer Science at the Technische Universität München where he received his Diplom in 1985, the Dr. rer. nat. in 1989 and the Habilitation in 1993. Since then he is a full Professor for Numerical Simulation at the University of Bonn. He was a Visiting Professor at the University of California at San Diego, at the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics of the University of California, Los Angeles, USA, at the University Paris VII Diderot, France, and at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He also was an International Fellow of the Australian Research Council (ARCIF). He is presently the Director of the Institute for Numerical Simulation at the University of Bonn and the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Algorithms and Scientific Computing (SCAI) in St. Augustin. Furthermore, he is the Speaker of the Collaborative Research Center SFB611 “Singular phenomena and scaling in mathematical models” and a member of Hausdorff Center for Mathematics (Cluster of Excellence) at the University of Bonn where he heads the research area J on “High-dimensional problems and multi-scale methods“. Michael Griebel works on the fast numerical solution of partial differential equations discretization techniques, multigrid- and multilevel methods, high-dimensional problems, the parallelization of numerical algorithms, high performance computing, visualization, numerical methods for data analysis and data mining, fluid flow simulations (CFD), and molecular dynamics simulations (MD), with applications in the Engineering Sciences. He is the author of seven books and more than 150 articles in international journals, series- and conference-proceedings and he serves on the editorial board of Springer′s “Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering” and “Texts in Computational Science and Engineering”. Furthermore, he edited nine books in the area of the Computational Sciences and he is the managing editor of the journal “Numerische Mathematik”. Details can be found on his web page http://wissrech.ins.uni-bonn.de

Prof. S.E.Jorgensen works in the fields of ecological modeling, management of ecosystems, ecosystem theory, ecological engineering and ecological thermodynamics. He is one of the few multidisciplinary researchers that has understood how to integrate several disciplines to solve ecological and environmental problems. Sven Erik Jørgensen has been able to integrate ecology (particularly systems ecology), with management and technological issues (ecological engineering) and thermodynamics and has developed ecological models as an integration tool.

Gianfranco Pacchioni (born 1954) received his PhD at the Freie Universität Berlin in 1984. He worked at the IBM Almaden Research Center, at the Technical University of Munich, and at the University of Milano. Since 2000 he is Full Professor at the University of Milano Bicocca where he has been Director of the Department of Materials Science (2003-2009). He received various awards including the Humbold Preis in 2005. He has published about 400 papers with nearly 12000 citations (h-index 61). His main interest is the electronic structure of oxides and their surfaces and interfaces, defects in oxides, and supported metal clusters.

In a career spanning over 40 years, in over 1050 publications and patents, and four books, Professor Herbert W. Roesky has established himself as one of the world's leaders in synthetic inorganic chemistry. He belongs to the generation of chemists who, in a very real sense, invented modern main-group organometallic chemistry over the last four decades with unusual and sustained creativity and originality. By his contribution to science, inorganic, organometallic and fluorine chemistry in particular he has influenced as nobody else the development of Inorganic Chemistry all over the world. Even as an emeritus professor he is involved very actively in research, and the quality of this work is always evidenced in the most esteemed international chemical journals. Besides his encompassing research his special concern is focused on promoting students and youngster’s interest in chemistry, which is supported by several books and a large number of public lectures with fascinating experiments. Besides his numerous honorary doctorates he was awarded with the Leibniz Prize, the Grand Prix de la Maison de la Chimie, the Inorganic Award and the Fluorine Award of the American Chemical Society. He is member of many Academies, to mention only a few: l’Académie Française des Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Romanian Academy of Sciences, the Argentinian Academy of Sciences.