Alessandro Parente obtained his Master's Degree in Chemical Engineering at the Università di Pisa in 2005. He then carried out a PhD at the same University in collaboration with the University of Utah, where he served as a Research Associate from 2007 to 2009. In 2009, he started working at the von Karman Institute of Fluid Dynamics. In 2010, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Aero-Thermo-Mechanical Department of Université Libre de Bruxelles. Since 2019, he has been Professor at the same Institution. In January 2015, he founded the BURN joint research group on combustion and robust optimisation. He is currently the co-director of BRITE, the Brussels Institute for thermal-fluid systems and clean energy. Dr Parente's research interests have been in turbulent/chemistry interaction in turbulent combustion, reduced-order models, non-conventional fuels and pollutant formation in combustion systems, novel combustion technologies, numerical simulation of atmospheric boundary layer flows, and validation and uncertainty quantification. 

Hong G. Im received his B.S. and M.S. in from Seoul National University, and Ph.D. from Princeton University.  After postdoctoral researcher appointments at the Center for Turbulence Research, Stanford University, and at the Combustion Research Facility, Sandia National Laboratories, he held assistant/associate/full professor positions at the University of Michigan. He joined KAUST in 2013 as a Professor of Mechanical Engineering. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award and SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award, and has been inducted as an International Member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea, a Fellow of the Combustion Institute and American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and an Associate Fellow of American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). He has also served as an Associate Editor for the Proceedings of the Combustion Institute, and currently on the Editorial Board for Energy and AI. Professor Im’s research and teaching interests are primarily fundamental and practical aspects of combustion and power generation devices using high-fidelity computational modeling. Current research activities include direct numerical simulation of turbulent combustion at extreme conditions, large eddy simulations of turbulent flames at high pressure, combustion of hydrogen and e-fuels, spray and combustion modeling in advanced internal combustion engines, advanced models for pollutant formation, and plasma-assisted combustion, and cryogenic carbon capture.

Deanna Lacoste is an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the Clean Combustion Research Center (CCRC) of the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). She obtained her MS, Ph.D. and Habilitation from the University of Poitiers – ENSMA, in France. From 2003 to 2014, she has been a post-doctoral fellow and a CNRS research engineer at the EM2C Laboratory, Ecole Centrale Paris, in France. In 2014, she joined the CCRC as a research scientist and in 2016, she became an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. In 2021, she was promoted to associate professor. Professor Lacoste’s research focus on plasma-assisted combustion, detonations, control of flame dynamics and development of dedicated optical diagnostics.