Adhitya is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, specializing in Geo-information Processing. His research, in collaboration with The Center of Expertise in Big Geodata Science (CRIB), focuses on energy-efficiency on earth observation big data processing within cloud computing environmet. He holds an M.Sc. in Logistics Information Technology from Pusan National University, Korea (2013) with the focus on vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication. For the past 10 years, Adhitya has worked as a lecturer and researcher at the Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Brawijaya, Indonesia. His experience includes collaborating on national and international projects such as the Indonesia Matching Fund Project, Erasmus+ Micro-Credential, and NICT ASEAN IVO Project. Beyond his primary research, Adhitya has developed a keen interest in the intersection of cloud computing service orchestration and scientific big data processing, particularly in the geospatial domain.

Alessio Sclocco is a research software engineer at the Netherlands eScience Center, specializing in optimizing GPU applications for scientific research. He earned his PhD in computer science from VU University Amsterdam in 2017, with a thesis titled "Accelerating Radio Astronomy with Auto-tuning." Previously, he worked at ASTRON, where he developed AMBER, an optimized GPU pipeline for detecting radio astronomical transients. Since 2012, Alessio has been dedicated to fostering computational excellence through mentoring and teaching GPU programming, helping others achieve high performance in their code.

In my research I develop machine learning and language technology. Most of my work involves the intersection of the two fields: computers that learn to understand and generate natural language, nowadays known as Generative AI and Large Language Models. The computational models that this work produces have all kinds of applications in other areas of scholarly research as well as in society and industry. They also link in interesting ways to theories and developments in linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics. I love multidisciplinary collaborations to make advances in all these areas.

For the past 10 years I have been a visualization advisor at SURF. During my time at SURF, I came in touch with the many categories of visualization, through many educational and research fields. The one thing that stuck out to me the most and proved to be the most useful, was creating web-based 3D visualizations. Naturally, due to curiosity, interest from our members and my affinity to 3D content, XR grew to be a part of the work I do at SURF.

I’m a PhD candidate at the VIS Lab, supervised by Cees Snoek. I work on generalist multimodal foundation models as part of the Horizon Europe ELLIOT project. My research focuses on designing unified architectures that combine modalities into a shared space, aiming for models that generalize well, adapt efficiently, and assist meaningfully across a wide range of tasks.

Dr. Serkan Girgin is an Associate Professor in the Geo-information Processing Department at the Faculty of Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente. He has established and is currently leading ITC's Center of Expertise in Big Geodata Science (CRIB), a facility dedicated to advancing geospatial big data and cloud computing technologies by developing, collecting, and sharing operational expertise.

Dr. Girgin's current research focuses on big data and cloud computing tools and infrastructures, with a particular emphasis on optimizing the performance and energy efficiency of geocomputing workflows. He provides strategic advice and consultancy on adopting these technologies for education, research, and capacity-building initiatives. He is also an expert in industrial risk assessment, more specificially technological accidents triggered by natural disasters. Besides developing methodologies, he also designed and developed the European Commission’s Natech Database (eNatech), and the Rapid Natech Risk Assessment and Mapping System (RAPID-N).

In addition to his research, Dr. Girgin designs and develops tools and platforms that promote best practices in research software development and research data management, including fairly toolset, Open Data Explorer, and OpenSTAC. With over 30 years of experience in software development, his expertise spans geocomputing platforms, GIS and remote sensing applications, environmental information systems, and large-scale web applications.

Dr. Girgin is a member of the ESA DestinE Sounding Board in the Netherlands, an eScience Center Fellow, and was named the SURF Research Support Champion in the Netherlands.

https://linkedin.com/in/serkan-girgin

I am a PhD student at IRLab, Amsterdam. My research interests include representation learning and retrieval-augmented generation

Florence Draux obtained a PhD in molecular biophysics from University of Reims (France). Then she held research engineer position at University of Reims for 3 years. She then started a career in high school education for 12 years. In 2023, she joined University of Reims ROMEO Computer Center as a research engineer and she is responsible for industrial partnerships.

Assistant Professor at VU Amsterdam Department of Computer Science.

Frédéric Mauguière obtained a PhD in mathematical physics from University of Reims (France) in the field of molecular physics and dynamical systems. Then he held postdoctoral positions at University of Crete (Greece) and University of Bristol (UK) working on several aspects of transition state theory. After working for several companies in the private sector for a few years, he joined University of Reims ROMEO Computer Center in 2018 as a research engineer.

Gijs studied Theoretical Physics and Mathematics at Utrecht University. Thereafter, he did a PhD in Particle Physics at the Radboud University Nijmegen and Nikhef. Subsequently, he worked as a consultant in scientific software development on environmental models and hydrodynamical solvers at Deltares. Gijs joined the Netherlands eScience Center in 2016 and has primarily been involved in projects in weather, climate and hydrology. Gijs became head of the natural sciences & engineering section in 2024.a

Joost de Kleuver is a fourth-year PhD student in astrophysics at Radboud University in Nijmegen. Under the supervision of Heino Falcke, he uses theoretical methods to develop new ways of studying the rotation, or “spin,” of supermassive black holes in the context of the Event Horizon Telescope. One of his projects focuses on recovering black hole spin from the gravitationally lensed images of bright flares (hot spots) orbiting the black hole, using ray-tracing in curved spacetimes. Another line of research involves producing high-resolution, long-duration general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic (GRMHD) plasma simulations of black holes, enabling new insights into accretion physics, jet launching, and strong-field gravitational physics.

Maria Girone is Head of CERN openlab and Principal Applied Scientist at CERN’s IT department. She has been at the forefront of scientific computing for over two decades, driving how advanced computing enables the groundbreaking research carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

At CERN, Maria has led efforts to integrate High-Performance Computing (HPC), cloud, AI, and new data technologies into the workflows of one of the world’s most data-intensive scientific experiments. She played a central role in the development and operation of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). WLCG is the largest distributed computing infrastructure ever built for science, connecting hundreds of data centers worldwide to process petabytes of data from particle collisions.

As former Chief Technology Officer of CERN openlab (2016–2023) and now its Head, Maria has defined international R&D strategies and built strong collaborations with industry and academia to push the boundaries of computing architectures. Her work not only supports the current experiments but also prepares for the High-Luminosity LHC, which will demand unprecedented computing capacity.

A strong advocate for diversity in STEM, Maria also co-founded IDEAS4HPC, the Swiss chapter of Women in HPC.

Menno Genseberger studied mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam. PhD research at Utrecht University and CWI was on domain decomposition to enable HPC for large scale eigenvalue problems from plasma physics and oceanography.

He joined Deltares in 2002. First by developing simulation software for surface water. He gave also lead to a discipline numerical methods. Later focus shifted to coupled hydrodynamical and transport modelling for lakes. In 2010 he initiated a pilot on HPC for Deltares at SURF. The years that followed this resulted in several European projects in which Deltares and SURF collaborated on HPC for simulation software of surface water.

Owen received the master’s degree in 2021 from the Civil Engineering Faculty, Delft University of Technology, where he is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree in radar oceanography as part of the Geoscience and Remote Sensing department. From 2022 to 2023, he was with the Oceanography from Space Laboratory at Ifremer, Plouzané (France), to study air-sea interactions with spaceborne radars.

Paul Melis is senior visualization advisor in the High-Performance Computing & Visualization group at SURF, having worked at SURFsara and SARA since 2009. He supports HPC users with (data) visualization, providing software & documentation, courses and working on visualization projects.

Apart from an HPC focus he spends part of his time on XR innovation within SURF. His XR activities include keeping tracking of hardware, software and market developments, trend watching, coordinating the SURF XR Developer Network, providing technical input and giving XR demonstrations.

Zeila Zanolli is leading the “Quantum Materials by Design” group at the Chemistry Department/Debye Institute for Nanomaterials Science, Utrecht University. Previously (2018 – 2020) she was a Ramon y Cajal Fellow at ICN2, Barcelona (Spain), an excellence program of the Spanish Ministry for Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (MINECO). In 2016 – 2018, she leaded the Nanospintronics Group at the Physics Dept of RWTH Aachen University, funded by the DFG. In 2015 – 2012 she was Marie Curie Intra-European Fellow at Forschungszentrum Jülich (Germany).

Her research focus is on Quantum Materials, a class of materials in which quantum mechanical effects are visible at the macroscopic scale. They provide unprecedented opportunities to enable a new technology based on quantum effects, with impact on low-dissipation electronics, photovoltaics, quantum information and, in general, quantum engineering. Her major contribution are in developing and using first-principles theory and computational methods to investigate topological materials, superconductors, quantum transport, (magnetic) proximity interaction, and spectroscopy. Her group is core developer of the open source code SIESTA https://gitlab.com/siesta-project/

She serves in the Psi-k working group “Quantum materials driven by correlations, topology or spin", in the Steering Committee of the European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility (ETSF), and in the board of the “Semiconductor and Quantum Materials” session of the European Physical Society. Since 2019 Dr. Zanolli serves in the Editorial College of SciPost Physics, a Diamond Open Access publication portal. In 2018-20, Dr. Zanolli served in the Executive Committee of the MaX (MAterials design at the eXascale) European Centre of Excellence which enables materials modelling, simulations, discovery and design at the frontiers of the current and future High Performance Computing (HPC), High Throughput Computing (HTC) and data analytics technologies. In 2017 she has been elected Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe (YAE), a pan-European network of scientists active in science policy, where she served as a board member and treasurer in 2028-22.

Rob & Emiel are renowned for delivering high-impact performances at corporate events, combining years of experience with an unmatched track record. As the most awarded magic duo in the Netherlands, they have won 14 national gold medals and uniquely claimed the prestigious Grand Prix three times. Internationally, they earned podium places at multiple World Championships and were crowned world’s best mentalists in China. With performances in over 15 countries and appearances in more than 100 television episodes like Op1, HLF8, Barend & van Dorp, Jensen, Life & Cooking, De Wereld Draait Door en Pauw & Witteman. They bring professional excellence, technical perfection, and a proven wow-factor to every business stage.

Sagar Dolas is Senior Advisor & Program Manager at SURF. He leads initiatives related to Advanced Computing and focuses on the future of applications and infrastructure for scientific research. He has a background in high-performance computing and applied mathematics.

Sander Houweling is Professor of Atmosphere, Greenhouse Gases, and Climate at the Department of Earth Sciences at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and a senior researcher at NWO-I SRON Space Research Organization Netherlands. His research focuses on long-lived greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and how these are influenced by human activities. His research group at VU Amsterdam develops numerical methods, implemented on high-performance computers, for monitoring greenhouse gas emissions using measurements from global and regional measurement networks and satellites. He is committed to the independent evaluation of national emission reports to the UNFCCC based on atmospheric data.

Sergio Andreozzi is the Head of Strategy, Innovation, and Communications at the EGI Foundation, which coordinates the EGI Federation to deliver advanced computing services to global research communities. In this role, Sergio leads EGI’s strategy development, innovation management, and governance initiatives. He also serves as Project Director of the EC-funded SPECTRUM project. Sergio holds an Executive Master in Research Infrastructure Management from the University of Milano-Bicocca, a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Bologna, and an MSc in Computer Science Engineering from the University of Pisa.

Sjoerd Kelder is a data scientist specializing in scaling machine learning workflows on high-performance computing systems. For his MSc in Information Studies (UvA, 2025) he used SURF’s Snellius HPC system to benchmark deep learning models with extended feature sets on large datasets. He now works with Fearless League on AI-powered lab tooling and reproducible ML infrastructure. His interests include workflow design, reproducibility practices, and efficient deployment of ML pipelines on large compute resources, applicable across sectors from science to industry.

University of Amsterdam (MSc Information Studies, 2025) / Fearless League (AI R&D)

PhD candidate at Utrecht University, working on Bayesian data analysis of gravitational waves, multi-messenger astrophysics and nuclear physics. Preparing software for future experiments such as Einstein Telescope and Cosmic Explorer.

With more than 15 years of experience in high-performance computing, Valeriu Codreanu is a strategic leader known for combining vision with empathy and a strong commitment to advancing research infrastructure in the Netherlands and across Europe. As Head of High-Performance Computing & Visualization at SURF, he oversees the Dutch national supercomputer Snellius, manages a portfolio exceeding €20M annually, and leads a team of over 30 specialists driving innovation in advanced computing.

He plays a central role in shaping the next generation of national infrastructure, including the upcoming tender that will unify SURF’s HPC, Grid, and Cloud services into a single, future-proof research platform. His influence extends across Europe through leadership positions in VSC Tier-1, LUMI, the Jules Verne exascale consortium, and the Dutch AI Factory.

Passionate about people as much as technology, Valeriu Codreanu is dedicated to mentoring talent, empowering teams, and inspiring research communities to push boundaries and achieve lasting impact.

Walter Lioen is Domain Manager Research Services at SURF. He studied mathematics at the University of Amsterdam and began his career as a scientific programmer at CWI, where he used Dutch supercomputers to develop efficient numerical and computational algorithms. In 2001 he moved to Data Distilleries as a software engineer. Since 2007 he has worked at SURF, progressing from HPC consultant to team lead and department head. Walter has been closely involved in European supercomputing initiatives such as DEISA and PRACE, and he currently serves as vice-chair of EuroHPC’s Infrastructure Advisory Group.