Roberto Di Cosmo 

is Professor of Computer Science at Université Paris Cité and currently on leave at Inria. He is the founder and Director of Software Heritage, the UNESCO-partnered global initiative dedicated to collecting, preserving, and sharing all publicly available software source code as part of humanity’s scientific and cultural heritage. He also serves as President of the Board of Trustees and of the Scientific Advisory Board of the IMDEA Software Institute and chairs the Software chapter of the French National Committee for Open Science.

His research spans logical systems, programming languages, functional and parallel programming, and software engineering, with a longstanding focus on Free and Open Source Software and digital commons. He founded the Free Software thematic group of Systematic, directed the European Mancoosi project to improve package management for large software collections, and established IRILL, a research structure dedicated to advancing quality in open-source software.

Through his work on Software Heritage, he has played a central role in shaping international approaches to software preservation, open infrastructure, and the recognition of software as a fundamental research output essential for reproducibility and Open Science.

Find out more here. 

Uwe Jandt

is Platform Coordinator for Helmholtz Federated IT Services (HIFIS) at Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron DESY. In this role, he is responsible for coordinating and advancing federated IT services across the Helmholtz Association, supporting large-scale scientific infrastructures and research communities.

Dr. Jandt previously served as Senior Research Associate and scientific group leader at Technische Universität Hamburg, where he led externally funded research projects at the intersection of computational methods and bioprocess engineering. His work focused on system biology, cell culture technology, enzyme engineering, and the automation of simulation–experimental feedback loops. Dr. Jandt earned his PhD in Medical Imaging from Philips Research Laboratories in collaboration with Ulm University, where he developed advanced 3D/4D reconstruction strategies for clinical interventional cardiac X-ray systems and received an innovation award in coronary X-ray imaging. He has been a member of the DECHEMA Zukunftsforum Biotechnologie since 2016.

Find out more here. 

Sonja Schimmler

is Guest Professor at Technische Universität Berlin, where she heads the Research Data Infrastructure department, and Research Group Leader at Fraunhofer FOKUS. Her work focuses on the digital transformation and opening of science, with a particular emphasis on research data infrastructures.

She plays a leading role in the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), serving as spokesperson of the NFDI4DataScience consortium and co-spokesperson of the NFDI section Common Infrastructures, the Base4NFDI initiative, and the NFDI4Cat consortium. Within the Berlin University Alliance (BUA), she leads the project “A Digital Research Space for the BUA” and heads the research group “Digitalization and Opening of Science” at the Weizenbaum Institute.

Her research interests span semantic web and linked data, data science and artificial intelligence, software engineering, and human-centered computing, with a strong focus on sustainable and interoperable research data ecosystems.

Find out more here and here.