Miia Kivipelto, MD, PhD, is Professor of Clinical Geriatrics at Karolinska Institutet, Center for Alzheimer Research, and serves as Senior Geriatrician and Director of Research & Development at Theme Aging, Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden.

She leads the Nordic Brain Network, a multidisciplinary research group of around 100 researchers and clinical staff, with affiliated teams at the University of Eastern Finland and Imperial College London, where she also holds a part-time professorship. In September 2025, she was appointed Rodman Family Endowed Professor of Gerontology at the Yale School of Nursing, Professor of Gerontology at the Yale School of Medicine, and Director of the Yale School of Nursing Center for Aging Well.

Prof. Kivipelto’s research focuses on the prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of cognitive impairment, dementia, and Alzheimer’s disease. Her work has identified key modifiable lifestyle and vascular risk factors, explored interactions with genetic risk, and advanced understanding of the underlying mechanisms of cognitive decline.

She is the Principal Investigator of the groundbreaking FINGER trial and the founder and scientific leader of World-Wide FINGERS, the first global network for dementia prevention.

Prof. Kivipelto has received numerous prestigious awards and is frequently invited to speak at leading international dementia conferences and serve on global expert panels.

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De Wet Swanepoel, Ph.D. is Professor of Audiology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa and adjunct professor in Otolaryngology-Head & Neck Surgery, University of Colorado School of Medicine. His research capitalises on digital technologies to explore, develop and evaluate innovative solutions and service-delivery models for access to ear and hearing care. Prof Swanepoel has published more than 300 peer-reviewed articles, books and book chapters and his research is funded by the NIH, UK Academy of Medical Sciences and industry. He is Editor-In-Chief of the International Journal of Audiology, and founder of a digital health company called the hearX group.

Professor Aarno Dietz is the Chair of the Center for Sense Organ Diseases at Kuopio University Hospital. He is an otologist whose research focuses on cochlear implantation and hearing technologies. Professor Dietz leads the multidisciplinary research group “Towards Better Hearing” (www.towardsbetterhearing.com) as well as the “Healthy HeAring for Healthy Ageing” working group, a collaborative project with the UEF-Brain Research Unit. He is the project leader of the EU co-funded Hearing Valley project (www.hearingvalley.fi). He serves as a member of the Medical Devices Expert Panel of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), where he contributes to the evaluation of high-risk medical devices.

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Tapio Lokki is a Professor and a Head of the department with the Department of Information and Communications Engineering at Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering. His passion is to understand how rooms modify sound that we hear. To pursue the encompassing understanding of room acoustics, his team is investigating auralization, spatial sound reproduction, binaural technology, and novel objective and subjective evaluation methods. Particularly, the interest has been in concert halls, in which the team has developed new measurement techniques, analysis methods for spatial impulse responses, and sensory evaluation methods to understand the perceptual differences between concert halls.

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Mark van Gils is Professor of Digital Healthcare, leading the research group Decision Support for Health, at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology at Tampere University. Activities in his over 25-year career in health data analysis have ranged from AI-driven patient monitoring to preventive approaches during daily living. He has special interest in addressing real-life challenges such as dealing with imperfect data, heterogeneous data, and ambiguity in outcomes. He has worked tightly with renowned hospitals and health tech companies, and he has extensive experience in leading roles, including coordination, in multi-disciplinary international research consortia, such as in EU projects.