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.

Carrie Nieman MD, MPH is an Associate Professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery. She is Core Faculty at the Johns Hopkins Cochlear Center for Hearing and Public Health within the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Principal Faculty at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Center for Equity in Aging. Her research is directed at understanding and addressing hearing health disparities among older adults through the development and implementation of public health-driven approaches to affordable, accessible hearing care, including among persons living with dementia.

Prof.dr.ir. Cas Smits is a medical physicist-audiologist at the department of Otolaryngology Head and Neck Surgery of Amsterdam UMC. In his clinical work he is involved in care for adults and children with hearing aids or cochlear implants. His research focusses on understanding and measuring speech recognition in noise abilities. Cas Smits developed the digits-in-noise test in the early 2000s and worked on many related projects including the development of similar tests in other languages, improving the efficiency of these test and the introduction of these speech-in-noise tests in clinical practice for children, CI users and via eHealth technology.

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.

To be updated.

Dr. Mia Liljeström is a Staff Scientist at the Department of Neuroscience and Biomedical Engineering at Aalto University and a senior researcher at the BioMag-laboratory at Helsinki University Hospital. Dr. Liljeström’s research has focused on studying cortical processing of language function using MEG. Her current interest is on developing reliable biomarkers of neurodegenerative disorders, such as Alzheimer’s disease, from brain imaging data.

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.

Ville Sivonen holds an MSc in electrical engineering from the University of Oulu, Finland and a PhD in acoustics from Aalborg University, Denmark. He is a Clinical Engineer at the Hearing Center of the Department of Otorhinolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery at Helsinki University Hospital, Finland. His research focuses on hearing loss and its rehabilitation with cochlear implants and middle-ear prostheses, with particular emphasis on intra- and postoperative objective measures, and the assessment of hearing outcomes in noisy and complex acoustic environments. He teaches technical audiology and has advised bachelor’s and master’s theses and co-supervised PhD students in the field.

Teppo Särkämö is a Professor of Neuropsychology at the Department of Psychology at University of Helsinki, Senior Research Fellow at the Cognitive Brain Research Unit (CBRU), and the Vice-Director of the Centre of Excellence in Music, Mind, Body and Brain (MMBB). His research focuses on the clinical and cognitive neuroscience of music, especially exploring the psychological and neural mechanisms underlying the impairment and preservation of music cognition in ageing and ageing-related neurological disorders (e.g., stroke, aphasia, dementia) and determining the efficacy and mechanisms of music-based rehabilitation in these clinical populations as well as in healthy aging.