International Scientific Council

President of Emerson Corporation Michael Train

Michael Train became president of Emerson in October 2018. In this role, he drives the company’s focus on software and digital technology development, major investments, international growth and global shared service organizations. In addition, he serves as chairman of Emerson’s Automation Solutions business and is a member of Emerson’s Office of the Chief Executive, which helps develop and guide the company’s global business strategies.

Prior to his current role, Train served as executive president of Emerson’s Automation Solutions business, managing strategy and operations for one of the company’s two business platforms.

In this role, Train directed two strategic programs – Project Certainty and Operational Certainty – to help companies reduce costs and timelines and drive more efficiencies into projects and ongoing operations. He has been instrumental in developing Emerson’s digital transformation initiative that provides strategies and an actionable roadmap for customers to leverage new digital technologies for improved business performance.

Train began his career at Emerson in 1991, starting as an international planner before serving in several Asia-Pacific and strategic business planning roles including vice president of planning and development for Asia-Pacific, corporate vice president of planning and international, president of Emerson in Japan and Korea and president of Emerson Process Management Asia-Pacific.

Train currently serves on Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management Advisory Council, the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum Board of Directors and was a 2008 Eisenhower Fellowship recipient.

Train holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from General Motors Institute and a master’s degree in business administration from Cornell University 

President and CEO of SMS group Inc., USA. an Honorary Professor at the South Ural State University Pino Tese

Pino Tese is a Professor at the South Ural State University, President and CEO of SMS group Inc., USA. Since 1975 he is a member of the German Steel Institute. In 1980, he got his cum laude degree in metallurgical engineering from Mercator University, Germany. Later he joined Thyssen Stahl AG Duisburg as an assistant at the Hot-Rolling-Mill.

Became a Division Manager of Production and Process Engineering in 1995. From 1993-2001 he worked as a General Manager of the CSP-Plant, ThyssenKrupp Steel.

In 1999 got Ph.D. in Metallurgical Engineering from Technical University Freiberg Germany. Joined SMS Demag as an Executive Vice President, Head of the BU Technical Service. From 2002-2018 was a Member of the Board of 6 SMS group entities. In 2009 became a Docent at the Faculty of Machinery and Metal Forming of South Ural State University.

He was appointed Assistant Professor in 2014. In 2017, received a Diploma of Doctor of Science and was appointed Professor at the South Ural State University.  From 2017 up to now he is a member of the Executive Committee SMS group. In time period 1994 up to 2017: In total 34 publications in several steel magazines and SMS group News. Since 2001 member of AIST, USA.

Since 2018 member of the AISI, USA. Since 2019 lecturer at the Technical Academy, Osceola, AR, USA. Speaks fluent German, English, Italian, French and has a working knowledge of Russian and Indonesian. From 2018 he is a President & CEO of SMS group Inc., USA.

Prof., Dr. Ashokkumar Muthupandian 

University of Melbourne; expert in physical chemistry. Hirsch index – 61.

Professor Ashokkumar Muthupandian (Ashok) is a Physical Chemist who specializes in Sonochemistry and is a senior academic staff member of the School of Chemistry, University of Melbourne.

He is currently the Assistant Deputy Vice-Chancellor International at the University of Melbourne. Ashok is a renowned sonochemist, with more than 20 years of experience in this field, and has developed a number of novel techniques to characterize acoustic cavitation bubbles and has made major contributions of applied sonochemistry to the Materials, Food and Dairy industry.

His research team has developed a novel ultrasonic processing technology for improving the functional properties of dairy ingredients. Recent research also involves the ultrasonic synthesis of functional nano- and biomaterials that can be used in energy production, environmental remediation and diagnostic and therapeutic medicine. He has received about $ 15 million research grants to support his research work that includes several industry projects.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of Ultrasonics Sonochemistry, an international journal devoted to sonochemistry research with a Journal Impact Factor of 6.0. He has edited/co-edited several books and special issues for journals; published ~380 refereed papers (H-Index: 52) in high impact international journals and books; and delivered over 150 invited/keynote/plenary lectures at international conferences and academic institutions. Ashok has successfully organised 10 national/international scientific conferences/workshops and managed a number of national and international competitive research grants.

He has served on a number of University of Melbourne management committees and scientific advisory boards of external scientific organizations.

Prof. Dr. Panayotis Koutentis

University of Cyprus; expert in is organic chemistry. Hirsch index – 28.

Panayiotis A. Koutentis (CSci, CChem, FRSC) is Professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cyprus, Nicosia.

He was born in Bristol (1969) and obtained his BSc (1992) and PhD (1997) at Imperial College working under the supervision of the late Prof. Charles W. Rees (FRS, CBE). This was followed by a short stay with Prof. Roger Alder, (Bristol, 1997), and then postdoctoral work with Prof. Fred Wudl (UCLA, 1997-8), and with Prof. Robert Haddon (Lexington, Kentucky, 1999). In 1999, Prof.

Koutentis was appointed Lecturer at the University of Cyprus and in 2009 achieved tenure. He has authored 4 book chapters on Thiazoles, 1,2,5-Thiadiazoles and 1,3,4-Thiadiazoles for Houben Weyl’s Science of Synthesis and Elsevier’s Comprehensive Heterocyclic Chemistry III and has published over 140 journal articles. Currently, he is Scientific Editor for ARKIVOC, Sci, Molecules, Molbank, and Advances in Heterocyclic Chemistry, and Volume Editor for Comprehensive Heterocyclic Chemistry IV. His research interests are: Synthesis, chemistry and application of rare heterocycles extending to the fields of medicinal and materials chemistry.

Prof. Dr. María Josefa Yzuel

University of Barcelona; expert in optics. Hirsch index – 26.

Maria J. Yzuel is Professor Emeritus and Honorary Professor at the Department of Physics, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB), Spain. She was a Full Professor of Optics at this Department from 1983 to 2011.

Formerly she was a Professor of Optics at the Universities of Zaragoza and Granada, Spain. She is a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Barcelona, Spain. She earned her Physics degree and Ph. D. Degree from the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She has worked in diffraction image theory, image quality evaluation, apodization, applications to photolithography, optical pattern recognition, color information in correlators, design of filters. She also worked in medical optics and, recently, she worked in liquid crystal pannels applied in diffractive optics.

She has published more than 250 papers and she has supervised 20 Ph. D. Thesis. Her h-index is 26. She is Fellow member of the SPIE (The International Society for Optics and Photonics), the Institute of Physics (IOP), the OSA (Optical Society of America), the EOS (European Optical Society), and Socio de Honor of the Spanish Optical Society (SEDOPTICA). She served as President of SEDOPTICA from 1993 to 1996.

She received the SPIE Board of Directors Award in 2005 and the Medal of the University of Warsaw. She was Vice President of the Royal Spanish Physical Society. She served in the SPIE Board of Directors from 2001 to 2003 and in several SPIE Committees. Dr. Yzuel was the SPIE 2009 President.

Prof. Dr. Jaewan Kim

Korea Institute for Advanced Study; expert in quantum informatics. Hirsch index – 24.

Jaewan Kim is a Professor of Computational Sciences at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS). In 1985, he received his bachelor’s degree from Seoul National University. Since 1993, he holds a Ph.D in Physics from University of Houston. Began his professional career as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Texas Center for Superconductivity. From 1994 to 2002 he worked as a Principal Researcher at Computational Science and Engineering Lab,
SAMSUNG Advanced Institute of Technology. In 2000 he became Research Associate Professor of Physics at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Later, in 2002, he became an Professor of Computational Sciences at KIAS. He held a number of high-ranking positions in the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology: from 2005 to 2008 Chair of School of Computational Sciences; from 2009 to 2011 Vice President of KIAS; since 2013 Director of Open KIAS Center.

Served as a Chair of Asian Quantum Information Science Conference (AQIS) 2008(Seoul), 2011(Busan), and 2015(Seoul); Chair of Steering Committee of AQIS since 2018; Chair of Asia-Pacific Conference and Workshop on Quantum Information Science (APCWQIS) 2006 and 2013; Member of Steering Committee of AQIS.

Research interests: Quantum Information Science: Quantum Computation, Quantum Cryptography, Quantum Imaging, Quantum Chaos and Quantum Decoherence, Quantum Entanglement.

Prof., Dr. Ron de Kloet

University of Leiden; expert in biomedicine. Hirsch index – 104.

E. Ron de Kloet, PhD, Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and (emeritus) professor medical pharmacology at Leiden University, is fascinated by the question how glucocorticoids - as master regulator of the stress system - can switch from protective to damaging, since understanding the underlying mechanism may help to develop a new class of medicines for treatment of mental disorders.

His oeuvre is more than 600 ISI-listed scientific articles, more than 100 book chapters, (co)editor of 10 books and co-author of 1 monograph “Stress, Depression and the Brain. Promotor of 56 PhD theses. H-factor 104 (ISI) and 123 (Google Scholar), > 42000 citations.

He received the 2014 Golden Emile Kraepelin Medal in Psychiatry, the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Society of Psycho-neuroendocrinology, the 2007 Award of the European College of Neuro-psychopharmacology and the 2005 Geoffrey Harris Award of the European Federation of Endocrine Societies. Ron de Kloet has been knighted to the ‘Order of the Dutch Lion’, august 2010.

Prof., Dr. Mohammed Milad

Mohammed R Milad is a Professor at the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois at Chicago.  Until 2017, Dr. Mohammed Milad worked as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, as well as a leading researcher and director of the Laboratory for Behavioral Neurology at the Massachusetts Hospital. In 2017, he became a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He defended his doctoral thesis at the Ponce School of Medicine in Puerto Rico. His doctoral thesis is devoted to the study of the effect of sex differences and sex hormones on the disappearance of fear in extreme situations.

He is a member of the Editorial Board of such scientific journals as the CNS Neuroscience and Therapeutics, Biology of Mood and Anxiety Disorders, Neurobiology of Learning and Memory и Molecular Neuropsychiatry.  In 2007, he became a member of the New York Academy of Sciences. He received a number of awards from public and state organizations, among them: the Positive Neuroscience Award from the Templeton Foundation. His h-index is 44.

Prof., Dr. Victorino Franco

A Full professor at the Condensed Physics Department of the University of Seville, Spain. Hirsch index – 36.

His current research interests are magnetic materials for energy applications (including soft magnetic and magnetocaloric materials), the development of methods for the analysis of thermomagnetic phase transitions and development of functional materials for additive manufacturing. Prof. Franco is frequently a visiting professor at numerous research institutions in Europe, America and Asia. He has more than 175 publications in international peer reviewed journals that have received more than 3950 citations (excluding self-citations). His h-index is 35.

He served as chair of the Spain Chapter of the IEEE Magnetics Society, chair of the Magnetic Materials Committee of the Minerals, Metals & Materials Society (TMS), is the current vice-chair of the Spanish magnetism association CEMAG and a member of the 147th Committee on Amorphous and Nano-Crystalline Materials of the University-Industry Cooperative Research Committees Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) .

He is frequent organizer of international conferences and symposia, including Soft Magnetic Materials Conference -SMM- (general chair, Sevilla 2017), Magnetism and Magnetic Materials -MMM- (publications chair in 2017, 2019, 2020), Joint MMM-Intermag (publications chair in 2019, general chair in 2022). He received the Young Scientist Award from the Royal Physical Society of Spain in 2000 and the Young Scientist Award of the Royal Order of Chivalry of Sevilla and Royal Academy of Sciences of Sevilla in 2005. He has been named 2019 IEEE Magnetics Society Distinguished Lecturer.

Prof. Fei Tao

Professor and Vice Dean at the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China.  Hirsch index – 46.

Fei Tao received the B.S. and Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2003 and 2008, respectively.

He was a Visiting Scholar/Postdoctoral at the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 2007 to 2009. He is currently a Professor and Vice Dean at the School of Automation Science and Electrical Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, China.

His current research interests include service-oriented smart manufacturing, manufacturing service management and optimization, digital twin driven product design/ manufacturing/service, sustainable manufacturing and cloud manufacturing. He has authored 4 monographs and over 100 journal papers in these fields, which obtained over 8,000 citations in Google Scholar and 2,000 citations in Web of Science. Dr. Tao is currently the Editor of International Journal of Service and Computing-oriented Manufacturing (IJSCOM). His h-index is 52.

Prof., Dr. Andrew B. Cundy, FGS, FRGS

Professor of Environmental Radioactivity and Director of Internationalisation in Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton, at the National Oceanography Centre (Southampton), U.K.

Hirsch index – 31 (Web of Science, Mendeley).

Andrew (Andy) Cundy is Professor of Environmental Radioactivity and Director of Internationalisation in Ocean and Earth Science, University of Southampton, at the National Oceanography Centre (Southampton), U.K.

Having originally studied oceanography, he graduated with a PhD in Geology from Southampton in 1994, and since then has worked at various UK Universities (including a period spent as Head of the School of Environment and Technology at Brighton University) before rejoining Southampton in 2016. He has over 25 years research and consultancy experience in the behaviour of aquatic and terrestrial pollutants (metal, organic, plastic and radioactive contaminants), environmental radioactivity and radiochemistry, environmental geology, contaminated land, wastes and water management, environmental monitoring, nanoscience and nanotechnology, and development of novel materials for environmental and engineering application (including low-cost adsorbents and catalysts).

Andy has worked across four continents in projects funded by government, environmental bodies, the European Union and private industry. He has published over 110 scientific papers, 2 patents, and has secured over £4 million in research funding. His h-index is 29. Andy is a co-ordinating Editor for the journal Environmental Geochemistry and Health, an Associate Editor of ASCE Journal of Environmental Engineering, and is a member of the Geohazards committee of the UNESCO International Geoscience Programme, focused on international geoscience capacity building