Sébastien Candel earned his PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 1972 and a Docteur ès Sciences degree from the University of Paris in 1977. He has been a professor at Ecole Centrale Paris (now CentraleSupélec) since 1978 and a professor at Institut Universitaire de France from 2001 to 2011. His research in combustion and aeroacoustics has applications in energy and in aeronautical and space propulsion. Among many distinctions, Sébastien Candel has been the recipient of the Marcel Dassault Grand Prize of the French Academy of sciences, the Pendray Aerospace Literature award of the AIAA, the Distinguished Alumni Award of Caltech, the Silver and Zeldovich Gold medals both from the Combustion Institute. Sébastien Candel is a member of the French Academy of sciences (its Vice-President for 2015 and 2016), of the French Academy of technologies and a foreign member of the National Academy of Engineering of the United States.

Prof. Henry Curran received his PhD degree from the National University of Ireland, Galway (NUIG) in experimental and numerical studies of combustion kinetics in 1994 and a DSc. degree by research from the National University of Ireland in October 2011. He served as a postdoctoral research scientist from 1994 to 1997 and research scientist in combustion modelling with Dr. Charles Westbrook and Dr. William Pitz from 1997 to 1999 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). In 1999, he returned to Ireland to take an appointment as a lecturer in Physical Chemistry at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology while continuing to consult with LLNL and performing collaborative research in kinetics with Prof. John Simmie at NUIG. He was appointed as an adjunct Lecturer at NUIG in 2001 and as a Lecturer in 2005. He is currently director of the Combustion Chemistry Centre at NUIG and is a member of the editorial boards of “Combustion and Flame” and the “Proceedings of the Combustion Institute”. He is a founder member of the Irish Section of the Combustion Institute, a fellow of both the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland and the Royal Society of Chemistry and a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Institution of Engineers Ireland, the American Society of Automotive Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers. Prof. Curran has over twenty years’ experience in developing comprehensive detailed kinetic models, thermochemical estimates, and calculating reaction rates to describe large carbon number hydrocarbons relevant to predicting real fuel behaviour in energy conversion systems. He works with Rolls-Royce, Alstom, Saudi Aramco, Shell and Renault on industrially sponsored projects. His collaborative work with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, Princeton and Stanford Universities and Imperial College London among others has contributed significantly to the construction and validation of detailed kinetic models presently used by the combustion community to simulate large alkanes, cyclo-alkanes, and their reaction intermediates, as well as for a large range of oxygenated hydrocarbons. Prof. Curran has contributed especially to mechanistic insights and detailed kinetic modelling of low temperature and negative temperature coefficient behaviour of large carbon number species. His experience in comprehensive, hierarchical model development provides much of the detailed modelling materials presently used in industry for emulating autoignition and combustion processes in energy conversion system applications.

James Driscoll is the A.B. Modine Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan.  He received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. He works closely with his grad students to image the preheat and reaction layers of turbulent flames using kilohertz laser imaging diagnostics in order to determine the regime boundaries of premixed turbulent combustion. Movies show how turbulent eddies cross a flame front, causing broadening and Landau instabilities. He also images flames undergoing combustion instabilities within a large-scale jet engine combustor experiment. He serves as Vice President of the Combustion Institute and was the Editor of Combustion and Flame. For his work he was awarded a Silver Medal and three distinguished paper awards. 

Chung K. Law is the Robert H. Goddard Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Princeton University. His research interests cover various physical and chemical aspects of fundamental combustion phenomena, with applications to propulsion, energy, fuels, and the environment.  He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and the American Physical Society (APS).  He is a past president of the Combustion Institute, the director of the Combustion Energy Frontier Research Center sponsored by the US Department of Energy, and the director of the Center for Combustion Energy at Tsinghua University. He has received a number of professional and best paper awards for technical contributions.

Prof. Mark Linne earned a PhD at Stanford University in 1985. Since then he has worked in the laser industry and in academia. As a professor, Linne has developed new laser and x-ray diagnostic techniques and applied them to research on swirling flames, gas turbine combustion, IC engine combustion, fundamentals of solid-oxide electrochemistry, and most recently fundamental studies of fuel spray breakup. He is currently the Professor of Combustion Engines at the University of Edinburgh. Professor Linne is a Fellow of the Optical Society of America and the author of Spectroscopic Measurement: An Introduction to the Fundamentals, Academic Press, London, UK, ISBN 0-12-451071-X, (2002). He has authored over 150 articles and he holds two patents for laser physics. Professor Linne is the current chair of the Gordon Research Conference on Laser Diagnostics in Combustion.