Manuel Vázquez has been a Professor of Research in the Spanish Council for Research (CSIC) since 1996. He was responsible of many scientific and technological projects on the magnetism of nano- and microwires, and has supervised 35 Ph.D. students and numerous visiting scientists. He is coauthor of over 600 publications and 23 patents, and has contributed to several books, including as editor of Magnetic Nano- and Microwires (Elsevier, 2015 and 2020). After defending his Ph.D. at the Complutense University of Madrid, he was an Alexander von Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the Max-Planck-Institute für Metallforschung and at the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, under a NATO research grant. He was the Head of Laboratory at the Institute of Applied Magnetism, IMA (1992-2000) and Manager of the Spanish Strategic Action on Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (2004-2009). He established the Group of Nanomagnetism and Magnetization Processes at ICMM/CSIC (2001). Prof. Vázquez has actively volunteered in international activities, particularly those of the IEEE Magnetics Society: He founded the society’s Spain Chapter in 2007, was chair of the Intermag Conference in 2008, and served as President in 2017-2018. He received the society’s Distinguished Service Award in 2021. For the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), he served as Secretary of the Magnetism Commission and as Program Chair of the International Conference on Magnetism (ICM) in 2015. He was one of the three co-founders of the Club Español de Magnetismo in 2002 and received its Salvador Velayos Award in 2016.

Yoichiro Tanaka is a professor in the Research Institute of Electrical Communication (RIEC) at Tohoku University. He received the bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Communications Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Electronic Engineering from Tohoku University, where he did his thesis research on perpendicular magnetic recording physics and storage system integrations. He has worked in Toshiba’s storage device business and in academia for over 30 years. He is devoted to the proof and development of PMR and helped realize the world’s first PMR hard disk drive in 2005. His career includes the development of a giant magnetoresistive head, perpendicular granular thin film media, and, recently, new computational storage systems with integrated big-data analytics capability. He won Nikkei BP Technology Awards (1997, 2006), the Japan Magnetics Society Achievement Award (2006), and the Okochi Memorial Prize (2007). He is a senior member of the IEEE and a member of the Magnetics Society Administrative Committee for a three -year term, 2022-2024. He is a fellow of the Magnetics Society of Japan (MSJ). He is currently serving as Secretary General for the International Magnetics Conference (Intermag 2023, Sendai).

Fazel Tafti completed his PhD at the University of Toronto with Prof. Stephen Julian. His thesis was focused on developing transport experiments under ultrahigh pressures in diamond anvil cells. His first postdoc position at the University of Sherbrook with Prof. Louis Taillefer was focused on the thermal conductivity and thermoelectric measurements in iron-based superconductors under intense magnetic fields. He then changed fields from physics to chemistry and completed a second postdoc at Princeton University with Prof. Bob Cava. His research was focused on the chemical synthesis of topological and magnetic materials.  He started his career at Boston College in 2016 where he is currently a tenured associate professor of physics. Fazel is a member of the user advisory committee at the national high magnetic field laboratory (NHMFL) that severs the high field/low temperature facility. His lab at BC is interdisciplinary between physics, chemistry, and materials science.