Prof. Giuseppe Bono is Associate Professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, Italy. He is involved in developing convective hydrodynamical models of radial variables. He, and his group, built a homogeneous evolutionary and pulsation framework for radial variables and provided solid constraints concerning their use as standard candles and stellar population tracers. He has also been involved in several observational projects dealing with photometry and spectroscopy of nearby resolved stellar systems (globular clusters, dwarf galaxies). More recently, he is contributing to shaping the science drivers for the European Extremely Large Telescope.

Prof. Richard de Grijs obtained his PhD from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) in 1997, and held two postdoctoral positions (at the University of Virginia, USA, and the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, UK), before being appointed to a permanent post at the University of Sheffield (UK) in 2003. He joined the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University in September 2009 as a full professor. He has been one of the scientific editors of The Astrophysical Journal since 2006 and took on the role of deputy Editor of The Astrophysical Journal Letters in September 2012. He is the joint director of the East Asian Regional Office of Astronomy for Development, as well as the international coordinator for China of the Institute of Physics (UK). He was awarded the 2012 Selby Award for excellence in science by the Australian Academy of Science, as well as a 2013 Visiting Academy Professorship at Leiden University by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

His research focuses on aspects of star cluster physics, from their stellar populations to their dynamics and their use as star-formation tracers in distant galaxies. His group uses both ground- and space-based observational data, as well as numerical simulations, to tackle their science projects. In addition, he recently published a high-level textbook on the astronomical distance scale and is currently engaged in a number of projects related to the history of astronomy, with an emphasis on the 17th Century. His research group at Peking University is popular among both undergraduate and graduate students. He considers interactions with students among the highlights of his professional life.

Prof. Gerry Gilmore is Professor of Experimental Philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge, UK.

He is Co-PI of the Gaia-ESO Spectroscopic Survey, a consortium of over 400 people delivering high-quality high-resolution spectroscopy for 100,000 stars, sampling all the Milky Way’s stellar populations. This project is allocated 300 nights on the ESO VLT with the FLAMES multi-object instrument. Approximately one-half of the spectra have been obtained. A major data release of spectra and astrophysical parameters will become public through the ESO archive in mid-2015. Some 35 refereed papers have so far been published from the Survey.

He is also the UK PI for the Gaia data processing and analysis activities, which involves teams in Cambridge, Leicester, MSSL-London, and Edinburgh. Cambridge hosts the Gaia data processing centre (DPCI) which reduces the photometry and spectrophotometry from Gaia, and also finds and publishes the real-time Gaia science alerts – supernovae, CVs, much else - through the gaia.ac.uk website.

His science interests are broadly in structure, chemical evolution and dark matter content of Local Group galaxies, big and small. He likes finding new things.

Dr Shrinivas R. (Shri) Kulkarni is MacArthur Professor of California Institute of Technology and also the Director of Caltech Optical Observatories.

His research covers a wide range of topics: the study of Galactic interstellar, millisecond pulsars, pulsars in globular clusters, brown dwarfs, soft gamma-ray repeaters, gamma-ray bursts and cosmic explosions. He has received many awards including the NSF's Alan T. Waterman award in 1992 and the Helen B. Warner Prize from the American Astronomical Society in 1991. He is the Principal Investigator of the Palomar Transient Factory – an innovative project based around the Palomar 48-inch Oschin Schmidt and the automated Palomar 60-inch telescope and designed to explore the transient sky. Their current iPTF (intermediate PTF) project has been discovering a large number of transient objects including type Ia supernovae with which he and his colleagues are continuing the effort to develop the cosmic distance scale. Their planned ZTF (Zwicky Transient Facility) will even further expand the ability to discover the transient objects.

Dr Anna Mangilli is a Planck Scientist and researcher at the Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale (France). She is deeply involved in the Planck mission, the ESA satellite that surveyed the microwave sky with unprecedented precision providing with the best maps of the anisotropies of the CMB radiation field. She is involved in the analysis of Planck data since 2011, in particular as regarding the study of: primordial non-Gaussianity, CMB lensing, CMB polarization, primordial gravitational waves and the reionization epoch. Her research interests also involve the study of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations, neutrinos and inflationary models.

Dr Francois Mignard is an astronomer at the Observatory of the Côte d'Azur, located in Nice in southern France. He has been for many years a regular lecturer at the University of Nice in astronomy, statistics and numerical analysis.

His researches focus on astrometry and dynamical astronomy with major involvement in space astrometry with the European Space Agency (ESA), including Hipparcos and the on-going mission Gaia. Dr. Mignard was the leader of the Gaia European Consortium of scientists (DPAC) from 2006 to 2012, in charge of the data processing for Gaia. He is a member of the ESA Gaia Science Team and the PI of the French participation in Gaia. He was director of CERGA (1992-2003) and chair of the IAU working group on Reference Frames.

Dr. Mignard has published about 200 papers on celestial mechanics applied to minor bodies, tidal effects in the solar system before moving to stellar astrometry with publications on the preparation and exploitation of Hipparcos, culminating with the publication of the catalogue in 1997 and later on the Gaia mission organisation and science objectives. He is one of the co-authors of the textbooks "Observational Astrophysics" and "Astrometry for Astrophysics".

Dr. Mignard is member of the French Bureau des Longitudes and was awarded two prizes from the French Academy of Sciences.

Dr. Takeo Minezaki is an assistant professor of the Institude of Astronomy, the University of Tokyo, Japan.

He has been involved in the multicolor active galactic nuclei monitoring (MAGNUM) project (PI Prof. Yoshii, the Univ. of Tokyo) since 1995, which proposed an original method to measure the cosmological distance of AGNs and hence the cosmological parameters of the Universe by using the dust reverberation of AGNs. In the MAGNUM project, he and his collaborators monitored the fluxes of several dozens of AGNs in the optical and near-infrared bands from the end of 2000 to 2008, and obtained the lags between the light curves in the two different wavelengths, which correspond to the light-travel time from the central engine to the inner radius of the dust torus. Based on these data, the radius-luminosity relation for the inner dust torus was established, and the Hubble constant was estimated using a model for the location of the dust sublimation.

In addition to these studies, his research involves those in various areas of the extragalactic astronomy such as AGNs, gravitational lenses, gamma-ray bursts, and so on. He also has been involved in engineering and operation of a number of telescopes and instruments in the optical and infrared wavelengths.

Dr. Mark Reid is a Senior Astronomer at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA, USA.

Dr. Reid has published over 225 papers related to the study of masers, red giant stars, star formation, active galactic nuclei, Galactic structure, and cosmology. He is one of the pioneers of the technique of spectral-line Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI). Currently, he is working to achieve near micro-arcsecond accurate astrometry at centimeter wavelengths, allowing trigonometric parallax measurements for compact sources across the Milky Way, as well as proper motion measurements of other galaxies. He is the PI of the BeSSeL Survey to map the spiral structure of the Milky Way.

Dr. Reid has co-authored three papers in the Annual Reviews of Astronomy and Astrophysics on the topics “Masers”, “The Distance to the Galactic Center”, and “Micro- arcsecond Radio Astrometry”. In recognition of his career accomplishments, Dr. Reid has been awarded an Alexander von Humboldt Senior Award, the Beatrice Tinsley Prize of the American Astronomical Society and the Jansky Prize Lectureship of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Dr. Sherry Suyu is an astronomer at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taiwan. She obtained her Ph.D. at the California Institute of Technology, and was a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bonn, University of California Santa Barbara and Stanford University before becoming a research faculty at ASIAA.

Dr. Suyu’s research areas are on cosmology and galaxies. She is probing the nature of dark energy and studying the formation/evolution of galaxies and their dark matter halos through gravitational lensing. She and her collaborators have measured the “time-delay distances” to two gravitational lenses, whose resulting cosmographic constraints are complementary and competitive to the best current cosmographic probes. She and collaborators have also measured the halo sizes and shapes of galaxies to understand their evolutions. She is the PI of the H0LiCOW program (H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL Wellspring) to measure the distances to a pilot sample of five gravitational lenses with excellent ancillary data. This program will not only provide independent and competitive cosmographic constraints, but will also allow detailed investigations of the interplay between baryonic and dark matter, and the co-evolution of the nuclear supermassive black hole and its host galaxy.

Dr. Suyu is involved in both the Hyper Suprime-Cam Survey and the Dark Energy Survey, two of the largest on-going imaging surveys, to search for new gravitational lens systems.

Prof. Masahiro Takada is a faculty member at the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU), the University of Tokyo.

His research interests include areas of cosmology: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, weak gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering, the effects of massive neutrinos on large scale structure formation, and estimation of cosmological parameters from galaxy survey datasets. He has also been involved in the Subaru Measurements of Images and Redshifts (SuMIRe) project, that is the project carrying out wide-area imaging and spectroscopic galaxy surveys with new prime-focus instruments of 8.2m Subaru Telescope, the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) and the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS). The imaging survey with Subaru HSC started in 2014 Spring, and will be done until around 2019, spending 300 Subaru nights. We aim at starting the follow-up spectroscopic survey of HSC images with PFS immediately after the completion of HSC survey, from 2019 for 5 years duration. Regarding the distance measurements relevant for the topics of this summer school, the Subaru PFS will enable us to make experiments of baryon acoustic oscillations by using a dense spectroscopic survey of emission-line galaxies over the redshift range of 0.8<z<2.4.

Prof Patricia Whitelock is an astronomer at the SAAO and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Cape Town.

She has used the unique astronomical facilities in South Africa, including the Japanese-South African Infrared Survey Facility, for studying the long-term infrared variability of stars. This has proved to be particularly useful for understanding Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) variables. Because of their very high luminosity, particularly at infrared wavelengths, these stars are proving to be valuable as extragalactic distance indicators and are likely to become increasingly important with the advent of the James Webb Space Telescope and the next generation of extremely large ground-based telescopes, which will be optimized for use in the infrared.

She is a member of the South African Academy of Science and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society. At various times she has been Director of SAAO, President of the South African Institute of Physics and of IAU Division VII (the Galactic System). She is on the Steering Committee of the IAU Office of Astronomy for Development and the Scientific Council of the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre (CDS) in France.

Dr. Daisuke Yonetoku is an associate professor of Kanazawa University, Japan.

His field is an observational astronomy in X-ray and gamma-ray, especially focusing on gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). He found a possible luminosity indicator of GRBs, so called the E_peak – Luminosity correlation, which is a strong correlation between the typical energy (E_peak) of gamma-ray spectrum and the intrinsic brightness. As an application of E_peak – Luminosity correlation, his group investigated and predicted the GRB formation rate up to the redshift of z = 12. Moreover, calibrating the correlation with Type Ia supernovae, he extended the Hubble diagram and measured the cosmological parameters (Ω_m, Ω_Λ) over the redshift of z>2.

He is also an experimental scientist for X-ray and gamma-ray instruments onboard astronomical satellite and spacecraft. His group's recent work is a development of gamma-ray polarimeter (GAP) aboard solar powered sail IKAROS. The GAP is the world's first gamma-ray polarimeter specifically designed for the polarization measurement of prompt emission of GRBs. They detected strong gamma-ray polarization in three bright GRBs. At present, he promotes future GRB satellite HiZ-GUNDAM as a principal investigator.