Patrick Dorey studied in Cambridge and Durham in the UK. He completed postdocs in Paris and CERN, before returning to Durham as a lecturer. His main research activity has been into exactly-solvable, or integrable, quantum field theories in 1+1 dimensions. Gregory Korchemsky studied in Russia, in Rostov-on-Don and in Dubna. After postdocs in Parma and Stony Brook, he came to France as a CNRS researcher, first in Orsay and then in Saclay. His main research activity has been into integrability in gauge and string theory. Nikita Nekrasov studied in Moscow and defended his PhD dissertation at Princeton University in 1996. He was a Junior fellow at Harvard, then permanent professor at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in France. Since 2013 he is a professor at the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics. He is known for his work on supersymmetric gauge theory and string theory: the Nekrasov partition function relates instantons in gauge theory, integrable systems and representation theory of infinite dimensional algebras. Volker Schomerus holds a joint position as a Senior Researcher in the DESY Theory Group, and a Professor of Mathematical Physics at Universitat Hamburg. His work focuses on string theory at the interface to high energy physics, mathematics and statistical physics, for which he has received several distinctions, including the Guy-Lussac-Humboldt award in 2010. Didina Serban studied in Romania then in France, where she prepared her PhD in Theoretical Physics at the Service de Physique Theorique de Saclay. After a post-doctoral stay at the University of Cologne she joined, in 1998, the Service de Physique Theorique as a permanent researcher. The focus of her research is on exactly solvable models and the use of symmetries, with applications in condensed matter physics like magnetic one-dimensional models, Quantum Hall effect or phase transition in low-dimensional disordered systems. More recently, her research deals with exactly solvable gauge theories and their dualities to string theories.
