Toni Ahlqvist is a Professor and Research Director of Futures Research at the Finland Futures Research Centre, University of Turku. He is an Adjunct Professor of Economic Geography and Technological Transformations at the University of Turku. His research focuses on regional planning and policy, spatial political economy, futures studies, and technology foresight. He has lead numerous research projects that have covered, e.g., emerging technologies, construction and uses of futures knowledge in organizations and regions, strategic development of industrial branches, such as forest industry in South Australia, and varied aspects of knowledge-based society. His most recent projects have dealt with potential societal antagonisms of radical emerging technologies and futures of land use planning in Finland. In futures studies, prof. Ahlqvist is specialised especially of strategic roadmapping and on emerging technologies and innovations. Prof. Ahlqvist’s research has been published in such journals as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, New Political Economy, Geopolitics, Geografiska Annaler A, Space and Polity, Technology Analysis and Strategic Management, Futures, Foresight, and Science and Public Policy.

Reynaldo Anderson (PhD) currently serves as Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Harris-Stowe State University in Saint Louis Missouri. Reynaldo is currently the executive director and co-founder of the Black Speculative Arts Movement (BSAM) an international network of artists, intellectuals, creatives and activists.  He is the co-editor of the following anthologies and journals, Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness published by Lexington, Cosmic Underground: A Grimoire of Black Speculative Discontent published by Cedar Grove Publishing, Black Lives, Black Politics, Black Futures, a special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design, and When is Wakanda: Afrofuturism and Dark Speculative Futurity; and author of numerous articles on Africana Studies and Communication studies.

Michael Bhatch is a Cape Town based academic and sound artist. He teaches an experimental literacy course at the University of the Western Cape that draws heavily on afrofuturism and speculative thinking as decolonial practice for critical thinking, critical reading, academic writing and research. His course promotes the use of technology within the traditional knowledge economy. Michael is currently pursuing a PhD which explores African expressions and contributions to the global Pan-African Afrofuturist movement, archive and canon. His work examines the ideas of a diverse array of African futurists like Credo Mutwa, Thomas Sankara and Kwame Nkrumah, and it maps out the general Afrofuturist landscape of the continent, and how it relates to diasporic expressions and imaginings of the Afrofuture. As an artist he draws on the character of the ‘Data Thief’ from John Akomfrah's seminal Afrofuturist video essay 'The Last Angel of History' to direct his soundscapes and DJ sets. He works effortlessly between the archive and technology, and boundaries between his scholarship and art are non-existent. Since early 2019 he has been operating as the Cape Town BSAM coordinator. In this capacity, he has been working closely with his BSAM associates to fortify and solidify global Afrofuturist networks.

Cristiano Cagnin (PhD) is a policy analyst and senior foresight researcher and practitioner at the EU DG Joint Research Centre (JRC). Before joining the JRC Foresight, Modelling, Behavioural Insights and Design for Policy Unit he worked as a senior advisor for innovation and sustainability at the think tank Center for Strategic Studies and Management Science, Technology and Innovation (CGEE) in Brazil and at GIZ as senior expert consultant on regional innovation. Previously he was a sci­entific officer at the JRC Institute for Prospective Technological Studies. He is an industrial engineer involved in research, international collaborative projects, development cooperation, and consultancy in innova­tion, sustainability, strategy (in business, supra-national government, regions and cities), regional coordination, joint programming and foresight. Cristiano supports policy design and implementation through co-creation policy and innovation labs, foresight and futures literacy, as well as early identification of emerging issues and their likely implications to crosscutting policy and strategic domains. His research interests include alternative ways of increasing interactions and learning between social stakeholders to bridge the gap between RTDI and indi­viduals in society, leading to inclusive governance as well as responsible and sustainable innovation, production, consumption and living.

Jennifer Cassingena Harper has an undergraduate degree in International Relations from the University of Keele, UK. She obtained an MSc Econ in Diplomacy from the London School of Economics and Political Sciences. Her doctoal research on the internationalisation of science and technology policy was undertaken at the University of Malta and University of Sussex, UK. Jennifer’s main area of expertise is Research and Innovation Policy with a particular interest in small transition economies. Since 2001 she has been active in foresight and conducted national exercises, EU Framework Programme projects, studies and tenders in this area and contributed to evaluations, impact assessment and studies for European and national public bodies. She has been a member of the JRC FTA Committee and contributed last year to a JRC study on scenarios to address SDGs  She was a member of  the EU DG Research Expert Group on Strategic Foresight in Research and Innovation (2016-7) which undertook several studies and consultations for shaping the Horizon Programme. She has been active on a number of expert groups: DG Regio Cities Foresight (2010), the Lisbon 3% Objective (2009), RD4SD (2009), ERA Rationales Group (2007), EU SCAR Foresight HLG (2006), the EU HLG on Key Technologies (2005). She currently acts as expert, evaluator, reviewer and observer on H2020 programme, covering joint programming, security, energy, SSH. 

Radu Gheorghiu (PhD) is a foresighter and an innovation policy expert. He is currently the President of Institutul de Prospectiva (www.prospectiva.ro), a Romanian foresight NGO specialized in horizon scanning by combining human experts and machine learning. In the last years he has coordinated large scale foresight exercises supporting the elaboration of the national strategies in the fields of R&I, education and public administration in Romania. He is the author of the consultation method called Dynamic Argumentative Delphi, which has been used in various international projects (CIMULACT, Bohemia, RIBRI, Post COVID-19) for exploring the future of European R&I landscape.

Yuan Like has been working at Institute of Foresight and Technology of Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development (CASTED). He is a member of the overall research group of China's fifth National Technology Foresight Program and the main organizer of the sixth National Technology Foresight Program. He serves as the executive chief editor of Chinese Journal of Technology Foresight & Assessment. Dr. Yuan Like is a Council Member of the Technology incubation and innovation ecology Committee of Chinese Society of Technology Economics He received LLM degree in Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2003 and Ph.D degree in Management from Chongqing University in 2007. From 2008 to 2011, he worked in the Southeast University and Tsinghua University as assistant professor. As Principal Investigator, he has been working on several national projects aiming at technology foresight and evaluation, governance of emerging technologies.

Ian Miles (PhD) – graduated in psychology from the University of Manchester. After working at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at Sussex University for eighteen years, he joined PREST in 1990. His research interests and methods are wide-ranging. Much of his work on technological innovation has concerned new Information Technologies, and he has been particularly interested in service industries as users and sources of innovation. IT is especially important for these industries, but other technological and organisational innovations are also highly relevant. Apart from analyses of services in general, Miles is particularly associated with Knowledge-Intensive Business Services (KIBS), pioneering research into these industries. Research covers both magaerial and policy dimensions of these issues, and uses tools such as case studies and survey analysis. Broader interests concern the social and employment implications of changing technology, and the social shaping of technologies; the evaluation of social science and other research programmes; social and other indicators; and foresight methods and practice. In connection with the latter, he is on the editorial board of several leading journals such as Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Foresight, and the International Journal of Foresight and Innovation Policy, as well as journals focusing more on services and innovation issues. He was a director of PREST and a founding director of CRIC, the Centre for Research on Innovation and Competition - both now assimilated into Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIOIR). He also works with colleagues in Moscow, at the Research University - Higher School of Economics, where he is head of the Laboratory for the Economics of Innovation.

Steven Popper is a RAND Senior Economist and Professor of Science and Technology Policy in the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His work on micro level economic transition focuses on the area of technological change. From 1996 to 2001 he was the Associate Director of the Science and Technology Policy Institute (S&TPI) which provided research and analytic support to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and other agencies of the U.S. government executive branch.  His S&TPI work included principal authorship of the Fourth U.S. National Critical Technologies Review and advice on federal R&D portfolio decision making for the National Science Board. He is an elected AAAS Fellow and served as the chair of its section on industrial science and technology. Dr. Popper’s work on strategy development and foresight has focused on the problem of planning under conditions of deep uncertainty He is co-developer of Robust Decision Making, a methodological framework for analytical decision support under deep uncertainty. He also led the team which developed the Systematic Technology Reconnaissance, Evaluation and Adoption Methodology (STREAM) for the Transportation Research Board of the National Research Council to provide foresight support for making informed, mission-specific adoption decisions over innovative technologies. Dr. Popper is co-editor of Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice (Springer) the first handbook of DMDU methods and is the founding chair for education and training of the international Society for Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty.

Rushdi Abdul Rahim is a Senior Vice President in Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology or better known by the acronym MIGHT, a technology policy think tank. Through MIGHT’s foresight, trend & horizon scanning activities, Rushdi spent most of his time working with organizations – private and public - understands and explore the future impacts of trends as well as disruptions. He led foresight and futures initiatives that shaped Malaysia’s national policy development including Youth Defined-Shape the Future; engagement of youth in foresight, Future Rail 2030; project for the development rail industry in Malaysia, Future of Malaysian Public Service – Beyond 2020; a collaborative project with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Public Service Department (JPA) as well as Future of Work – Work, Workforce, Workplace; looking at the impact of 4th Industrial Revolution to the nature work, workforce required and the work environment. Recently he led MIGHT’s team in the collaborative development of Industry4wrd - Malaysia’s National Industry 4.0 framework with the Ministry of International Trade & Industry  and the National Anti-Corruption Plan with Center for Governance, Integrity & Anti-Corruption. He was also the Co-Chair for the working committee on Prioritization of Technologies for R&D under the National Science and Research Council (NSRC).

Fabiana Scapolo is Deputy Head of Unit for Foresight, Modelling, Behavioural Insights and Design for Policy at the European Commission General Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Brussels. She is also the Head of the Competence Centre on Foresight. The Unit is responsible for the EU Policy Lab that is a collaborative and experimental space combining tools and practices from foresight, behavioural insights, design for policy and citizens engagement for innovative policymaking in Europe. Fabiana has more than 15-year of working experience on foresight both in terms of managing and applying foresight to specific context and topics. Her main interest is to foster the application of Foresight methods and tools in support to policymaking at European level. She has managed and co-authored many foresight projects reports and articles. Fabiana's background is in Political Sciences (University of Milan, Italy) and she has a PhD on foresight methodologies (University of Manchester, United Kingdom). 

Kuniko Urashima is Deputy Director of Foresight Center National Institute of Science and Technology Policy (NISTEP) Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan. She joined her present post in 2003 after working in the development of treating and eliminating environmental pollutants using plasma technology at Toshiba Co. in Japan, McMaster Univeristy in Canada, Ford Motor Co. and Los Alamos National Laboratory in United States of America, and Poitiers University in France. She is principally engaged in investigating science and technology trends related to the world environment and energy as a whole. She is also adjunct professor at Nagoya University, Gifu University and Iwate University.