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Yasaman Yazdi is a Research Ireland Pathway awardee and postdoctoral fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. She obtained her PhD from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics and the University of Waterloo in 2017. She has also held an Avadh Bhatia Fellowship at the University of Alberta, an Imperial College Research Fellowship, a Leverhulme Trust grant and an Emmy Noether Fellowship at the Perimeter Institute. Her research is on the fundamental nature of quantum gravity, as well as its applications. She works on the causal set theory approach to quantum gravity, and in particular, topics including quantum field theory, entanglement entropy, the Everpresent Λ dark energy model, and Lorentzian spectral geometry.

Dr Luca Bombelli is a theoretical physicist specialising in gravitational theory and mathematical physics. He earned his PhD from Syracuse University and held various temporary appointments including postdoctoral research positions at the University of Vienna, the University of Calgary and the Université Libre de Bruxelles before joining the faculty at the University of Mississippi, where he is currently Professor of Physics and Astronomy.

Dr Bombelli has worked on the physics of black holes, particle and wave propagation in curved spacetimes including black holes and expanding universe models, and the canonical formulation of general relativity and its quantization in the loop quantum gravity approach. His current research centres on the causal set approach to spacetime structure and quantum gravity.

Joshua Jones is a 3rd year PhD student at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, supervised by Yasaman Yazdi. He did his undergraduate studies at Imperial College London, and a masters at the University of Cambridge. His interests are largely focused on entropy, black hole thermodynamics, and causal set theory. In particular, he studies entanglement entropy in the causal set as a potential source of the Bekenstein-Hawking entropy, championing a spacetime approach to the calculation such that one can regularise covariantly.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. I began working on causal set theory during my master’s thesis and continued to develop this line of research throughout my PhD at Imperial College London, with a particular focus on quantum field theory on causal sets.

My current research interests also include the effective field theory of gravity and environmental effects in compact binaries, exploring how surrounding media can influence gravitational dynamics and observables.

Marián Boguñá (Barcelona, 1967) is Full Professor at the Department of Condensed Matter Physics of the University of Barcelona. He earned his degree in Physics in 1994 and completed his PhD in 1998. After a postdoctoral appointment with Professor George H Weiss at the National Institutes of Health in Washington DC, he returned to Barcelona, where he was awarded a Ramón y Cajal fellowship in 2003 and obtained tenure in 2008. He has also been a visiting scientist at Indiana University. He has published in major peer-reviewed international scientific journals, including Nature, Nature Physics, Nature Reviews Physics, Nature Communications, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Physical Review Letters, and Physical Review X. He has co-chaired international conferences, served on program committees, received the Outstanding Referee Award of the American Physical Society, and was appointed ICREA Academia Researcher in 2010, 2015, 2020, and 2025. His research focuses on complex systems, especially the interplay between topology and function in networked systems such as social, biological, and communication networks. He is a leading contributor to the field of Network Geometry, which seeks to uncover the geometric principles underlying the discrete structures of complex systems.

Ren Yeats works on combinatorial problems in fundamental physics including quantum field theory and causal set theory. They hold the Canada Research Chair in Combinatorics in Quantum Field theory in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo. They got their PhD from Boston University in 2008 under the supervision of Dirk Kreimer, then held a faculty position in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University before joining the University of Waterloo in 2016.

Steven Johnston completed his PhD in 2010 at Imperial College London, with a thesis entitled "Quantum Fields on Causal Sets". His research focused on defining scalar field propagators on discrete causal set spacetime. He moved into industry after 2010 but has continued to publish causal set research, more recently focusing on general methods to embed causal sets into Minkowski spacetime. His current interests are on developing models for higher-spin particles on a causal set.

Arad Nasiri is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of New Brunswick where his research lies at the intersection of quantum gravity and cosmology. He completed his PhD at Imperial College London under the supervision of Professor Fay Dowker. His thesis, titled Stochastic Dark Sector, explored the interplay between ideas from quantum gravity and stochastic behaviour in dark matter and dark energy, as well as the phenomenological implications of causal sets in cosmology. As a postdoctoral fellow, his current interests span a range of topics, including the time-depended functional renormalisation group in the early universe, the quantum-to-classical transition via decoherence in cosmology, and the application of generative diffusion models in downscaling and weather forecasting in Atlantic Canada.

Nosiphiwo Zwane is a lecturer at the University of Eswatini and a founding member of the Eswatini Young Academy. With over eight years of academic experience, she bridges fundamental physics and complex systems. She is also coordinator for the University Physics Society, she is dedicated to fostering STEM engagement and mentoring the next generation of African physicists. Her research interest focuses on Causal Set Theory, a discrete approach to quantum gravity that replaces the space-time continuum with a partially ordered set of elementary events. She is interested in investigation involves identifying observational signatures of quantum gravity, such as the potential "swerving" or diffusion of high-energy cosmic rays as they travel through a discrete vacuum. She also interested in cosmological tests for alternative dark energy models, specifically the Ever-present Lambda (Λ), where the cosmological constant fluctuates based on the volume of the past.

Astrid Eichhorn is a junior research group leader at the University of Heidelberg. She received her PhD from the University of Jena in Germany, in 2011. After that she became a postdoctoral researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, where she was promoted to senior postdoctoral researcher in 2014. She then joined the Theory Group at Imperial College as a junior research fellow, before moving to Heidelberg in 2016. Her research concentrates on physics beyond the Standard Model, with a particular focus on quantum gravity and its effects on matter.

Professor Dima Krioukov graduated from Saint Petersburg State University with Diploma in Physics in 1993. In 1998 he received his PhD in Physics from Old Dominion University, and moved to the networking industry as a network architect with Dimension Enterprizes. Upon their acquisition by Nortel Networks in 2000, he accepted a research scientist position at Nortel. In 2004 he moved back to academia as a Senior Research Scientist at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). In 2014 he moved to Northeastern University as an Associate Professor (Professor since 2024) at the Departments of Physics, Mathematics, and Electrical & Computer Engineering, and a core member of the , where he is the Director of the . DK-Lab research deals mostly with theory and fundamental aspects of network science. Research topics of particular interest to the lab are latent network geometry, maximum-entropy ensembles of random graphs and higher-order structures, random geometric graphs, causal sets, navigation in networks, and fundamental aspects of network dynamics.