Marc Avila studied Mathematics at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and at the University of Glasgow and got his PhD in Applied Physics and Scientific Computing from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 2008. During his PhD, he was a research scholar at the Arizona State University and subsequently a postdoc at the Max-Planck-Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization. Prior to becoming Professor of fluid mechanics at the University of Bremen, and Director of its Center of Applied Space Technology and Microgravity (ZARM), he was Professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. For his work on the transition to turbulence in pipe flow, he received the Euromech Young Scientist Award in 2009 and the Richard-von-Mises Prize of the GAMM in 2018. He enjoys applying dynamical-systems approaches to understand and predict the dynamics of transitional and turbulent flows, and more recently of multiphase flows.

Miguel Rubi is Professor of the University of Barcelona. His research field is statistical physics. He was awarded a von Humboldt prize (von Humboldt Foundation, 2003), an Icrea Academia prize (2010) and the ‘Plus Ratio Quam Vis Medal’ (Jagiellonian University, 2017). He was appointed Onsager Professor (NTNU, 2003), Leverhulme Professor (Imperial College, 2013), and Doctor Honoris Causa by NTNU (2016).