Ivan Bozovic received his Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from Belgrade University, Yugoslavia in 1975, where he was later elected a professor and the Physics Department Head. In 1985 he moved to the USA and worked at Stanford University and the Varian Research Center in Palo Alto, California, then 1998-2002 in Oxxel, Bremen, Germany. Since 2003, he has been the MBE Group Leader at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and since 2014 also an Adjunct Professor at Yale University. He is a Member of the European Academy of Sciences, a Foreign Member of the Serbian Academy of Science and Arts, Professor Honoris Causa of the University of Montenegro, a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), and a Fellow of the International Society for Optics and Photonics (SPIE).  He received the APS McGroddy Prize for Materials Physics, the Bernd Matthias Prize for Superconducting Materials, the SPIE Technology Award, M. Jaric Prize, BNL Science and Technology Prize, etc. He was elected as Max Planck Lecturer, Van der Waals Lecturer, and (twice) Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Principal Investigator. Ivan’s research interests include fundamental physics of condensed states of matter, novel electronic phenomena including unconventional superconductivity, innovative methods of thin film synthesis and characterization, and nano-scale physics. He published 11 research monographs and over 300 research papers, including over 30 in Science and Nature journals.

Leena Aggarwal is a postdoctoral research associate at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York, USA. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa, Canada (2021-2023), where she worked on the fabrication and study of transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) related devices using scanning tunneling microscopy. From 2018 to 2021, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Illinois, focusing on the synthesis and characterization of thin films of topological materials. Before that, she worked as a research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh (2017-2018), studying the electronic properties of LAO/STO heterostructures at ultra-low temperatures and high magnetic fields. Leena received her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), India in 2017. Her research interests include scanning probe microscopy, molecular beam epitaxy, and low-temperature physics.