Keynote Speakers

Prof. Guanrong Chen

City University of Hong Kong, China

IEEE Life Fellow

Biography

Professor Guanrong (Ron) Chen received the M.Sc. degree in computational mathematics from Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University, China in 1981, and the Ph.D. degree in applied mathematics from Texas A&M University, USA in 1987. He has been a chair professor (now, “Shun Hing Education and Charity Fund Chair Professorship in Engineering”) and the founding director of the Centre for Complexity and Complex Networks at City University of Hong Kong since 2000. Prior to that, he was a tenured full professor at the University of Houston, Texas, USA.

Prof. Chen was elected Member of the Academy of Europe (Academia Europaea) in 2014, Member of the European Academy of Engineering and Fellow of The World Academy of Sciences in 2015. He was elected IEEE Fellow in 1997 and became a Life Fellow in 2019. He was conferred Honorary Doctorates by Saint Petersburg State University, Russia in 2011 and by University of Le Havre, Normandy, France in 2014.

He is a Highly Cited Researcher in Engineering, the 2011 Euler Gold Medallist named by the Euler Foundation of Russia, and a recipient of the 2008, 2012 and 2016 Chinese State Natural Science Awards as well as 11 best journal paper awards. His main research pursuit is in nonlinear systems control and dynamics, as well as complex networks. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos.

Prof. Jürgen Kurths

Humboldt University Berlin, Germany

Biography

Kurths studied mathematics at the University of Rostock and was awarded his PhD in 1983 at the GDR Academy of Sciences, followed by his installation in 1991 in theoretical physics at the University of Rostock. In 1991, in a special program of the Max-Planck-Society, he was selected as one of a few scientists from East Germany to become a director of a new working group and he has formed an internationally well-known group on nonlinear dynamics. In 1994 he got a full-chair on theoretical physics/nonlinear dynamics at the University of Potsdam. There he was also Dean of the Science Faculty (1996–1999), and established as the founding director the Interdisciplinary Centre for Dynamics of Complex Systems (1994–2008). He was the founding director of the Leibniz-Kolleg Potsdam. In 2008, he was called to re-create the research domain Transdisciplinary Concepts at PIK and to bring complex systems perspectives into Earth system research and has become a Professor of Nonlinear Dynamics at the Institute of Physics at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and in 2009 a 6th-century chair for Complex Systems Biology at the Institute for Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology at Kings College, Aberdeen University. Since 2021, he is senior advisor at the PIK.