Gerard Ateshian is the Andrew Walz Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Musculoskeletal Research Laboratory at Columbia University in New York City.  His primary research is in the field of soft tissue mechanics, with an emphasis on cartilage mechanics, lubrication, and tissue engineering, and the formulation of growth theories for biological tissues.  In collaboration with Prof. Clark T. Hung at Columbia, he has translated his findings on cartilage mechanics to the field of functional cartilage tissue engineering, with a particular focus on the role of mechanical loading in tissue growth. Together with Dr. Jeffrey A. Weiss at the University of Utah, he has developed open-source computational tools that facilitate the modeling of tissue mechanics, transport, and growth processes (febio.org).  He has applied and validated these tools with the modeling of engineered cartilage growth.

Kristin Myers is an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Columbia University in the City of New York. In 2010 she founded the Myers Soft Tissue Lab at Columbia, which uses experimental, theoretical, and computational mechanics to solve problems in Women's Health and Reproductive Biomechanics. With clinical translation in mind, her lab is uncovering the structural antecedents of preterm birth. Her current obstetrics research is done in collaboration with the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. She received her Mechanical Engineering doctorate and master's degree from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her bachelor's degree from the University of Michigan. In 2017 Kristin was given the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Y.C. Fung Young Investigators award for her contributions to the field of biomechanics, and in 2019 Kristin was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for her work in understanding tissue growth and remodelling in pregnancy.

João Manuel R. S. Tavares is a senior researcher at the Instituto de Ciência e Inovação em Engenharia Mecânica e Engenharia Industrial (INEGI) and Associate Professor with Habilitation at the Department of Mechanical Engineering (DEMec) of the Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto (FEUP). He graduated in Mechanical Engineering at the Universidade do Porto, Portugal in 1992. He earned his M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Universidade do Porto in 1995 and 2001, respectively,  and the  Habilitation in Mechanical Engineering in 2015 from the same University.  João Tavares is co-editor of more than 50 books, co-author of more than 35 book chapters and 650 articles in international and national journals and conferences. Further, he is author of 3 international as well as 3 national patents. He has been a committee member of several international and national journals and conferences, and is the co-founding and co-series editor of the book series 'Lecture Notes in Computational Vision and Biomechanics' published by Springer. He is the founding editor and Editor-in-Chief of the journal 'Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization' published by Taylor & Francis, and co-founder and co-chair of the international conference series CompIMAGE, ECCOMAS VipIMAGE, ICCEBS, and BioDental.  Additionally, he has been (co)supervisor of several M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses and supervisor of several postdoc projects. He has participated in many scientific projects both as a researcher and as a scientific coordinator. His main research areas include computational vision, medical imaging, computational mechanics, scientific visualization, human-computer interaction, and new product development. More information can be found at his personal page at www.fe.up.pt/-tavares