Plenary Lecturers

The defender of the “web of life” in the face of the climate crisis.

Sandra Díaz is an Argentine biologist and one of the world’s leading specialists in ecology and biodiversity. Her research addresses a crucial but sometimes overlooked aspect of the environmental crisis: the way climate change, land use and other global pressures transform the plant communities on which entire ecosystems depend.
Plants sustain the web of life. They provide food, shelter, regulate water and climate, store carbon and create the conditions in which animals, including humans, can survive. Díaz has shown that understanding biodiversity requires more than counting species. It is also necessary to study their functional traits: the characteristics that determine how organisms grow, reproduce, use resources and influence their environment.
She developed the first global quantitative picture of the essential functional diversity of vascular plants, known as the global spectrum of plant form and function. Her work has shaped the theory and practical use of functional diversity and helped explain how changes in plant communities affect ecosystem properties and human quality of life. She has also promoted plural approaches to the ways different societies value nature, including the influential concept of nature’s contributions to people.

Career and recognitions

Díaz studied Biology at the National University of Córdoba, where she graduated in 1984 and completed her PhD in 1989. She is Professor of Ecology at the same university and a Senior Principal Investigator of Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council. She co-founded TRY, the global communal plant-trait initiative, and co-chaired the Global Assessment of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. She also contributed to the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Her distinctions include the Margalef Prize in Ecology, the Gunnerus Sustainability Award, the Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award and the 2025 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of several national academies. Her international scientific work has made her a clear and influential voice in the defence of biodiversity and in the search for fairer ways of responding to environmental change.

The creator of new states of matter at ultracold temperatures

Wolfgang Ketterle is a German physicist whose experiments have created and explored forms of matter that appear only at temperatures extremely close to absolute zero. At such low temperatures, atoms lose much of their ordinary individual behaviour and begin to act collectively according to the laws of quantum mechanics.
Ketterle is best known for his work on Bose-Einstein condensation, a state of matter predicted in the 1920s but not observed in a dilute atomic gas until 1995. In a condensate, a large number of atoms occupy the same quantum state and behave like a single coherent wave. This makes it possible to study quantum phenomena on a scale that can be controlled directly in the laboratory.
His group also achieved the first realisation of an atom laser in 1997, producing a coherent beam of atoms in a way analogous to the coherent beam of light produced by an optical laser. His research continues to investigate superfluidity, coherence, correlations and strongly interacting many-body systems, providing new ways to test fundamental theories and simulate complex quantum materials.

Career and recognitions

Ketterle received his diploma from the Technical University of Munich in 1982 and completed his PhD in Physics at the University of Munich in 1986. He carried out postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and the University of Heidelberg before moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. He joined the MIT faculty in 1993 and has been the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics since 1998.
He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics with Eric A. Cornell and Carl E. Wieman for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation and early fundamental studies of condensates. His other honours include the Rabi Prize, the Gustav Hertz Prize, the Fritz London Memorial Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the MIT Killian Award and a Humboldt Research Award. He is a member of several academies of sciences and has received a number of honorary degrees.