Prof Jonathan Jansen is Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Stellenbosch and President of the Academy of Science of South Africa. He started his career as a Biology teacher in the Cape and holds a PhD from Stanford as well as honorary doctorates from Edinburgh, Vermont, Cleveland State and the University of Cape Town. He is the author of the award-winning book, Knowledge in the Blood (Stanford University Press) and his recent books include The decolonization of knowledge (Cambridge University Press, with Cyrill Walters) and Corrupted: A study of chronic dysfunction in South African universities (Wits University Press). He was recently elected to membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and holds an A1rating from the National Research Foundation.

Ulrike Tillmann is a mathematician who has worked in topology, K- theory, and non-commutative geometry. Her well-known work on moduli spaces has been motivated by problems in quantum physics and string theory, while some of her recent work in applied topology addresses challenges in data science. Born in Germany, Tillmann attended her local grammar school. With the help of a Wien Scholarship she studied at Brandeis University and later received her PhD from Stanford University. Following a post-doctoral position in Cambridge she spent most of her career in Oxford and Merton College. Currently she is the Rothschild & Sons Professor in Cambridge, Director of the Isaac Newton Institute, President of the London Mathematical Society (LMS), and Vice-President of the International Mathematical Union (IMU). For her outstanding research Tillmann was awarded the Whitehead Prize by the LMS in 2004, the Bessel– Humboldt Forschungs Preis in 2008, elected an inaugural Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012 and a Member of the Leopoldina in 2017. She has been a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute since its establishment in 2015, and currently she serves on scientific boards of several international institutions, including the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF). A former member of Council of the Royal Society 2017-20 during which time she also served as interim Vice-President, she has chaired the Royal Society's Education Committee since 2020.

Dr Tendai Mugwagwa is a Director of Value & Evidence at Pfizer inc. Tendai holds PhD in Theoretical Immunology from Utrecht University in the Netherlands, a master’s in applied mathematics from the University of Cape Town in South Africa and a Post-graduate diploma from AIMS-South Africa. In her professional life Tendai focuses mainly on demonstrating the clinical and economic value of treatments and vaccines for infectious diseases. Before joining Pfizer, Tendai developed health economic models at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) to assess the value of public health interventions of controlling tuberculosis spread among populations with difficulties in accessing health care. Prior to joining UKHSA Tendai focused on the within host dynamics of infectious disease using dynamic models of lymphocytes and immunes responses to HIV and Flu infections in academia at Imperial college London, The University of Rochester Medical Center and Utrecht University. Tendai is a qualified high school biology and mathematics teacher and retains a passion for access and quality of mathematics and science education so spends her time outside of work on mentoring young women with an interest in STEM as well as teaching mathematical modelling courses across Africa. She is a trustee for METEA.

Neil Turok (PhD Imperial College London, 1983) was born to anti-apartheid activist parents who both later served as members of parliament in the New South Africa. Neil now holds the Higgs Chair of Theoretical Physics at the University of Edinburgh, UK and the Roger Penrose Visiting Chair at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. Previously, he was Professor of Physics at Princeton University and Chair of Mathematical Physics at the University of Cambridge. Neil is a global leader in developing and testing theories of the universe. His team’s predictions for the polarization-temperature correlations in the cosmic background radiation (CBR) and for galaxy-CBR correlations induced by dark energy were confirmed at high precision. He and his collaborator L. Boyle have recently proposed a novel approach to the key puzzles in cosmology, called the CPT-symmetric universe. In 2016, he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship of the UK Institute of Physics and the John Torrence Tate Medal of the American Institute of Physics for International Leadership in Physics. He is also an Officer of the Order of Canada.

Neil founded the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences in 2003 and is honoured to serve as Chair of its International Governing Board.

Professor Sabine Döring was appointed State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in February 2023.

Before joining the BMBF, she had held the position of philosophy professor at the University of Tübingen since 2008, where her focus was on practical philosophy (ethics). In 1997, Sabine Döring earned her doctorate at the University of Göttingen with a thesis on Robert Musil’s philosophy. She was a fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation). She then spent periods of research and teaching at institutions including the University of California, Berkeley, King's College London, and Universität Hamburg. In 2005, Professor Döring obtained her senior university lecturing qualification from the University of Duisburg-Essen with a postdoctoral thesis on ethics and emotions (title: Gründe und Gefühle. Zur Lösung des Problems der Moral).

In summer 2022, she was awarded the Opus Magnum fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation for her current research on political liberalism and her book project on solidarity and freedom entitled Solidarisch handeln in Freiheit. Eine liberale Theorie des Gemeinwohls.

Pelonomi is CEO and co-founder f Lelapa AI and spent 8 years in the data science domain, leading data science teams in developing and productionalising machine learning solutions in the finance industry.

She has Biomedical and Electrical Engineering degrees from the University of the Witwatersrand and an MSc from Tohoku University where she did research on a deep learning application for neurophysiology.

A community organiser she is Trustee of the Ruth First Jeppe Memorial Trust and runs the Code Kamoso coding academy for girl teens as co-director of The Ungovernable NPC. Pelonomi was named to the 200 Young South Africans list in 2019.

Pelonomi was named as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023, and appeared on the front page of Time Magazine!

Jade is CTO and co-founder of Lelapa AI, as well as being cofounder of Masakhane, a pan-African natural language processing (NLP) movement. She has 10 years experience building and professionalizing AI in industry working across banking to NGOs to startups. She is co-founder of Masakhane, the grassroots organisation driving NLP research in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. Abbott holds an MSc. from the University of Pretoria. Recent honours include being one of South Africa’s Inspiring Fifty 2020 and Mail&Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans 2021.