Andrea Pinotti is professor in Aesthetics in the department of Philosophy “Piero Martinetti”, Università di Milano. His research focuses on image theories and visual culture studies, virtual and augmented reality, memorialisation and monumentality, empathy theories, and the morphological tradition from Goethe to the present day. He has been fellow of various international institutions, including the Italian Academy at Columbia University, the Warburg Institute in London, the ZFL in Berlin, the IEA and the FMSH in Paris. Among his publications the volumes Il corpo dello stile. Storia dell’arte come storia dell’estetica a partire da Semper, Riegl, Wölfflin (1998), Memorie del neutro. Morfologia dell’immagine in Aby Warburg(2001), Empathie. Histoire d’une idée de Platon au post-humain (2016), Cultura visuale. Immagini sguardi media dispositivi (in collaboration with Antonio Somaini, 2016). In 2018, he was awarded the Wissenschaftspreis der Aby-Warburg-Stiftung in Hamburg. He is currently directing an ERC-Advanced project entitled An-iconology. History, Theory, and Practices of Environmental Images (2019-24). 

Aniket is one of the most distinguished landscape architects in India. He guides the process of conceptualization, and execution of all the commissions that the studio undertakes. He believes that every space must be designed to tell narratives, and challenge the conventional notions associated with any design typology.

He has been deeply involved in academics since 1985, and has led studios in landscape architecture, architecture, and interior design.

He now utilizes the same principles of teaching, and knowledge creation with LEAF, and guides the various research and outreach documents that the foundation undertakes.

David Kirsh is professor & past chair at the Cognitive Science Department, University of California San Diego. During 2017-2019 he was Leverhulme Visiting Professor at The Bartlett School of Architecture University College London where he continues part-time. He is currently President of ANFA. He received a D. Phil. From Oxford Univ in Philosophy & Cognitive Science, did post-doctoral work in Artificial Intelligence at MIT (AI Lab), and held Research or Visiting Professor positions at: MIT - Comp Sci, Stanford Univeristy - Grad School of Education, Comp Sci, Music upcoming, Univ College London - Comp Sci, Architecture, Paris University - Sociology, Comp Sci, Adjunct Prof in Dance at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, London. 

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He has written extensively on situated cognition, especially on how the environment can be shaped to simplify and extend cognition, including how we intelligently use space, and how we use external representations as an interactive tool for thought. He runs the Interactive Cognition Lab at UCSD where the focus is on the way humans are closely coupled to the outside world, and how human environments have been adapted to enable us cope with the complexity of everyday life. Some recent projects focus on ways humans use their bodies as things to think with, specifically in dance making, how thought unfolds in many modalities, and how new media tools are reshaping thought, especially in the different stages of design. He is currently working on a new theory of interaction and visual reasoning. David Kirsh is a Board Member and Past President of ANFA (Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture), an international non-profit, based in La Jolla, California. 

Galen Cranz is a designer, a consultant, and a Professor of the Graduate School in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught social and cultural approaches to architecture and urban design, and established the field of Body Conscious Design, which she taught for 30 years.

She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique mid-career in New York. Cranz has lectured widely on her perspective on Body Conscious Design and taught her unique approach at craft schools in the US and abroad. Her
research on the chair has attracted print and media attention nationally and internationally. The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (Norton 1998) received a 2004 Achievement Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).

As a designer she has been part of significant park design competition teams for Spectacle Island, Boston Inner Harbor; Olympia Fields, Chicago; Tschumi’s Parc de LaVillette in Paris, and lead designer for and winner of the St. Paul Cityscape competition. She holds two US patents for body-conscious bathtub and chair designs. In 2005-2007 she designed and built a residence for the elderly following universal design principles.

Jonas Kjellander, born in Sweden with a background as longtime resident in Asia and Latin America, is a senior architect and lighting designer at Sweco Architects, Sweden. Jonas has comprehensive experience in public and private developments involving building, interior and urban design.  He is the responsible architect and/or lighting designer for a wide selection of schools, higher education, kindergartens, activity centers, libraries, offices, retail, restaurants, sport facilities, residential buildings and historic environments, of which a considerable amount have been published nationally and internationally. His international experience comprises China, Malaysia, Panama, Mexico, Greece, Austria and Norway.

Jonas is devoted to design for social sustainability with the children's perspective and lighting as a major tool for pedagogy, inclusion and wellbeing. He has been awarded the Swedish Lighting Prize three times as well as the Nordic Lighting Prize and the Great Merit Prize by the Swedish Lighting Foundation. He is a frequent lecturer on the integrated fields of architecture, children and light.

Katharina Wulff, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of chronobiology and sleep at Umeå University in Northern Sweden where she established the Nordic Daylight Research Programme. She earned her Master’s degree in biology at the Free University Berlin in 1996, after returning from conservation projects at the Coastal Old Growth Forests of British Columbia, Canada. Wulff completed her doctoral thesis in human behavioural chronobiology at the Humboldt-University Berlin in 2001 and moved with a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship to Imperial College London, UK in 2002, bringing human aspects of sleep and circadian adaptation to the lab of prof. Russell Foster, while working in close collaboration with prof. Derk-Jan Dijk, Surrey Sleep Research Centre and Eileen Joyce, emeritus prof. of neurology at UCL.

Wulff moved to Oxford University in 2006, where she expanded her research on how sleep and circadian phenotypes impact physical and mental wellbeing. In 2019, the family relocated to Umeå in Northern Sweden to consider subarctic climate factors as means of temporal predictors that challenge human biology and necessitates thinking of a sunlight-adapted architecture. She recently served on the ‘Sleep, Circadian Rhythms and Mental Health Advisory Committee’ of the Wellcome Trust, and is a co-founder of the Light Collaboration Network (LCN), an past speaker of the Daylight Academy (DLA).

Mark Alan Hewitt, FAIA, is an architect, historian, and preservationist practicing in the New York area. Educated at Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, he has taught at leading schools of architecture throughout the U.S., including Rice, Columbia, and the New Jersey Institute of Technology. His design practice focuses on architectural conservation, history of the built environment, adaptive reuse, and traditional design for residential and institutional clients. He is active as an advocate for sustainable design, historic preservation, social justice, and housing equity for all humans. 

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Hewitt is the author of seven books and dozens of articles on architectural history, theory, and practice. He has published extensively on American architecture of the Progressive era, and has written numerous biographies of American architects. His latest book, Draw In Order to See, is the first to trace the history of architectural design using cognitive neuroscience and embodiment as a basis for analysis. 

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He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, a recipient of the Arthur Ross Award for publishing on classical architecture, and a former NEH Winterthur Fellow. He has also won design awards for projects ranging from single family houses to churches. He continues to do research bridging the gap between the sciences, social sciences, and humanities as a cultural historian and critic.

Meghal Arya, an educator and an architect is a full professor at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University, India where her design studios build narratives with tools like story boards to foreground experiential qualities of a space in the design process. Her doctoral research Embedded Knowledge in Architecture, later published as Spatial Ecology of Water has influenced a paradigm shift in the manner of studying and analysing traditional architecture for water, positioning the objects at the intersection of architecture, systems thinking, infrastructure planning, landscape, heritage and history. She developed a framework to unpack this intersection calling it Spatial Ecology wherein the spaces embedded an interconnected network of influences that included the physical built and natural environment, technology, materials, social and cultural practices. She has collaborated with teachers at ETSAM Madrid, TU Wien, Vienna and POLIMI, Milan to conduct design studios. She conducts training programs for teachers in architecture and has several publications to her credit.

The academic orientation influences the building projects at Arya Architects where Meghal is a founding partner. The firm’s work is shaped by the idea of ‘appropriate’ that straddles traditional and contemporary technology through abstract diagrammatic conceptual ideas, often materialised by local material and building traditions. The negotiation of this dichotomy, is reflected in the relation with the outside, where the boundaries between binaries like built-unbuilt, inside-outside, natural-human, open-closed are ambiguous, blurred and diffused. The narrative incorporates elements like courtyards, semi-open spaces and transition spaces, translating as an emphasis on investigating meaningful ways of interaction between these binaries. Most projects of the firm are in the public domain, seeking to bring dignity, equity and inclusion in the everyday. The firm’s portfolio includes public projects related to transport infrastructure, educational institutions and special buildings like zoo. They are published in leading publications and recipient of numerous awards. She is also the managing trustee at AADI Center, a non-profit trust dedicated to furthering knowledge in art, architecture and design.

Sachin Soni is a Senior Associate Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University, Ahmedabad and currently chairs the Bachelor of Architecture program there. He teaches architecture and urban design studios, and architectural history and theory. Sachin holds a Bachelor of Architecture from CEPT University and a Master’s degree in City Design & Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), UK. He has practiced independently and worked with Architect Neelkanth Chhaya before joining CEPT. His special interests include architectural language and exploring alternative paradigms for creating inclusive urban spaces in Indian cities.

Sameep Padora completed his undergraduate studies in Mumbai in 1996 followed by post-graduate studies at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University in 2005. He is the principal architect and founder of Mumbai based studio, sP+a (Sameep Padora & Associates) as well as Director of sPare, a research initiative looking at issues of urbanization & architecture in India. sPare’s maiden project, a documentation and analysis of historic housing types within the city of Mumbai resulted in a traveling exhibition entitled ‘In the Name of Housing’ and a book published by the UDRI. He is also one of the founding members of the Bandra Collective, an organization of architects involved with the design of public spaces in Mumbai.

His practice has received numerous awards including Wallpaper Magazine’s award for single-family house of the year, the WAN 21 for 21 Award for Emerging International Practices and the MARMOMACC award for Architecture in Stone. His studio’s work has also received commendations at the AR Emerging Architecture Awards and has been nominated for the BSI Swiss Architecture Award. In 2016 the studio’s projects have been a basis for a travelling solo exhibition entitled Projective Histories.

In 2017 sP+a won two prestigious international competitions, for the National War Museum at India Gate in Delhi and the Maharashtra Nature Park In Mumbai. Sameep is also a member of academic councils for a number of architectural schools in India and is a member of the National Technical Committee of Habitat for Humanity, India.

Sarah Robinson is an architect, writer and educator whose practice is based in Pavia, Italy. Her writing and research is concerned with the many ways that the built environment shapes body, mind and culture. Her books, Nesting: Body, Dwelling Mind (William Stout, 2011), Mind in Architecture: Neuroscience, Embodiment and the Future of Design with Juhani Pallasmaa (MIT, 2015) and Architecture is a Verb, (Routledge, 2021) are among the first works to engage the dialogue between architecture and the cognitive sciences.

Holding degrees in both philosophy and architecture, she was the founding president of the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture board of governors.

She is Adjunct Professor in Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark, and she is a member of the scientific board of NAAD at IUAV, Venice. 

Satchidananda (Satchin) Panda, Ph.D. is a Professor at the Salk Institute in California, where his research focuses on the circadian regulation of behavior, physiology, and metabolism in model organisms and in humans. Dr. Panda discovered a blue-light sensing cell type in the retina which entrains our master circadian clock, affects mood, and regulates the production of the sleep hormone melatonin. Recently, he discovered that maintaining a daily feeding-fasting cycle – popularly known as time-restricted feeding (TRF) – can prevent and reverse metabolic diseases. Based on a feasibility study in humans, his lab is currently carrying out a smartphone-based study to assess the extent of circadian disruption among adults. Dr. Panda has received the Julie Martin Mid-Career Award in Aging Research, Dana Foundation Award in Brain and Immune System Imaging, and was a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences.

Suchi Reddy is an Indian-American architect and artist. She is the founder of Reddymade, an architecture, design and public art practice based in New York City.

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Raised in Chennai, India, Reddy studied architecture in India at Anna University. She moved to the United States at age 18 and earned her Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Detroit. She has worked at Arquitectonica, Polshek Partnership, and Gabellini Sheppard.

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Reddy founded her firm, Reddymade, in 2002 with a focus on architecture and neuroaesthetics. She has described her mantra as "form follows feeling," which focuses on how design can impact wellbeing.

Reddy teaches at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. In 2019, she was appointed Plym Distinguished Visiting Professor at the architecture school of the University of Illinois School of Architecture. 

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Reddy's work is guided by the mantra "form follows feeling," which examines architecture's relationship with the body. She has written and lectured about architecture and neuroaesthetics. In 2019, she designed the installation, "A Space for Being," in collaboration with Google executive Ivy Ross, Muuto, and Susan Magsamen at the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University for Salone del Mobile in Milan to explore physiological response to the stimuli of our designed environment.

Tatiana Berger (Princeton University, UC Berkeley) is an architect, urban designer, entrepreneur, consultant and educator. She worked as an architect for over 35 years in the U.S., Portugal, Spain and Austria. Her built works, collaborations and community plans were published in international periodicals and presented in exhibitions in Europe and U.S.  Berger worked with Richard Meier in New York,  was Director of the Sochi Olympics 2014 project for ILF Engineers and project architect for Baumschlager-Eberle in Bregenz, Austria. From 1997-2004 she worked as project architect and manager in the office of Alvaro Siza in Porto. Berger's built work, designed in collaboration with architects named above, is found in Porto, Lisbon and Viana do Castelo in Portugal, and also in Austria, the Netherlands, China, Russia and the U.S. In addition to architecture, her experience in professional practice includes landscape design and urban planning, furniture/product design, and construction administration.     ​

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Berger is Founder and Director of Moving Boundaries Collaborative, which provides educational services and design/consulting services. She is guest lecturer at NAAD in Venice, ETH Zurich, NeuroArq Brazil, NAD Chile, and the BAC. She was Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the NewSchool of Architecture & Design in San Diego and Professor of Architecture at the Boston Architectural College. A member of the Advisory Council of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA), she developed a new curriculum in architectural theory and studio with a focus on ANFA themes as faculty in the pioneering Neuroscience for Architecture Program at NewSchool. She is President of ANFA Portugal, a new international chapter. ​

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​She has lectured internationally on topics in architectural theory, urbanism and health, regionalism, and transdisciplinary design education. Berger has directed and curated multiple international conferences and courses in human-centered design. She is increasingly involved in research in dynamic sensory experience of the built environment informed by knowledge from the human sciences. 

Tim Ingold is currently Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen. He began his professional career at the University of Manchester, where he was to spend 25 years before moving to Aberdeen in 1999 to establish Scotland’s youngest Department of Anthropology. He retired in 2018.

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Ingold has carried out ethnographic fieldwork with Sámi and Finnish people in Lapland, leading to broader comparative interests in the peoples of the circumpolar North, as well as in the role of animals in human society, in issues of human ecology and evolutionary theory, and in environmental perception and skilled practice.

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In his later work on lines and linearity, Ingold has laid out new field of inquiry at the intersection of anthropology, archaeology, art, and architecture. This has since broadened out to wider questions surrounding perception and imagination, education for conviviality, and intergenerational relations. His latest book, The Rise and Fall of Generation Now, was published in 2024. A Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Ingold was made a CBE in 2022 for his contributions to Anthropology.