Al Gore
45th Vice President of the United States
Al Gore is the founder and chairman of The Climate Reality Project, a nonprofit devoted to solving the climate crisis. He is the author of the #1 New York Times best-sellers An Inconvenient Truth and The Assault on Reason and the NYT best-sellers Earth in the Balance,Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change, and most recently, An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. In 2007, Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for “informing the world of the dangers posed by climate change.”
Fabiola Gianotti
CERN Director-General
Fabiola Gianotti received a PhD in experimental particle physics from the University of Milan in 1989 and joined CERN as a research physicist in 1994. From 2009 to 2013, she was the head (“spokesperson”) of the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It was during this period that the ATLAS and CMS experiments announced the discovery of the Higgs boson.
She was appointed Director-General of CERN for a first term of office starting in 2016 and renewed for a second term starting in 2021. She is the first woman to have held this role, and the first Director-General to be reappointed for a full second term. She has received 15 honorary doctoral degrees from universities across the world and is a foreign member of eight academies of science worldwide. She was ranked fifth in Time magazine’s Person of the Year issue in 2012. In 2013, she was a joint recipient of both the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics and the Italian Physical Society’s Enrico Fermi Prize, and in 2019 she received the Tate Medal for International Leadership from the American Institute of Physics.
Benoit Delile
CERN, Head of Health & Safety and Environmental Protection Unit
Benoit Delille leads the Occupational Health & Safety and Environmental Protection Unit at CERN since January 2021. HSE’s mission is support CERN’s safety policy and oversee the implementation of environmental protection. In particular, the unit ensures that the impact of the Organization’ s activities on the public and the environment is monitored and that pollution prevention, noise and waste minimisation and conservation of resources is integrated into projects and existing activities to limit their environmental impact.
Rebeca Grynspan
Secretary-General of UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD)
Rebeca Grynspan, appointed in 2021 as the Secretary-General of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), is the first woman to lead the institution. A prominent advocate for sustainable development, she also coordinates the UN Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy, and Finance, addressing economic impacts of the Ukraine conflict. Grynspan’s extensive career includes roles as Secretary-General of the Ibero-American Conference (2014-2021), former UN Under-Secretary-General, and Associate Administrator of the UN Development Programme. Earlier, she served as Vice-President of Costa Rica and held various ministerial roles, focusing on economic and social issues. .
Joeri Rogelj
Professor of Climate & Science Policy, Imperial College London
Prof. Joeri Rogelj is Director of Research at the Grantham Institute and Professor of Climate Science & Policy at Imperial College London, focusing on pathways for a sustainable and climate-resilient future. His research bridges Earth system sciences, societal change, and policy, with significant contributions to climate agreements like the Paris Agreement and studies on emission pathways for limiting global warming to 1.5°C and 2°C. He is a lead author for the UN Emissions Gap Reports and the IPCC, contributing to crucial assessments that inform international climate policy. He served as Coordinating Lead Author on the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and as a Lead Author for the IPCC Sixth Assessment. In 2019, he joined the UN Secretary-General's Climate Science Advisory Group, and since 2022, he has been part of the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change. He was awarded the 2021 Early Career Scientist Award from the International Science Council and the 2016 Piers Sellers Award for solution-focused climate research.
