Keynote Speakers

John R. Gilchrist

Dr. John R. Gilchrist is an applied physicist and specialist in optical spectroscopy and hyperspectral imaging with over 35 years of experience in the development, commercialisation, and application of advanced optical instrumentation. He is the co-founder of three companies and the founding director, in 2020, of ClydeHSI who specialise in hyperspectral cameras and, in particular, the delivery of complete hyperspectral imaging systems for scientific, industrial, and applied measurement applications. Over his career he has combined deep technical expertise with senior executive leadership roles across optical and spectroscopy businesses in both the UK and the USA, including positions at Horiba Jobin Yvon Inc., Gas Measurement Instruments Ltd, and Edinburgh Instruments Ltd.

Dr. Gilchrist holds a PhD and BSc in Applied Physics from the University of Strathclyde, where his doctoral research pioneered Opto-Thermal Transient Emission Radiometry (OTTER), a time-resolved technique used to characterise optical and thermal properties of materials. He has supervised numerous postgraduate students and has held visiting professor positions at the University of Bath and the University of Strathclyde, where he contributed to the development of hyperspectral imaging research activities. Since 2018 he has been actively involved in the development of the IEEE P4001 hyperspectral imaging standard, initially serving as Secretary of the working group and becoming Chairman in 2021. In this role he works closely alongside leading international experts including Prof. Torbjørn Skauli (University of Oslo) and Chris Durell (Labsphere) as well as other academic, research, and industrial specialists in the field to develop standards for hyperspectral imaging system characterisation and calibration.

Hugh Turvey

Hugh Turvey is an experimentalist and contemporary pioneer of the "Xogram," a genre situated at the critical intersection of fine art and radiographic science. With a career spanning over 30 years, he is uniquely positioned between the worlds of aesthetic photography and technical imaging, exploring the hidden structures of the ordinary.

An Accredited Senior Imaging Scientist and Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), Hugh has served as Chair of the RPS Science Committee and is the inaugural Artist in Residence at the British Institute of Radiology (BIR). A key advocate for cross-disciplinary collaboration, he initiated the strategic partnership between the RPS and the Royal Society, where he currently serves as a judge for the Royal Society Publishing Photography Competition (Celebrating the power of photography in capturing scientific phenomena). His work is exhibited globally—from traditional galleries to international science symposia and healthcare environments—functioning as a vital bridge for public engagement by translating complex scientific imagery into a universal visual language.

Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Cambridge. There, she is head of the Cambridge Image Analysis group. Since 2011 she is a fellow of Jesus College Cambridge. Her current research interests focus on variational methods, partial differential equations and machine learning for image analysis, image processing and inverse imaging problems, and the mathematical foundations of machine learning. She has active interdisciplinary collaborations with clinicians, biologists and physicists on biomedical imaging topics, chemical engineers and plant scientists on image sensing, as well as collaborations with artists and art conservators on digital art restoration.

Her research has been acknowledged by scientific prizes, among them the LMS Whitehead Prize 2016, the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2017, the Calderon Prize 2019, a Royal Society Wolfson fellowship in 2020, a doctorate honoris causa from the University of Klagenfurt in 2022, a SIAM fellowship in 2024 and an ELLIS fellowship in 2025, and by invitations to give invited lectures at several renowned applied mathematics conferences, including SIAM, ICM and ICIAM.

Carola graduated from the Institute for Mathematics, University of Salzburg (Austria) in 2004. From 2004 to 2005 she held a teaching position in Salzburg. She received her PhD degree from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2009. After one year of postdoctoral activity at the University of Göttingen (Germany), she became a Lecturer at Cambridge in 2010, promoted to Reader in 2015, promoted to Professor in 2018, and elected to the Professorship of Applied Mathematics (2006) in 2025. Carola convened the European Women in Mathematics Association between 2016 and 2020 and chaired the Committee for Applications and Interdisciplinary Relations (CAIR) of the EMS from 2021 to 2025. She also has been holding several leadership positions at SIAM.