Claudio Pellegrini was born in Rome and studied physics at “Università La Sapienza” where he received the Laurea Summa Cum Laude in 1958. He worked initially at Frascati National Laboratory in Italy and later at the Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, CERN. In 1989 he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus. After retiring from UCLA, he joined the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory as an Adjunct Professor of Photon Sciences. After an initial period working on high energy physics and general relativity his research concentrated on many body, collective and self-organization phenomena in particle beams and their applications to particle colliders for high energy physics and the generation of coherent X-ray radiation with free-electron lasers. Pellegrini’s work established the theoretical and experimental foundation of X-ray free-electron lasers, leading to their construction in the USA and worldwide, opening a new window to explore atomic and molecular science and producing breakthrough new advances in chemistry, physics, materials science and biology. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Fulbright Fellow. He received the honors of “Ufficiale Ordine al Merito della Repubblica Italiana”. He received the American Physical Society R.R. Robert Wilson Prize and the Free-electron Laser Prize. In 2015 he received from President Obama the Enrico Fermi Presidential Award “for pioneering research advancing understanding of relativistic electron beams and free-electron lasers, and for transformative discoveries profoundly impacting the successful development of the first hard x-ray free-electron laser, heralding a new era for science.” He is a member of the USA National Academy of Sciences.

Nicola Di Cosmo is the Henry Luce Foundation Professor of East Asian Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies (2003-present). He holds a PhD from Indiana University in Uralic and Altaic Studies, and a BA from the University of Venice (Italy). He has been a Research Fellow at Cambridge University, taught at Harvard University and at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and held numerous visiting or teaching positions in Japan, China, France, Italy, and the US. He is also Visiting Professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University.

His work has been on the history of Chinese and Inner Asian frontiers from the ancient to the modern periods, history of nomadic peoples, and history of late imperial China. His authored and edited books include Ancient China and Its Enemies: The Rise of Nomadic Power in east Asian History (Cambridge) Manchu-Mongol Relations on the Eve of the Qing Conquest (Brill), The Diary of a Manchu Soldier in Seventeenth Century China (Routledge) and several edited books: Military Culture in Imperial China (Harvard), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia, vol II (Cambridge), Warfare in Inner Asian History (Brill), and most recently Exchange and Empires in the Eurasian Late Antiquity (Cambridge 2018).

His most recent work tries to integrate paleoclimatic data and historical sources, with special reference to the history of Medieval Eurasia and the Mongol empire. His articles in this area have been published in Scientific Reports, Nature Geoscience, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History and Climate Change among others.