Prof. Ajit Kembhavi is presently an Emeritus Professor at the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) in Pune, India.  He is one of the founders of IUCAA and has served as its Director and Distinguished Professor.  Over the decades, He has worked on gravitation theory, galaxies, quasars, pulsars, X-ray binaries, high-energy astrophysics, Virtual Observatories, Big Data and so forth.  Presently, he is working on applying AI to astronomy and, occasionally, to other domains.  He is seriously involved in teaching and public outreach and has written several books on astronomy in English and Marathi.

Prof. Annapurni Subramaniam has more than three decades of research experience and has published about 175 research publications in topics such as star clusters, stellar populations, galaxies, and ultraviolet astronomy. She has trained a large number of students in various projects and has guided 15 students for their Ph.D.s, and several more have collaborated with her for their thesis work. She was the calibration scientist for the Ultra-violet Imaging Telescope (UVIT) on-board AstroSat and carried out the in-orbit performance verification phase. She has contributed to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which is being built by an international consortium with India as a partner. She is the Principal Investigator of the proposed next generation UV-Optical space telescope (INSIST), leveraging on the experience gained from AstroSat and UVIT.

Prof. Biswajit Paul is a Professor at the Raman Research Institute (RRI), Bengaluru, and a leading Indian astrophysicist specializing in high-energy astrophysics. His research focuses on accreting neutron stars, X-ray pulsars, and X-ray binaries, with particular emphasis on accretion physics, pulse timing, and spectral variability. He has extensively used data from major X-ray missions such as RXTE, XMM-Newton, Suzaku, NuSTAR, AstroSat, and NICER. Prof. Paul has published widely in international journals and has played an important role in the scientific utilization of India’s AstroSat mission.

Dr. Sankarasubramanian K. is a senior solar scientist at the U R Rao Satellite Centre (URSC), Bengaluru. He obtained his PhD in Physics from Bangalore University through the Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru. His research areas of interest are the Solar Magnetic field, Optics, and Instrumentation. He has contributed to AstroSat, Chandrayaan-1 and Chandrayaan-2 missions of ISRO in several capacities. Currently, he is heading the Space Astronomy Group (SAG) of URSC. SAG is involved in developing scientific payloads for the upcoming missions of Aditya-L1, XPoSat, and science payload onboard the Chandrayaan-3 propulsion module. He is also the Principal Investigator for one of the X-ray payloads onboard Aditya-L1. Dr. Sankarasubramanian K also heads the Aditya-L1 Science Working Group, which has members from several institutes of India engaged in solar science research. 

Dr. Ajith P is a physicist/astrophysicist at the International Center for Theoretical Sciences (ICTS), Bangalore. His research spans different aspects of gravitational-wave astronomy: modeling of gravitational-wave sources by combining analytical and numerical relativity, gravitational-wave data analysis, interpretation of gravitational-wave observations, tests of general relativity using gravitational wave observations, and astrophysics. He has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration since 2004. Along with his colleagues at the ICTS Astrophysical Relativity Group, He has directly contributed to deciphering the recent LIGO discovery of gravitational waves.

Dr. Drisya Karinkuzhi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Calicut, India, specializing in nuclear astrophysics and stellar archaeology, particularly metal-poor and extrinsic stars. She earned her M.Sc. from the University of Calicut and her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics. Before joining Calicut University in 2021, she held several postdoctoral positions in India and Belgium. She has received prestigious fellowships, including the INSPIRE Faculty Fellowship and SERB National Postdoctoral Fellowship, and is actively involved in international collaborations and research projects in astrophysics.