Professor Fengzhou Fang has been working in the fields of freeform optics design and manufacturing, bio-manufacturing, and ultra-precision machining and metrology since he became a faculty member at the university in 1982. He developed the theory of the three paradigms of manufacturing advancement, which identified atomic and close-to-atomic scale manufacturing as the fundamental technology of the new manufacturing paradigm, Manufacturing III. His contributions to micro/nano manufacturing and ultra-precision machining technologies, especially on the fundamentals of nanometric cutting, are widely adopted and referenced in new manufacturing processes. He has been elected Fellow of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP), the International Academy of Engineering and Technology (AET), the International Society for Nanomanufacturing (ISNM), and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME).

Professor Fang is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), the current President of CIRP, the President of AET, and the Editor-in-Chief of Nanomanufacturing and Metrology.

André Walter is Chief Executive Officer of Airbus Aerostructures GmbH. In this role he is in charge of leading the plants Hamburg, Stade, Nordenham and Bremen with more than 10.000 employees. Airbus Aerostructures is the backbone of Airbus in Germany for structural assembly and equipping.  Until June 2022 André Walter was Head of Hamburg Plant and Industrial Site and Chairman of the Board of Management of Airbus Operations GmbH. He joined the Airbus management team in Hamburg on 1 April 2019. Prior to this, he was Head of Site and Plant of the Airbus site in Bremen for four years. In 2006, he moved to Airbus in Bremen and took over the management of the division for metallic materials and processes. In the following years, André Walter gained extensive experience at Airbus in various management positions in materials and process research. Before joining Airbus, André Walter was Technical Manager and Scientific Assistant at the Institute for Materials Science, University of Bremen. André Walter is married and has three children. He studied mechanical engineering at the
University of Hanover and has received his doctorate at the University of Bremen.

Prof. Bernhard Karpuschewski graduated from the University of Hannover, Germany. He received his Ph.D. degree in 1995 and worked as chief engineer at the Institute for Production Engineering and Machine Tools (IFW) until April 1999. From 1999 until 2000 he worked as Associate Professor at the Keio University, Yokohama (Japan). After that he was appointed as full professor for production engineering and head of the Laboratory for Production Technology and Organisation (PTO) at the Technical University of Delft (Netherlands), where he worked until March 2005. From April 2005 until August 2017 he was appointed as full professor for production engineering and managing director of the Institute for Production Technology and Quality Management (IFQ) at the Otto-von-Guericke-University in Magdeburg (Germany). Since September 2017 he is full professor for manufacturing technologies at the University of Bremen and Director of the Division Manufacturing Technology at the Leibniz Institute for Materials Engineering IWT, Bremen.

Kirsten Tracht is professor at the faculty of production engineering of the University of Bremen and speaker of the Bremen Institute for Mechanical Engineering. She studied mechanical engineering at the University of Hannover and received her PhD under the supervision of Prof. H.K. Tönshoff in the field of die and mould making. She received the Kienzle-Medal. She is responsible for the master’s study course ‘production engineering’. Her research focuses on assembly technologies and production design techniques in industrial settings.