Dr. Cathy Hohenegger
(Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, DE) is a climate scientist whose work has been central to advancing km-scale modeling of moist convection from weather to climate applications. Trained at ETH Zurich, she investigated the predictability of convection at the dawn of km-scale numerical weather prediction, followed by postdoctoral work at ETH and the University of Washington. Since 2011, she has led a research group at MPI-M, receiving her habilitation in 2021. Her research at MPI-M has focused on the dynamical controls of deep convection and land–ocean precipitation feedbacks. She has co-led the development of global km-scale climate models. Now she is excited by the next step, using km-scale earth system models to understand the coupling between water and carbon, which has culminated in the production of the first fully coupled water–energy–carbon cycle simulation at 1.25 km resolution, recognized by the 2025 Gordon Bell Prize in climate modeling.
Mike Pritchard
(NVIDIA) is the Director of Climate Simulation Research for NVIDIA, where he leads a research team working to re-imagine technology across the Earth System Modeling stack using new ideas in AI. His group of climate domain scientists and AI researchers has worked on applied topics such as AI for global-to-regional weather forecasting, climate state estimation, hybrid physics-AI climate simulation, steerable climate state sampling for high-resolution informatics, generative super-resolution, multi-component autoregressive Earth System prediction, and related problems of interest. Prior to joining NVIDIA Research in 2022, Mike was a Professor of Earth System Sciences at the University of California, Irvine (2013-2025), a NOAA Climate and Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington (2011-2013), and received his PhD in 2011 from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego. He remains affiliated with UC Irvine as an adjunct affiliate professor.
Prof. Dr. Thomas Schulthess
(CSCS - Swiss National Supercomputing Center, CH) is a Director of the CSCS and Professor of Computational Physics at ETH Zurich. Prof. Schulthess spearheaded innovations including Europe’s first GPU-accelerated supercomputing system and co-developed MeteoSwiss’ cutting-edge weather forecasting model optimized for GPU architectures, an achievement that earned the prestigious Swiss ICT Award in 2016. He has twice won the most prestigious prize in computing, the Gordon Bell Prize (2008, 2009), and has been a mastermind and architect of many of the innovative approaches required for simulations of the Earth system at kilometer and finer scales.
Prof. Tiffany Shaw
(University of Chicago, US) is a climate scientist whose work bridges theory, numerical models (physics-based and AI), and observations to improve confidence in climate projections. Her most recent research focuses on understanding the physical mechanisms underlying discrepancies between climate model predictions and observed signals, particularly in atmospheric circulation. She is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and the American Physical Society and a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report (AR7).
Dr. Axel Timmermann
(IBS Center for Climate Physics, Pusan National University, KR) is a leading Earth system scientist with more than two decades of internationally recognized research spanning Europe, the United States, and Asia. He is the founding director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics in Busan, South Korea. His work covers a broad spectrum osf topics, including high-energy physics, El Niño–Southern Oscillation dynamics, paleoclimate, physical oceanography, climate predictability, isotope geochemistry, dynamical systems, human evolution, and theoretical ecology. His current research focuses on speleothem-based climate reconstructions from the Kalahari Desert, models of terrestrial life, and high-resolution Earth system modeling.
Invited speakers
- Ryan Abernathy* (Columbia University)
- Francisco Doblas-Reyes (BSC)
- Peter Dueben (ECMWF)
- Claudia Frauen (DKRZ)
- Nicolas Gruber (ETH Zurich)
- Christian Jakob (Monash University)
- Tobias Kölling (MPI-M)
- Jenni Kontkanen (CSC-IT)
- Bryan Lawrence (NCAS)
- Hailong Liu (Laoshan Laboratory)
- Tina Odaka (IFREMER)
- Adam Sobel (Columbia University)
- Allison Wing (Florida State University)
- Laure Zanna* (New York University)
* pending confirmation
As part of 
