Idelfonso Tafur Monroy obtained his MSc from Saint Petersburg University of Telecommunications (Russia) in 1992 and his PhD in Electrical Engineering from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in 1999. He also took courses at Stockholm University (Sweden), KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) and Utrecht University. Tafur Monroy worked as Assistant Professor in Electro-Optical Communications at TU/e from 1999 to 2006, after which he became Associate Professor and later Full Professor at DTU Fotonik (Denmark). In the meantime, Tafur Monroy also worked at Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications (China), UC Berkeley (USA) and ITMO University (Russia) as visiting professor.
Tafur Monroy founded Bifrost Communications in 2015. In 2017, he returned to TU/e to become Full Professor in the Electrooptical Communication (ECO) group of the electrical engineering department and to join the Institute for Photonic Integration. He is currently the leader of the team Quantum and Terahertz Systems (QTS) within the ECO group.
Mikhail Gryaznevich, M.Sc., Ph.D., Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Chartered Physicist.
Born 1954 in Leningrad, received Honours Diploma in Plasma Physics at the Leningrad University in 1977 and PhD in Plasma Physics and Nuclear Fusion in 1988 at Ioffe Institute.
Since 1990, he has been working at the Culham Laboratory, UK, United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority on START, MAST and JET tokamaks, leading experimental programmes, preparing and performing experiments, designing, constructing and operating tokamak systems and diagnostics, supervising students, scientific and engineering staff. Supervised and participated in design, assembly and commissioning of START and MAST tokamaks and their systems.
Performed experiments on 21 tokamaks and stellarators, including JET, MAST, START, ST25, ST25HTS, ST40 (UK), AUG (Germany), DIII-D, NSTX, HIDRA (USA), JT-60U, TST-2, (Japan), VEST (Korea), T-10, TUMAN-3 (Russia), COMPASS, GOLEM (Czech Rep), ETE, TCABR (Brazil), STOR-2M (Canada), TJ-2 (Spain), supervising and participating in experiments. Worked for IAEA Co-ordinated Research Projects, chairing the Scientific Committee on Small Fusion Devices, co-ordinating international activities in this area, organising IAEA International Joint experiments.
Since 2009 he is the Chief Scientist and Executive Director at Tokamak Energy Ltd, working on ST path to Fusion Power and the use of the high temperature superconductors (HTS) in Fusion magnets. He was playing a leading role in construction and operations of a compact high-field spherical tokamak ST40 and in conceptual design of the ST-based Fusion Pilot Plant.
