Hamid Reza Pourghasemi earned his PhD in watershed management engineering and sciences, from Tarbiat Modares University (TMU), in 2014. He also holds an MSc in watershed management engineering from TMU (2008), and a BSc in range and watershed engineering from Gorgan University (2004). His current scientific interests include landslides modelling, natural hazards, multi-hazard mapping, machine learning, and spatial modelling in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing (RS). He is also skilled in application of data mining/machine learning techniques in natural and man-made hazards (flood, gully erosion, forest fire, and land subsidence); application of GIS and RS in natural resources and environment; application of spatial multi criteria evaluation (SMCE) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP), and geo-statistics in hydrology. For his scientific results he has been selected as the best educational professor at Shiraz University, College of Agriculture (2017); distinguished researcher (2017); distinguished youngest researcher (2018); and distinguished researcher (2019) all at Shiraz University. Also, he was selected as Highly Cited Researcher in 2019 by Web Of Science.

Erfani was an assistant professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Basic Sciences (IASBS), Zanjan, Iran. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Bonn, Germany (2012). She got her master's in Iran before joining the High Energy Physics Diploma programme of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Italy, in 2007. After her Ph.D., she was a postdoc at the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences, Iran, and worked as a visiting scientist at ICTP-SAIFR, Brazil under a TWAS fellowship, before joining IASBS in 2016. Her research area is cosmology. She studies the origin of the Universe, its evolution, and its components like dark matter and dark energy. Erfani obtained international awards such as the ICTP Diploma programme scholarship (2007), the Bonn-Cologne graduate school scholarship (2009), TWAS fellowship for Research and Advanced Training (2014, 2015). She is a junior associate of ICTP, Italy since 2017. She is passionate about teaching, promoting science in public, and helping young students, especially females. In April 2018 she co-organized the first workshop ever in physics in Afghanistan, under the Physics Without Fronti