Adnan is a researcher and academician from Bangladesh, with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in microbiology from the University of Dhaka, where he studied antibiotic pollution and resistance mechanisms. He earned his PhD at Tokyo Institute of Technology (2016), Japan, in the field of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. During his PhD, he designed and developed fusion polypeptides he used to carry out lineage specific differentiation from stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. His developed matrices are currently being used by various groups for in vivo studies. In Bangladesh, he set up a molecular biotechnology lab, a biotech farm, and the Bangamata National Cellular and Molecular Research Center (BNCMRC). Today, he is developing affordable point-of-care diagnostic devices, collaborating with locals and foreign groups to develop seed clones for biosimilar and biologic drugs. His also aims to establish a national cell bank and conduct research by mapping the genetic diversity of HLA haplotypes in the Bangladeshi population. He received research grants from: Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Technology, and University Grant Commission of Bangladesh.

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