Delfim F. M. Torres is a Full Professor at the Department of Mathematics of University of Aveiro, and Coordinator of the Systems and Control Group of CIDMA. He is Director of the FCT Doctoral Programme Consortium in Mathematics and Applications (MAP-PDMA) of Universities of Minho, Aveiro, Porto and UBI. Eleven Ph.D. students in Math and nine post-docs have successfully finished under his supervision. He served as an Associate Editor for the SIAM Conference on Control and Its Applications (CT13), held in San Diego, USA, July 8-10, 2013 (joint with the 2013 SIAM Annual Meeting), was a member of the Program Committee (PC) of SIAM-CT15, held in Paris, France, July 8 to 10, 2015, and is member of the PC of SIAM-CT17, to be held in Pittsburgh, PA, USA from July 8 to 10, 2017. His main research area is calculus of variations and optimal control; optimization (MSC 49-XX), with emphasis on the regularity of solutions and necessary optimality conditions, fractional derivatives and integrals (MSC 26A33), dynamic equations on time scales or measure chains (MSC 34N05), and Mathematical Biology (MSC 92D30). Delfim F. M. Torres has written more than 300 scientific and pedagogical publications. In particular, he has co-authored two books about the Fractional Calculus of Variations with Imperial College Press and World Scientific Publishing, 2012 and 2015, a book on Quantum Variational Calculus with Springer, 2014, and a book on Advanced Methods in the Fractional Calculus of Variations with Springer, 2015. He has a strong experience in graduate and post-graduate student supervision and teaching in applied mathematics, both in Portugal and abroad. Moreover, he has been team leader and member in several national and international R&D projects, including EU projects and networks. He was (2011-2014) a Key Scientist of the European Marie Curie Project SADCO (Sensitivity Analysis for Deterministic Controller Design), Network for Initial Training, under the 7th Framework Programme FP7-PEOPLE-2010-ITN, grant agreement number 264735-SADCO. Delfim F. M. Torres is a Highly Cited Researcher, having been recently awarded the title of '2015 Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher'.

Eduardo Liz is professor at the Department of Applied Mathematics of the Universidade de Vigo (Spain). He is coauthor of more than 80 research papers in the areas of Mathematics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Mathematical Physics, and has collaborated with research groups in Spain and other countries (Portugal, Germany, Hungary, Ukraine, Chile, Canada). His research interests are focused on the global dynamics (stability, periodic solutions, bifurcations, chaos) of Functional Differential Equations and Difference Equations, with special attention to their applications in Mathematical Biology.

My research interests are centered on two main topics: characterization and understanding of the relationship between ecological patterns at large spatial scales, and application of Bayesian methods to data analysis. Both topics are driven by practical problems: the former by the need to provide sound scientific guidelines to practical problems of conservation, and the latter because I perceive the Bayesian methodology as a more unified approach to data analysis and an easier way to communicate scientific results to managers and policy makers. In the past, I studied theoretical space plasma physics, with emphasis on computer simulations. Computer simulations remain one of my favorite areas of research, and I have been particularly interested in patterns of species diversity in space and time.

Carlota Rebelo is an Associate Professor at Departamento de Matemática of Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa of which she is a member since 1989. Her research interests are qualitative theory of ordinary differential equations and applications. Epidemiology and Celestial Mechanics are two of the topics on which she worked recently.

Being a researcher at MARETEC/LarSys my main interests lie on the development of Dynamic Energy Budget (DEB) theory as a means of understanding Ecology, integrating contributions from Organism Biology, Physiology and Thermodynamics, as well as Ecotoxicology. My background is in Physics, having an M.Sc. in Physical Engineering and Ph.D. in Physics (Theoretical High Energy Physics). Apart from teaching Applied Ecology in IST, I’m also part of the teaching team of the DEB international course since 2009 and a member of the Board of Curators of the Add-my-pet DEB collection since 2015. In the pursuit of DEB development, I’m now focused on three points: (1) improving the optimization process of parameter estimation including the use of regulators (including filters in parameter space or the use of anchoring points); (2) making use information of closely related species to estimate the parameters of several species simultaneously; (3) find inter-specific patterns beyond the standard body-size scaling relationships.