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F. Vernerey is a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Material Science and IQ Biology programs at the University of Colorado, Â鶹ӰԺ. His research focuses on the relationship between the structure and behavior of soft materials, which include polymers, biopolymers, hydrogels, and biologically active materials such as cells.

B. Cox is an independent researcher whose interests lie in the theory of pattern formation in populations of living cells, melding machine and mechanism-based approaches to learning, and high temperature materials.

D. Montell is a Distinguished Professor in the Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology Department at University of California Santa Barbara. She has developed border cells in the fruit fly ovary as a relatively simple model for in vivo collective cell migration that is amenable to genetic manipulation and live imaging.

A. Fernandez-Nieves is an ICREA Professor in the Department of Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Barcelona, Spain. His research interests are in experimental soft condensed matter with recent work on partially ordered fluids, colloidal crystals and glasses, and active matter. A recurring theme is the presence of defects in the order and how they sense and respond to the local geometry, the local environment and the system’s inherent activity. He is also interested in fluid mechanics and hydrodynamic instabilities.

J. Bourgeois is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bourgogne Franche-Comté, CNRS, France. His research interests include distributed intelligent MEMS (DiMEMS), distributed algorithms for modular robots and Programmable Matter. He is currently leading the programmable matter project.

J. Lengiewicz is an assistant professor in the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and since 2019 he is on an MSCA-IF fellowship at the University of Luxembourg. In his research on the concept of modular-robotic programmable matter he focuses on computational and mechanistic aspects of designing those cyber-physical collectives.