Marina Cortês is Research Faculty at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Science of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. She previously held positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the United States, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, and the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Her research spans observational and theoretical cosmology, including work on large-scale surveys such as SDSS-III's BOSS and DESI, and on fundamental questions about the nature of time and the Universe. She won the inaugural Buchalter Cosmology Prize in 2014.

Andrew Liddle is Research Faculty at the Institute of Astrophysics and Space Science of the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He held previous positions as Professor at the Universities of Edinburgh and Sussex, United Kingdom, where he was also Head of Faculty. He is interested in understanding the properties of the Universe and is best known for his work on cosmological models, in particular early Universe inflation.