Dr. Juli Caujapé-Castells is the director of the Jardín Botánico “Viera y Clavijo”-Unidad Asociada al CSIC, a research division of the Cabildo de Gran Canaria devoted to the conservation of the Canarian and Macaronesian terrestrial floras through the knwoledge furnished by multi-disciplinary science. With a strong background in conservation genetics and molecular phylogenetics, he is also the Scientific Head of the Department of Molcular Biodiversity and DNA Bank at this institution. His research group uses the information contained in the molecule of DNA in an inter-disciplinary and creative context to investigate problems related to the floras from Macaronesia and other insular enclaves. Throughout his scientific career, he has published numerous papers on plant conservation genetics, phylogeny, phylogeography, and bioinformatics, he directed 5 PhD theses, he collaborates actively with more than 20 international research institutions, and he has led 21 research projects focused on insular floras, most of them international. The problems of his utmost interest are: 1. To better understand the origins, relationships, post-colonizing evolution, diversity, bio-geographic links and conservation of the current Canarian flora. 2. To integrate DNA banking and molecular data in multi-disciplinary approaches to taxonomy. 3. To help formulate conservation objectives for insular plant endemics worldwide, fostering pattern generalization beyond single cases. 4. To promote public awareness of biodiversity research & education developed in Botanic Gardens. 5. To facilitate the storage, analysis and meta-analysis of any kind of genetic diversity data.

Luís Silva has a degree in Biology (1989), a PhD in Biology (2001, Plant Ecology) and a professorship in Biology (2015, Biostatistics and Ecological and Environmental Statistics). He has been an associate professor since 2020, in the Department of Biology, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of the Azores. He taught in undergraduate, master’s and doctoral courses, mainly in the fields of biostatistics, quantitative methods, ecological statistics, ecology, and conservation. He is the responsible for curricular units at the bachelor’s level - Terrestrial Ecosystems, Biostatistics, Epidemiology - and at the master's level - Epidemiological Studies, Statistical Methods in Biology, Methods of Data Analysis in Ecology, Quantitative Methods in Environment and Security - being the coordinator of the Data Analysis module in the PhD in Biology. He supervised 9 doctoral students (4 in progress), 31 master's students (4 in progress) and about 20 internships. He was director of the bachelor’s degree in Ecotourism, the master’s degrees in Plant Ecology, Biodiversity and Plant Biotechnology, and Environment, Health and Safety, having participated in the accreditation of all these courses. He is particularly interested in modeling species distributions and the composition and structure of plant communities, and in Bayesian statistical models, which is why he developed his professorship at the interface between biology and statistics, paying special attention to the conceptualization of teaching in the field of ecological and environmental statistics. He is a researcher at InBIO, a research network in Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology, where he coordinates the research group BIOISLE (Biodiversity and Islands, with 22 PhD researchers). Participated in 29 research projects, with regional, national, or European funding, and published 66 articles in international journals with peer review, 31 articles in other journals, 8 articles in proceedings, participated in the edition of 9 books and 26 chapters and sheets of books, mainly in the areas of plant ecology, biological invasions, flora of the Azores, endemic species, conservation, and forest. He participated in the organization of 21 national and international scientific meetings, having co-authored more than 50 posters and 125 oral communications. He participated in science outreach and outreach activities, through the co-authorship of outreach books, external commissions and services provided to public and private entities. He has focused his research on the study of the forest, through his involvement in several projects dedicated to the ecological and economic valorization of the forests of the Azores. He is also developing research dedicated to plant, microbial and phylogenetic diversity in different types of pasture. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of Biochemical Genetics and, as a Red List Authority Coordinator, he is a member of the IUCN Species Survival Commission. At the University of the Azores, he integrated the General Council, the Strategy and Evaluation Council, the Scientific Council, the Assembly of the Faculty of Science and Technology, the Commission for Scientific Research of the Faculty of Science and Technology, being director of the Biodiversity and Genetic Resources Research Center - Azores.