PRESIDENT

Dr. Patrick Bourdot has been President of EuroXR since November 2021. Research Director at CNRS, he founded and co-leads the VENISE team (Virtual & augmented ENvironments for Simulation & Experiments - http://www.limsi.fr/venise/), the research team in Virtual and Augmented Reality (V&AR) within LISN laboratory at the University of Paris-Saclay (Orsay, France). His main research focuses are: levels of detail, virtual navigation, 3D reconstruction, multimodal and collaborative interactions in V&AR, and the perceptual and cognitive problems of users using such technologies. Regarding the V&AR application fields, he has a particular interests in Design and Engineering, Data mining for Scientific applications, Science education, and Treatment of some behavioral disorders. He has been founding member of the French VR and AR association (AFRV), and EB member (Secretary) of this association the year of its creation (2005). Scientific coordinator of the CNRS Labs in the INTUITION NoE of the FP6-IST (2004-2008), he is Founding member of EuroVR (2008) today renamed EuroXR, and regularly reelected in its EC until now. He is the former Vice-President "Academic issues & Conferences" of EuroXR (March 2016 - Nov. 2021).

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TREASURER

Jerome Perret is the co-founder of the company Haption, and acts as CEO for Haption in both France and Germany. Jerome holds a PhD in Robotics and Artificial Intelligence. With a strong technical background in real-time software programming and robotics, he's an international expert in force-feedback for human interaction. Within EuroXR, Jerome has been a member of the Executive Committee since 2009, and was VP for EU issues and collaboration from 2017 to 2021. In November 2021, he took the position of Treasurer.

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HONORARY PRESIDENT

Research Director in the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, and a member of its Board of Directors. Founder and Director of the ISENSE Group. ERTICO Chairman. Former President, currently Vice President and one of the founding members of ITS Hellas.

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VICE-PRESIDENT - COMMUNICATION

Lucio Tommaso De Paolis is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering and the Director of the Augmented and Virtual Reality Laboratory (AVR Lab) at the University of Salento (Italy). His research focuses on the design and development of eXtended Reality (XR) applications in fields such as medicine and surgery, cultural heritage, and education.

From December 2013 to November 2020, De Paolis served as the Scientific Director of the “Advanced Virtual Reality for Medicine” research group at the Laboratory of Interdisciplinary Research Applied to Medicine (DReAM) at Lecce Hospital, Italy. Additionally, from 2015 to 2021, he was the Vice President of the Italian Modelling and Simulation Movement (MIMOS). Currently, De Paolis is the Deputy Director of the Interdepartmental Research Centre in Digital Humanities.

De Paolis teaches the course "eXtended Reality" at the University of Salento and is the organizer of the annual International Conference on eXtended Reality (XR SALENTO – www.xrsalento.it/).

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VICE-PRESIDENT - EU ISSUES AND COLLABORATION

Dr. Marco Sacco is Researcher Director, head of CNR-STIIMA Lecco subsidiary,. President of EuroXR (European Association of Extended Reality) from 2016 to 2021. His experiences are VR/MR/AR applied to the life cycle of the product/process/factory, discrete event and 3D simulation, Knowledge management, and Semantic Web. He has been the coordinator of European (two of the larger EU projects in FP-VI and FP-VII) and National/Regional projects. He participated as an expert in several boards both EU as well at national/regional level for the evaluation of research and development projects. He has more than 200 publications (171 Scopus certified – H-index 28), including papers in academic journals and conference proceedings.

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VICE-PRESIDENT - ACEDEMIC ISSUES, CONFERENCES, AND SIG

Dr. Gabriel Zachmann is professor for computer graphics, visual computing, and virtual reality at University of Bremen, Germany, since 2012. Before that, he established and headed the computer graphics group at Clausthal University, Germany, where he was a professor with the computer science department since 2005. Prior to that, he was assistant professor with Prof. Reinhard Klein's computer graphics group at Bonn University, Germany, and head of the research group (Nachwuchsgruppe) for novel interaction methods in virtual prototyping, and head of the research group for novel interaction methods in virtual prototyping, which was funded by the German Science Foundation (DFG) within the Emmy-Noether programme.

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VICE-PRESIDENT - Industry & END-USERS

With more than 20 years of industry experience, Christoph Runde is one of the pioneers in the field of professional systems and applications of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). After starting his career at Porsche, he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation (IPA) in 1999, where he led the institute's activities in VR/AR. From 2007 on he developed the Virtual Dimension Center (VDC) to one of the biggest and most successful cluster initiatives for VR/AR in Europe. Under Christoph's leadership, the VDC was decorated with numerous awards. Christoph's expertise is in demand by governmental bodies and VC funds, which he supports as an advisor. In 2017 Christoph was awarded with an honorary professorship by the Heilbronn University.

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Kaj Helin is a Principal scientist in virtual engineering area and Certified Project Manager. Helin manage the mixed reality facilities in VTT Tampere. Helin has managed several ESA contracts and participated EU and national projects in field of VR/AR. Kaj Helin joined VTT in 1998 and has gained 20+ years of experience in virtual and augmented reality, simulation, safety analysis, ergonomics and usability. Helin is member of following committee.

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Professor at Tallinn University of Technology (TalTech) since 2010. Holding a grant for National Chair of Manufacturing Engineering and leading Estonian research roadmap distributed infrastructure Smart Industry Centre. Have been involved as an expert evaluator by European Research Executive Agency in terms of Factories of the Future. Primary research interests areas are related to digitalisation of manufacturing industry (Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0, digital twins).

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Krzystof Walczak is a full professor in computer science and the head of the Department of Information Technology and the VR Research Laboratory at the Poznań University of Economics and Business in Poland. His research interests cover virtual reality and mixed reality systems, multimedia communication, interactive television, and the semantic web. He was coordinating numerous research and industrial projects in these domains. He often serves as an expert for the European Commission, National Science Centre, National Centre of Applied Research, and the Polish Ministry of Education and Science. He has authored or co-authored two books and over 150 research articles published in books, journals, and proceedings of international scientific conferences. He also holds several EU and US patents. He is an elected member of the Executive Committee of the EuroXR Association.

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Mariano Alcañiz is the founding director of the Immersive Neurotechnologies Laboratory (LabLENI) at the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV). Since 1989, his general research interests have hovered around a better understanding and enhancement of human cognition, combining insights and methods from computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. Towards this end, he has been involved in clinical psychology, neurodevelopmental disorders, consumer neuroscience, organizational neuroscience, education, and training projects. He has published more than 350 academic articles, in interdisciplinary journals such as Science, Scientific Reports, and Plos One, as well as domain-specific journals in the fields of communication, computing, education, medicine, management, and psychology. He received the Cybertherapy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 from the US Interactive Media Institute.

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Dr. Eleftherios Anastasovitis holds a PhD in XR, Virtual Worlds, Storyliving, and Virtual Cultural Heritage from the Department of Applied Informatics at the University of Macedonia (2024). He obtained his B.Sc in Informatics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2005). In 2014, he received his M.Sc in Cultural Informatics and Communication from the University of the Aegean. In 2017, Dr. Anastasovitis obtained an M.Ed in Adult Education at the Hellenic Open University. Since 2012, Dr. Eleftherios Anastasovitis has been the Founder, CEO, and XR Software Engineer in Pyrseia Informatics. Dr. Anastasovitis is a PostDoc Researcher in Extended Reality, Virtual Reality, Virtual Worlds, Serious Games, and 3D Graphics for Cultural Heritage and Training and Technical Project Manager. Dr. Eleftherios Anastasovitis is an Adjunct Professor in Virtual Reality. Dr. Eleftherios Anastasovitis is also a member of the Europeana Network Association.

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Despina Michael-Grigoriou is an Associate Professor of Virtual Reality at the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology (CUT). She is also the founder and the director of the Microsoft Computer Games and Emerging Technologies Research Lab - GET Lab [getlab.org], established with seed funding from Microsoft Cyprus in 2012. Prior that, she has been a short-term postdoctoral visitor/researcher at EVENT Lab, University of Barcelona (2011), which specializes in experiments within Virtual Reality systems and a Lecturer (2009-2010) at the University of Nicosia, while she obtained a PhD in Computer Graphics from the Computer Science Department, University of Cyprus (2010).

Despina has received several awards and distinctions, including but not limited to: Anita Borg Scholarship awarded by Google (2008), nomination of her PhD dissertation for the Best PhD Thesis Award of the Eurographics Association (2011), Best Paper award (VSMM 2014), another Best Paper award (VS-Games 2014), certificate of a journal Top-Downloaded Paper (CAVW 2018-2019), Best Audience Poster award (ICAT-EGVE 2020), Female Personality of CUT award (2023).

Despina is as Advisory Board member of the European Association of eXtended Realities (2025-today) elected by the General Assembly of the association. She is also an appointed, after invitation, member of the Eurographics Virtual Environments working group (2019-today) and an appointed, after invitation, a member of the ICAT steering committee (2018-today) serving two of the oldest communities, in Virtual Reality, in the world.  She also serves the research community by being a regular reviewer for leading scientific journals, scientific conferences, EU grants proposals, participating in editorial boards and being the chair or a member of organizing and program conference committees.

Despina has participated in more than 20 european and local funded projects on Virtual Reality and related fields, coordinating many of them and played an instrumental role in the acquisition of grants of over 50 million euros. She is a core initiator and the founding coordinator on behalf of CUT, of the H2020-Teaming-RISE project which led to the establishment and operation of a Centre of Excellence, where she was leading the Visual Science research pillar (2018-2023) and a founding member of the SCRC Social Computing Research Centre where she also serves as a member of the board (2019-today). She has been also an elected member of the Senate of the Cyprus University of Technology (2018, 2023, 2024).

Personal Website: https://getlab.org/despina/

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As a senior researcher, Dr. Wolfgang Schäfer explores consumption of and experiences with novel products and services made possible by augmented and virtual realities. His research focuses on phenomena such as branding, co-creation and customer identity through the lens of consumer-culture psychology and theory. Against this background, he supports the development of the interdisciplinary "Service Lab X" at the ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland. He is also a reviewer for various international journals and conferences (ACR, CCTC, FQS, Industrial Marketing Management, etc.). At EuroXR, Wolfgang supports the OpenForum, which promotes knowledge transfer between theory and practice by regular events.

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Kayvan Mirza CEO Has built his career in the US and France. Previously held key positions at Invensys, HP, and Thomson/Technicolor where he successfully set up and ran an optical component business from scratch. He also ran an RF component business two R&D centers (Singapore and Germany), manufacturing in Indonesia (20mpcs/yr), and aworldwide sales force and agent network. He holds a BSEE degree from University of Illinois and has studied Operations Management at the ESCP the oldest business school in Europe.

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Dr. and Engineer Barbara Schiavi is a creative and motivated XR R&D professional with over six years of experience in developing and implementing XR solutions, specializing in VR simulation and passionate about spatial computing. With a strong international perspective, she is dedicated to developing innovative XR solutions that deliver tangible results across diverse fields.

Her enthusiasm for VR/AR, sparked in 2014, propelled her early career in developing healthcare applications at Université de Montréal and USC's MedVR Lab, followed by impactful work in the video game industry. Currently at VINCI Construction, while pursuing an industrial PhD with CESI LINEACT Lab, Barbara is advancing VR training for construction site procedures. Her research focuses on BIM data flow architectures for VR integration, emphasizing scenario creation and QHSE knowledge usability. A published author cited in academic circles (notably for her work on BIM data flow with XR in AEC),

Beyond her professional endeavors, Barbara's commitment to XR is evident in her personal projects, often created for her family. These initiatives highlight her curiosity, self-directed learning, and dedication to developing enriching XR applications.

In addition to her professional and personal pursuits, Barbara actively volunteers with the European Association for eXtended Reality (EuroXR), contributing her skills and passion to the broader XR community. She also leads the Bordeaux XR community, organizing dedicated meetups to foster local engagement and knowledge sharing.

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Electra Tsaknaki is an XR researcher and developer with expertise in VR, AR, Serious Games, and 3D Graphics. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in applied informatics from the University of Macedonia and a Master’s degree in Big Data Analytics from the University of Derby. Her research focuses on the integration of VR/AR technologies with cultural heritage preservation and educational training environments. Electra has contributed to 10 EU and national research projects, demonstrating her ability to apply XR and machine learning technologies to real-world applications. Her work spans areas such as spatial analysis using topographical data combined with machine learning, AI-powered geospatial analysis for transport networks, and the development of immersive environments for digital skills training and cultural heritage preservation. She is proficient in multiple programming languages, including Python, C++, C#, HTML, PHP, R, and Java, and has experience with software development frameworks for XR applications. Her research on VR/AR development tools for immersive experiences creation has been published in several journals and presented at international conferences, highlighting her contributions to the advancement of immersive technologies in education and cultural heritage.

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