Heino Falcke is the Chair of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council, and based at the Radboud University Nijmegen as Professor of Astroparticle Physics and Radio Astronomy. He is specialised in black holes, and operating in theoretical, observational and experimental astrophysics.

His most recent work centres around one of the biggest questions in current astrophysics: the origin of the highest energetic cosmic particles. Here, a new generation of telescopes is used, such as the revolutionary Low Frequency Array (LOFAR)- telescope, based on a supercomputer.

Super massive black holes are likely to be amongst the producers of these particles. He is a LOFAR International Project Scientist and Chair of the Board at the Netherlands Foundation for Research in Astronomy (ASTRON), a member of the National Institute for Subatomic Physics (NIKHEF), and a visiting scientist at the Max-Planck-Institute.

Feryal Özel is based at the University of Arizona, where she is Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics and member of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council. She has done pioneering and groundbreaking work on the physics of neutron stars and black holes, studied the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies in the early Universe, and was the first one to deliver accurate measurements of neutron star radii. Her work in accretion flows has lead her to be the first to predict the size of images of nearby supermassive black holes at different wave lengths. Prior to her professorship, she worked at the Niels Bohr Institute and CERN, and received her PhD from Harvard University in Astrophysics. At the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, she worked as a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral fellow. She has worked as an advisor for NASA and the National Science Foundation, is a fellow of the American Physical Society and a member of the Science Academy of Turkey. Feryal Özel has received many awards such as the Maria Goeppert Mayer Award from the American Physical Society and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study fellowship. She is a frequent speaker on TV documentaries, and made many contributions to the popular press with scientific articles.

Sera Markoff is a full professor in theoretical high energy astrophysics at the University of Amsterdam and member of the Event Horizon Telescope Science Council. Before arriving at the UvA in 2006, she earned her PhD in Theoretical Astrophysics from the University of Arizona in 2000, took a prestigious Humboldt Research Fellowship to the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany, and a US National Science Foundation Postdoctoral fellowship to MIT in the US. She has received many prestigious grants, such as NWO Vidi in 2007, Vici 2015, and a EU Marie Curie ITN in 2008. She is an advisor of the Dutch National Research Organisation NWO, and has won several recognitions, including being named Fellow of the American Physical Society, and the Willem de Graaff prize for public outreach from the Royal Dutch Astronomical Society.

Sera’s specialisation is in accretion processes around compact objects. Her most recent focus is to understand how black holes release and channel energy into various forms such as radiation, high-energy particles and outflows, and how these outputs impact their surroundings.