Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Valentin L. Popov studied physics and received his doctorate from Lomonosov Moscow State University in 1985. He habilitated at the Institute of Strength Physics and Materials Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1994. Since 2002, he has headed the Department of System Dynamics and Friction Physics at the Institute of Mechanics at the Technische Universität (TU) Berlin.
Dr.-Ing. Markus Heß studied engineering science at TU Berlin. He received his doctorate in 2011 and was awarded the German tribological society's sponsorship prize for his dissertation in the same year. From 2011-2015 he was head of the physics department at the preparatory college of the TU Berlin and has been a research assistant at the Department of System Dynamics and Friction Physics since 2015.
Dr.-Ing. Emanuel Willert studied engineering science at TU Berlin and Tomsk Polytechnic University. He received his doctorate in 2020 and was awarded the Dimitris N. Chorafas Foundation Prize for his doctoral research in 2019. He has been working as a research assistant at the Department of System Dynamics and Friction Physics since 2015.