Is emeritus researcher at the Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas, (CBPF-RJ, Brasil) founder of the National Institute of Science and Technology for Complex Systems, and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He holds a doctorat d’État ès Sciences Physiques from the University of Paris-Orsay. He is doctor honoris causa from various universities in Latin America and Europe, member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Mexico Prize laureate. He has supervised over forty PhD and master theses, and delivered over one thousand of invited lectures around the world. He published in 1988 a proposal of generalization of the Boltzmann-Gibbs statistical mechanics on the basis of nonadditive entropies. This idea is since then being worldwide explored. Prof. Tsallis´ contributions have received over 21,000 ISI citations (6,000 of them for his 1988 paper), which currently makes him one among the most cited scientists of all times in Latin America.

Ronald Dickman has a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts from Hunter College, City University of New York (CNUY) (1974) and a Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Texas at Austin (1984). He taught at Lehman College and the Graduate Center (CUNY) during 1985-97, and was a visiting professor at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina,  1998. He is currently a full professor at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences since 2013, and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.  Prof. Dickman has experience in Statistical Physics and 
Thermodynamics, with research focusing on on non equilibrium phase transitions,  critical phenomena, Monte Carlo simulation, universality, theory of liquids, stochastic  processes, and steady-state thermodynamics, explaining the "self-organized criticality" in sand piles due to a control mechanism, the so-called absorbing-state mechanism. He is co-author of a book on non-equilibrium phase transitions and more than 175 articles in scientific journals. As a consequence of his teaching activity, he developed courses on Hydrodynamics, Computational Methods, Climate Physics, Phase Transitions, Renormalization Groups, Stochastic Processes, and Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics.