Dr. Clemens Hellsberg, chairman and first violin of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra:
Born in 1952 in Linz, Clemens Hellsberg received his first violin lesson at age four and a half by his father. From 1971 to 1975, he took violin as a concert subject with Prof. Eduard Melkus at the School of Music in Vienna, from 1975 to 1977 with Prof. Alfred Staar. At the same time, he studied musicology and ancient history at the University of Vienna from where he received his PhD in 1980 (doctoral thesis: “Ignaz Schuppanzigh. Life and Work“). Meanwhile, Clemens Hellsberg was appointed archivist of the historic archive of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. During this time, he also had his first engagement as second violin with the orchestra of the Vienna State Opera, followed only shortly afterwards by an engagement as first violin. In the 90s, Dr. Hellsberg was vice president of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, in 1997, he became president. He published his book “Democracy of the Kings. The history of the Vienna Philharmonics” in German, French and Japanese.

Plácido Domingo
Born in 1941 in Madrid, Spain, Plácido Domingo and his family relocated to Mexico in 1950; there he studied vocal technique, as well as piano and conducting, at the Mexico City Conservatory. After making his public debut as a baritone, he essayed his first major tenor role as Alfredo in Verdi's La Traviata in 1960; he subsequently spent close to three years with the Israel National Opera, singing 280 performances in a dozen different roles. In 1966, Domingo created the title role in the U.S. premiere of Ginastera's Don Rodrigo at the New York City Opera; his Metropolitan Opera debut followed two years later, appearing as Maurizio in Adriana Lecouvreur -- the first of well over 400 performances at the legendary venue.
In the years to follow, Plácido Domingo's stature continued to grow on the strength of regular performances at all of the world's most famed opera houses, among them La Scala, the Vienna State Opera, London's Covent Garden, the Opéra de la Bastille in Paris, the San Francisco Opera, Chicago's Lyric Opera and the Los Angeles Music Center Opera (which he co-founded). With over 100 recordings to his credit, he performed with sopranos including Rosalind Plowright, Katria Ricciarelli and Montserrat Caballe.
Plácido Domingo has raised millions of dollars through special benefit concerts for the victims of the 1985 Mexican earthquake, AIDS and the victims of disasters such as the Armenian earthquake, the mud-slides of Acapulco, etc. Within the past few years, he has become one of the most decorated and honored artists.

Prof. Dr. Richard Seewald, Audiologist
Richard Seewald holds a Canada Research Chair in Childhood Hearing at the National Centre for Audiology in London, Ontario, Canada. He is also a Professor in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Western Ontario. For the past 25 years, Richard Seewald’s work has been focused on issues that pertain to the selection and fitting of amplification in infants and young children and is known internationally for his work in developing the Desired Sensation Level (DSL) Method for paediatric hearing instrument fitting. In addition to his numerous publications and presentations on paediatric amplification, Richard Seewald has recently chaired and edited the proceedings from three international conferences on early intervention.

Prof. Dr. Heinrich Rohrer
Heinrich Rohrer was born on June 6, 1933 in Buchs (SG), Switzerland. He received his PhD in experimental physics in 1960 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, with a thesis on superconductivity. After a two-year post-doctorate at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., USA, he joined IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory in 1963 as Research Staff Member and became an IBM Fellow. His research interest included Kondo systems, phase transitions, multicritical phenomena, scanning tunneling microscopy, and most recently nanomechanics. He spent a sabbatical at the University of California in Santa Barbara, California, USA in 1974-75. He served on the board of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH) during 1993-2003. He retired from IBM in 1997 and took research appointments at CSIC, Madrid, and RIKEN ,Tokyo, and Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan.
For the invention of the scanning tunneling microscope, together with Gerd Binnig, he was corecipient of the King Faisal Prize and the Hewlett Packard Europhysics Prize in 1984, and the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1986. In 1987, he was awarded the Cresson Medal of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, USA. The practical value of the invention was recognized by the induction to the US National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1994. In addition he is a Member or Honorary Member of various professional societies and academies and he also received honorary degrees from several universities.

Prof. Dr. John Bamford
John Bamford has held the Ellis Llwyd Jones Chair of Audiology and Deaf Education at the University of Manchester since his appointment in 1989. Prior to that he was Head of Audiology Services at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, Reading, UK, where he specialised in all aspects of paediatric audiology. His research interests include early screening, identification and management, hearing aids, and service quality and service development in audiology. In the last six years he has been one of a team responsible for the advent of a national programme of newborn hearing screening across England, and for the introduction of digital signal processing hearing aids and associated procedures for paediatric audiology services in the UK's National Health Service. He has recently led a team which has reviewed the role and performance of the UK's School Entry Hearing Screen, and is now leading the Positive Support longitudinal study (www.positivesupport.org.uk) which is following a number of children identified through newborn screening and attempting to relate outcomes to details of interventions. He is closely involved with the new career structures and training for graduate and postgraduate audiologists in the UK and he recently returned from a Visiting Erskine Fellowship at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand.