Eric Duffner
Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM), Germany

He is graduated in mechanical engineering from the Berlin University of Applied Sciences in 2004 and started working at the Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing (BAM) in Berlin in the same year.
Since then, he has been working in the field of hazardous goods transportation with a focus on pressure vessels for the high-pressure storage of gases. He has more than 20 years of experience in research, testing and approval of composite pressure vessels and their safe transportation.
He is a member of several national and international standardization groups on the subject of pressure vessels and has gained a lot of experience in regulatory work for the transport of dangerous goods and gas transport in the automotive sector.
Eric Duffner has been working for more than 15 years in the field of non-destructive testing, in particular in acoustic emission testing for mainly composite pressure vessels and is a certified acoustic emission level 3 tester and member of the DGZfP Technical Committee for Acoustic Emission Test Procedures. 
As part of the competence center H2Safety@BAM.de, Mr. Duffner heads the TestCert-3 work package on "Online monitoring and structural health monitoring for hydrogen storage and transport technologies". He is currently working in Department 3.5 "Safety of Gas Storage Systems", where he is leading several national research projects on composite pressure vessels.

Dr. Nathalie Godin
INSA Lyon, France
Winner of Adrian Pollock Award 2024 of the EWGAE

Nathalie Godin is an Associate Professor at the National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) in Lyon (France) since 1996 and conducts research at MATEIS lab. She received her PhD degree from the University of Bordeaux in 1994 and her HDR (Habilitation to conduct researches), delivered by INSA of Lyon and the University Claude Bernard Lyon, in  2009. She has more than 25 years of experience in acoustic emission and its application for the analysis of damage in various classes of materials, in particular fiber-reinforced composites. The main topics of her research concern the durability of composite materials and the prediction of their fatigue lifetime under mechanical or thermomechanical tests with acoustic emission.  She has co-authored over 80 articles, 5 book chapters and 2 books. She has supervised 35 MSc students and 28 PhD students.

Horst Trattnig
Vallen Systeme GmbH

Since 04/2015 Vallen Systeme GmbH Munich, Germany Managing Director
Details of position
▪ Head of the development and production team
▪ Responsible for new AE Products and Solutions
▪ Ramp up of new products in the production line
▪ Responsible for the conformity of intrinsically safe products

ACOUSTIC EMISSION INDUSTRY
Since 2018:
Delegate of DIN (Germany) in CEN TC138/WG7 & ISO  TC135/SC9, Convenor of ISO TC135/SC9/WG11

Since 2015:
Member of Acoustic Emission Working Group (AEWG) United States

Since 2022:
Member of European Working Group of Acoustic Emission (EWGAE)

Dr. Els Verstrynge
KU Leuven University, Belgium

Dr. Els Verstrynge is Associate Professor at the KU Leuven University in Belgium and an expert in the development of acoustic emission methods in Civil Engineering applications. She has a dual background in structural and architectural engineering. Her research aims at multi-scale condition assessment of existing materials and structures in view of degradation analysis, retrofitting, renovation and reuse, with a focus on reinforced concrete structures and historical masonry.

In the past fifteen years, she has spent research stays at the Technical University of Delft, the University of Minho in Portugal, Stanford University and the University of Edinburgh. In 2020, she won the EWGAE young researcher award and gave a keynote lecture at the Ljubljana conference in 2022 on “Acoustic emission for multi-scale assessment of degradation in existing structures.”