Mietek Lisak was born 1947 in Szczecin, Poland. Married and has two children (24 and 19). Languages spoken: Polish, Swedish, English, Russian. Hobbies: music, walking - tours. Studied at the University of Technology in Stettin, 1965-69. Emigrated due to political reasons to Sweden where he continued the studies at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, 1970-72. In 1972, he became Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and initiated the PhD studies at the Institute for Electron Physics at Chalmers. He received his PhD degree in 1976. Since 1977 he has been employed at Chalmers being engaged in research and education where since 1997 he is a professor in Electromagnetic Field Theory and Plasma Physics. During years he has been project leader of national and international projects and worked as a part time research consultant for industry. His research activity covers a broad range of plasma physics with application to fusion energy production, nonlinear optics with applications to high-speed fibre optical communication, microwave discharge physics with applications to microwave phenomena and accelerator physics.

He is author and co-author of more than 200 papers in international scientific journals and more than 100 contributions to scientific conferences and symposia including many invited presentations. He is author and co-author of 8 lecture compendia and several popular review reports on thermonuclear fusion and nonlinear optics. He has been supervisor together with Prof. Dan Anderson of 35 diploma works for the M.Sc. degree, 18 licentiate theses and 15 Ph.D. theses. Since 1999, Mietek Lisak is currently Head of the Swedish Fusion Research Programme.

Ulf Jordan was born in Storfors, Sweden, in 1974. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden in 1999, and is currently working toward his Ph.D. degree. His main research interests include plasma physics and microwave breakdown.

Torbjörn Olsson was born in 1955, married Katarina 1986 and they have three daughters. In 1979 a Master in
Engineering Physics was completed at the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. At this time an intense interest in fundamental research led to a decision to stay at Chalmers, for completion of a Ph.D-degree under the supervision of Professor Arne Rosén within the department of atomic physics headed by Professor Ingvar Lindgren. The work for the dissertation involved both experimental and theoretical efforts. The experimental challenge was to use high-resolution laser and rf-spectroscopy in order to investigate atomic hyperfine structure. An atomic beam apparatus was constructed and the complete system comprised also optics, radio-frequency equipment, data-sampling system and a sophisticated single mode ring-laser. The title of the dissertation reads "Experimental and Theoretical Investigation of Hyperfine Structure and Isotope Shifts in Mo and Alkaline Earth Elements".

A post-doctoral scholarship from the Swedish Natural Science Research Council made a two-year visit at the Jesse W. Beams Laboratory in Charlottesville, Virginia possible in 1987- 1989. There, in the group of Professor Daniel J. Larson, the issue was to use narrow-band strong pulse-lasers to investigate negative ions trapped in a so-called ion trap of Penning type. In such a configuration rf-signals are used for monitoring purposes of the stored charge.

During the subsequent four years as a research assistant in the department of atomic and molecular physics at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm most interest was put into possible application of spectroscopy. In collaboration with the Institution of Accelerator Physics at Åbo Akademi gases at a pressure range of 0.1 to 15 Bar was investigated using proton and alpha-particle bombardment in conjunction with classical spectroscopy. Effort was also given to a possible detector concept, using laser excitation for the detection of ionizing radiation.

Being employed by Allgon Systems AB from 1993 his focus has been the analysis and construction of microwave filters. The possible problem of microwave breakdown in components used for communication systems constraints the freedom of design and has been a natural topic to study.

Mats Åhlander: I was born in Stockholm, Sweden in 1974. Besides me, my family consists of my father (teacher at KTH in mathematics and computer science), my mother and my harassing twin sisters. I still live in my parents´ house in Täby, a suburb to Stockholm. Recently I bought my own apartment so I will move out after new years eve. In my spare time I play a very popular game in Sweden called "Floor Ball". It is a sport played indoors and has some similarities with hockey. In my spare time I also enjoy working with computers and especially programming them, making small games and similar things.

In 1993 I started my M.Sc.E.E studies at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). My favorite subjects were calculus and theoretical electromagnetics. In my last year at KTH I stumbled on Torbjörn Olsson at Allgon Systems AB who gave me a proposal for a diploma thesis work dealing with the subject of microwave induced breakdown in resonators. I thought this was an interesting area and agreed to do my thesis work at Allgon. There among other things I developed a numerical tool for predicting the breakdown threshold in microwave resonators. Some of the results from the thesis work later was included in our publication. I graduated from KTH in May 1998. In August 1998 I joined the signal processing team at Ericsson Radio Systems AB. Currently I am still working at Ericsson taking part in the development of traffic signal processing algorithms for GSM/EDGE base stations.