Hailed as one of the best football freestylers in the world, Marcel Gurk is the current German champion, holds ten Guinness World Records and is the author of the world’s first book on football freestyling. He made it to the semifinal of Germany’s Got Talent, Das Supertalent, and travels around the world sharing his unique skills. Having studied sport and media management in Dusseldorf, Marcel also specialises in working with children and has designed his own unique concept to help take his students’ skills to the next level. While in the Maldives, he will be hosting football freestyling workshops for Young Sonevians at Soneva Fushi and Soneva Jani.

Kiki Bertens is a Dutch former professional tennis player who picked up her first racket at the age of six. Throughout her decade-long professional career, she won ten WTA singles titles and ten WTA doubles titles and reached the semi-finals of Roland Garros and the quarter-finals of Wimbledon. In 2019, she achieved a career-high WTA singles ranking of world No. 4, becoming the highest-ranked Dutch female player ever. She retired in 2021 following the Olympic Games in Tokyo and is now working as a coach for the Dutch tennis federation and training teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18.

Igor Oleynik is ranked among the top 16 football freestylers in the world and is a four-time Russian national champion. He started playing football when he was six years old and switched to freestyling at 16. He went on to successfully participate in numerous international tournaments, including the prestigious Red Bull Street Style events. During his professional career, he has been a brand ambassador for Nike and Adidas and collaborated with Volkswagen and FC Lokomotiv. In 2018-2019 he played for Amkal, one of the most popular media football teams in Russia and also one of the biggest YouTube projects. In addition, he is the founder of iFreestyle, the largest freestyle and street football school in the world which united around 250 children. A talented coach, Igor never stops learning and polishing his skills. Passionate about inspiring others, he never sets limits for himself, constantly inventing new tricks.

Dr Ryuki Hyodo is a planetary scientist at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) as an International Top Young Fellow and spends several months per year working at Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris (IPGP). He specialises in planetary formation theory and planetary exploration, actively contributing to the development of next-generation planetary missions within JAXA. Previously having participated in planetary missions of the European Space Agency (ESA), NASA, and JAXA, with the contribution of optimising mission design for the most significant scientific insights and discoveries. His research interests are focused on understanding the formation and evolution processes of various planetary systems, small celestial bodies, and rings, using computer simulations and theoretical methods. He is known for his notable work on the formation of Saturn’s rings, and his research on Phobos, one of Mars’ moons, has suggested the possibility of finding traces of past Martian life on its surface. Dr Hyodo’s research has been published in esteemed scientific journals, including Science and Nature Geoscience.

Ricky Saward is a German chef, entrepreneur and cookbook author. He is the head chef and co-owner at Frankfurt’s Seven Swans restaurant, which was named the world’s first Michelin-starred vegan restaurant in 2020. Ricky’s recognition stems from his unique, sustainable philosophy of vegetarian cuisine with regional, seasonal sourcing of ingredients based on the concepts of “farm to table” and “root to leaf”. After joining Seven Swans in 2018, the restaurant was awarded one Michelin star for its vegetarian cuisine, making Ricky one of just five Michelin-starred vegetarian chefs in the world. In mid-2019, Ricky switched his focus to plant-based cuisine utilising only home-grown or regionally sourced ingredients. The same year, his sustainable philosophy was awarded the world’s first Michelin Guide Sustainability Award. In 2020, he was again awarded one Michelin star, in addition to a green star, and became the world’s first Michelin-starred vegan chef. Today, he remains Germany’s only Michelin-starred chef producing purely plant-based cuisine.

Entrepreneur and top chef Tim Raue is one of Germany’s best-known chefs. And with good reason, because the Berliner, born in 1974, has redefined German top gastronomy and made a name for himself internationally as one of the few German chefs. For example, Tim Raue’s restaurant has not only been awarded two Michelin stars and 19.5 Gault&Millau points, as well as the title of Restaurant of the Year 2019 by Feinschmecker, but it has also occupied a permanent place on The World’s 50 Best Restaurants list since 2016 – currently ranked 31st in 2021. In addition, Tim Raue is the only German chef to date to whom the world-renowned series Chef’s Table on Netflix has dedicated its own episode, and you can also watch him on MagentaTV in his own series HERR RAUE REIST! SO SCHMECKT DIE WELT on his gastronomic discovery tour around the globe. Tim Raue has also established a firm place for himself on German television: He regularly appears in front of the camera on the hit VOX show Kitchen Impossible and is a jury member on the SAT1 programme The Taste. In the past 15 years, Raue has also published four books – including the autobiography “Ich weiß, was Hunger ist“ and the cookbook “My Way“. In addition to his work as a star chef, Tim Raue is also active as an entrepreneur. For this activity, he was named „Restaurateur of the Year 2014“ by the renowned gourmet guide Gault&Millau. Raue himself says: “With the TIM RAUE restaurant, I have fulfilled a lifelong dream – but my other projects mean culinary freedom for me and the opportunity to fully live out my many ideas with the help of my chefs.“ He already operated restaurants in Dubai and a Michelin starred Pop-up in Switzerland. In his role as culinary consultant, he, therefore, oversees now the Brasserie Colette Tim Raue in Munich, Constance and Berlin as well as Villa Kellermann in Potsdam. In 2016, he also created the Asian restaurant concept HANAMI by Tim Raue on TUI Mein Schiff 5, which has since opened on three other ships in the fleet.

Sarafina El-Badry Nance is an astrophysicist, analog astronaut, author and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit model. She has conducted research at Harvard’s Center for Astrophysics and is now at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab completing her doctoral thesis on supernovae and cosmology. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Science Foundation, been named one of Forbes’ 30 Inspirational Women and was on Forbes’ list of “30 Under 30” and the Arab America Foundation’s “40 Under 40.” Her critically acclaimed memoir,  Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark, was featured by The TODAY Show, NPR, and has been selected by Apple Books, Book Riot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and more as a Summer 2023 Must-Read.