Dr. Lilian Alessa, University of Idaho President’s Professor of Resilient Landscapes in the Landscape Architecture program, is also Co-Director of the University of Idaho Center for Resilient Communities. She conducts extensive research on human adaptation to environmental change through resilient design at landscape scales. Much of her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, including projects awarded the Arctic Observing Network, Intersections of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) and the Dynamics of Coupled Natural Human Systems programs. Canadian-born and raised, Alessa received her degrees from the University of British Columbia. She also uses her expertise in social-ecological and technological systems science to develop ways to improve domestic resource security for community well-being, particularly through the incorporation of place-based knowledge. Her work through the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence, the Arctic Domain Awareness Center, involves developing social-technological methods to monitor and respond to critical environmental changes. Lil is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education and is on the Science, Technology and Education Advisory Committee for the National Ecological Observing Network (NEON). Professor Alessa also teaches a university landscape architecture capstone course: Resilient Landscapes with Professor Andrew Kliskey. Professor Alessa’s collaborative grant activity with Professor Andrew Kliskey, since coming to the university in 2013, exceeds 7 million USD to date. She has authored over a 100 publications and reports and has led the development of 2 federal climate resilience toolbox assessments, the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI) and the Arctic Adaptation Exchange Portal (AAEP).

My research focuses on pastoral systems. I examine how pastoralists adapt to changing ecological, political and institutional conditions that affect their lives and livelihoods. I have been conducting research with pastoralists in the Far North Region of Cameroon since 1993. The long-term research has allowed me to develop innovative, interdisciplinary research projects with colleagues at the Ohio State University and the University of Maroua in Cameroon. Check out my website for more information about my research, teaching, and other scholarly activities: http://mlab.osu.edu

Gerd Wagner is Professor of Internet Technology at Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus, Germany. After studying Mathematics, Philosophy and Informatics in Heidelberg, San Francisco and Berlin, he (1) investigated the semantics of negation in knowledge representation formalisms, (2) developed concepts and techniques for agent-oriented modeling and simulation, (3) participated in the development of a foundational ontology for conceptual modeling, the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), and (4) created a new Discrete Event Simulation paradigm, Object Event Modeling and Simulation (OEM&S), and a new process modeling language, the Discrete Event Process Modeling Notation (DPMN). Much of his recent work on OEM&S and DPMN is available from sim4edu.com.

Ronja Hotz is a PhD student in the Land Use Change & Climate Research Group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, where she has been working since August 2023. Her research focuses on understanding and modelling the social processes underlying land use change using agent-based modelling, with a particular emphasis on the CRAFTY framework. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Freie Universität Berlin and a Master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from Technische Universität Berlin.

Prior to her PhD, she worked at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, where she implemented a generic decision-making layer for land managers in agent-based socio-ecological models. The framework was analysed in a stylised model to investigate emergent dynamics and critical transitions and was subsequently integrated into the InSEEDS model, which simulates the adoption of conservation agriculture at regional to global scales.

I am a researcher in data science for sustainability, working at the intersection of society, politics, economy, and the environment. My work integrates statistics, artificial intelligence, and complex systems approaches to generate robust, data-driven evidence that supports decision-making in complex socio-environmental contexts.

My research focuses on understanding and modeling socio-ecological systems, with the goal of improving sustainability outcomes through interdisciplinary analysis and innovative analytical tools.

a geographer

Flaminio Squazzoni is Full Professor of Sociology at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan and director of BEHAVE. He teaches “Sociology” to undergraduate students, “Behavioural Sociology” to master students and “Behavioural Game Theory” to PhD students. Untill November 2018, he has been Associate Professor of Economic Sociology at the Department of Economics and Management of the University of Brescia, where he led the GECS-Research Group on Experimental and Computational Sociology.

He is editor of JASSS-Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, co-editor of Sociologica -International Journal for Sociological Debate and member of the editorial boards of Research Integrity and Peer Review and Sistemi Intelligenti. He is advisory editor of the Wiley Series in Computational and Quantitative Social Science and the Springer Series in Computational Social Science and member of the advisory board of ING’s ThinkForward Initiative. He is former President of the European Social Simulation Association (Sept 2012/Sept 2016, since 2010 member of the Management Committee) and former Director of the NASP ESLS PhD Programme in Economic Sociology and Labour Studies (2015-2016).