Dr. Benjamin Bechtel
University of Bochum (GER)He holds a professorship in Urban Climatology at the Depart. of Geography, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany. Before he was Research Associate with the Cluster of Excellence CliSAP. His research interests include crowd sourcing & urban remote sensing, in particular the characterization of urban surfaces & thermal remote sensing for applications in urban climatology. He serves as board member of the International Association for Urban Climate, & as a steering committee member of the Belgian research project REACT & the GEO Global Human Settlement Working Group.
Peilei Fan
Michigan State University (USA)She is a Professor of Urban & Regional Planning at the School of Planning, Design & Construction at Michigan State Univ. She holds a joint research appointment at the Center for Global Change & Earth Observation. She has a PhD in Economic Development & an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, both from MIT. She has served as a consultant for the UN University – World Institute of Development Economics Research & the Asian Development Bank. Her research focuses on urban environment and sustainability, public health, innovation and economic development, & planning and policy.
Monika Kuffer
University of Twente (NL)Monika Kuffer is working as Assistant Professor at the Faculty ITC (University of Twente). Her research focuses on urban remote sensing, SDGs, mapping deprived areas (e.g., slums), and analyzing urban form and dynamics. She is co-chairing a network on deprivation area mapping IDEAMAPS (https://ideamapsnetwork.org) and is working on two research projects, SLUMAP (http://slumap.ulb.be) and ACCOUNT (https://slummap.net). She received her PhD from the University of Twente (NL), an MSc in Human Geographer (TU Munich) and an MSc in GIS (University of London).
Catherine Linard
University of Namur (BE)Catherine Linard is Professor at the department of Geography of the University of Namur (Belgium) and member of the WorldPop consortium (www.worldpop.org). She is interested in integrated approaches to spatial issues in epidemiology using spatial methods and tools (remote sensing, GIS, spatial models). Her current research activities focus on human population distribution in African cities, urban health inequalities and the impact of population distribution changes on health and vulnerability.
Pierre-Philippe Mathieu
Head of the ESA Φ-lab Explore OfficeHe is heading the philab Explore Office at the European Space Agency in ESRIN (Frascati, Italy), aiming to connect people, ideas & digital technologies to help shape the future of Earth Observation. He spent 20+ years working in the field of environmental and ocean modelling, weather risk management and remote sensing. He has a degree in Mechanical Engineering and M.Sc from ULiège (Belgium), a Ph.D. in Oceanography from the Univ. of Louvain (Belgium), and a Management degree from the Univ. of Reading Business School (UK).
Son V. Nghiem
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (USA)In 1991, he joined the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), CalTech, where he is currently a Senior Research Scientist, the Science & Applications Development Lead of the Radar Science & Engineering Section, and the JPL Hydrology Discipline Program Manager of the Hydrology Office in the Earth Science Research & Mission Formulation of the Earth Science & Technology Directorate. His research encompasses active & passive remote sensing, development of advanced satellite radars & radiometers, electromagnetic scattering & emission modeling, & Earth sciences and applications from the tropics to polar regions.
Karen Seto
Yale University (USA)She is Associate Dean of Research & Professor of Geography and Urbanization at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. She is an expert in urbanization and global change, & satellite remote sensing. Prof. Seto has pioneered methods to reconstruct land-use dynamics with satellite data and to forecast the expansion of urban areas. She has conducted urbanization research in China for twenty years. She was one of the 2 Coordinating Lead Authors for the urban chapter of Working Group III of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. She has served on many U.S. National Research Council Committees.
Devis Tuia
EPFL-ENAC (CH)After his PhD at UNIL in remote sensing, Devis Tuia was postdoc in Valencia (Spain), Boulder (Colorado, US) and EPFL, working on model adaptation & prior knowledge integration in machine‑learning. In 2014 he became Research Assistant Professor at the Univ. of Zurich, where he started the Multimodal Remote Sensing group. In 2017, he joined Wageningen Univ. (NL), where he was Professor of the GeoInformation Science & Remote Sensing Laboratory. He then joined EPFL Valais in 2020 to start the ECEO lab, working at the interface between Earth observation, machine-learning & environmental sciences.
