Creating Socio-Environmental Scenarios Webinar

Dr. Vanessa Schweizer is is an Associate Professor of Knowledge Integration at the University of Waterloo in the Faculty of Environment. She is also a faculty member at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation. Her research focuses on the integration of qualitative and quantitative knowledge for constructing narrative scenarios, as well as computational methods for ‘discovering’ scenarios. Her work has focused primarily on climate change, and she is a steering committee member of the International Committee on New Integrated Climate Change Assessment Scenarios.  

Dr. Hannah Kosow is a researcher, project manager, and lecturer at the Center for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovation Studies at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Her research focuses on environmental scenarios and qualitative systems analyses. During her PhD at the Stuttgart Cluster of Excellence SimTech, she explored new qualitative-quantitative scenario methods. She also studies the participation of experts, stakeholders and citizens in research processes. Currently she works on conflicts and policy design in the fields of water and land use. 

Sondoss Elsawah is an Associate Professor of Systems Engineering and Information Technology, and the Director of the Capability Systems Centre at University of New South Wales. Her research program focuses on understanding the behavior of large complex problems and systemic risks that arise from the interactions between social, technological, and environmental systems. She is an expert on the application of systems thinking and system modeling methodologies to support decision making and education. Building on her academic achievements, Sondoss been recognized as a thought leader in her scientific fields in Australia and internationally. For example, she is the Vice President of the Australian Society of Operations Research (ASOR) and was elected a distinguished Fellow of the Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand (MSSANZ). Sondoss is a senior editor of the Journal of Environmental Modelling and Software (A*) and the journal of Group Decision and Negotiation (A*).

Dr. Martin Cenek is an Associate Professor at the University of Portland, Oregon, USA. He is a computer science researcher and educator working in the fields of complex systems and intelligent cyber-physical systems. He builds integrative agent-based models to study and understand coupled socio-ecological systems. The models aid in answering questions of how we, as a society, interact with natural resources and the environment at a time of global ecological change. Martin received his PhD in computer science from Portland State University, specializing in artificial intelligence and complex systems. 

Dr. Rebecca Kariuki is a Carson Fellow with Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Germany and an AIMS Fellow in Climate Change Science with the African Institute of Mathematical Sciences (AIMS), Rwanda. Her research is on understanding the impacts of changing climates, environments, and societies on the future sustainability of social-ecological systems in East Africa. Her current research involves integrating multistakeholder perspectives with spatial modeling to understand long-term changes in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania and to explore sustainable futures for the societies, biodiversity and ecosystem services they support. She has worked at the African Conservation Centre (ACC) and other consultancies in Nairobi, Kenya in several projects. She received her PhD in Environmental Geography from the University of York, UK and her MSc (in Biology of Conservation) from the University of Nairobi, Kenya.