Philip Lewis

Chair, UK Future Earth

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Tim O’Riordan

OBE FBA (University of East Anglia)

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Professor O’Riordan is Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. Professor O’Riordan is European Advisor to the UK Sustainable Development Commission and a member of Sustainability East, the East of England Sustainable Development Round Table. His research deals with the themes associated with better governance for sustainability. His direct work relates to designing future coastlines in East Anglia in England so that they are ready for sea level rise and the creation of sound economies and societies for a sustainable future. He is a core member of the Prince of Wales’ seminar on Business and the Environment. He is an assessor for the Prince of Wales Accounting for Sustainability project. He sits on the Corporate Responsibility Body for Asda plc, and also on the Growth and Climate Change Panel for Anglian Water Group.

William Powrie

FREng (University of Southampton)

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Professor Powrie is Professor of Geotechnical Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of Southampton. His main technical areas of interest are transport infrastructure and sustainable waste and resource management, underpinned by an understanding of fundamental soil behaviour. Professor Powrie is also a Geotechnical Consultant for the internationally leading groundwater control company, WJ Groundwater Ltd. He is also a co-author of two Construction Industry Research and Information (CIRIA) reports incorporating the results of my research in groundwater control (C515) and embedded retaining walls (C580). He currently leads TRACK21, a major EPSRC-funded research consortium with the aim of revolutionising techniques for railway track design, construction and maintenance. Professor Powrie’s research on waste and resource management focuses on landfill science and engineering and has led to the development of methods to improve resource recovery and reduce the pollution potential from landfills. He has also worked on the design and engineering risk assessment of the low-level radioactive waste repositories at Drigg, and from 2004-2010, chaired the Technologies Advisory Committee for Defra’s £30m programme of research and demonstrator projects for new technologies for the treatment of biodegradable waste.

Melissa Leach

CBE FBA (Institute of Development Studies)

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Professor Leach is Director of the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex. She co-directed from 2006-2014 the interdisciplinary, internationally collaborative ESRC STEPS (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) Centre. As an anthropologist she has thirty years of long-term ethnographic research experience in West Africa, focusing on eastern Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia and the Gambia. Recent research and publications focus on pandemic preparedness, the anthropology and ecology of zoonotic disease, the politics of green transformations, and sustainability and inequality. Amongst external roles, she was vice-chair of the Science Committee of Future Earth 2012-2017, lead author of the 2016 World Social Science Report on Challenging Inequalities and the UN Women’s World Survey on the Role of Women in Economic Development 2014. Professor Leach is a member of the Strategic Coherence of ODA Research (SCOR) Board and the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food).

Carol Robinson

Chair, Scientific Steering Committee (IMBeR)

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Professor Robinson is currently Professor of Marine Sciences within the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, where she is also a member of the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Conservation, and the Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences. She is presently the chair of the Scientific Steering Committee of the SCOR/Future Earth Global Research Project ‘Integrated Marine Biosphere Research’ (IMBeR). Professor Robinson leads a team which studies the role of marine bacteria, phytoplankton and zooplankton in the global cycling of carbon and oxygen, and how this varies in space and time and with changing environmental conditions such as increasing nutrient supply, temperature and carbon dioxide and decreasing dissolved oxygen. Professor Robinson also developed an analytical system to continually measure seawater dissolved inorganic carbon and used this to determine the spatial variability in the North Atlantic CO2 sink, the impact of coccolithophore blooms on oceanic carbon uptake and the imbalanced uptake of carbon and nitrogen by phytoplankton. Recent projects have included the determination of oxygen photolysis as a potential bias in the determination of plankton production, the impact of coastal upwelling on carbonate chemistry, the relationship between apparent oxygen utilisation and dissolved organic carbon, and determination of the proportion of plankton respiration attributable to bacterioplankton.

Hugh Coe

University of Manchester

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Professor Coe is currently Head of School and Professor of Atmospheric Composition at the University of Manchester. Professor Coe is also presently the Chair of the UK Local Organising Committee for the Future Earth Global Research Project International Global Atmospheric Chemistry (IGAC). His research focuses on improving the knowledge of the physics and chemistry of atmospheric aerosols. Current research includes biomass burning and dust aerosols, the long-range transport of pollution aerosol, aerosol-cloud interactions, organic aerosol, transformation and transport of aerosols on urban to regional scales. Professor Coe chairs the joint NERC/Met Office FAAM aircraft operations committee and is a current member of the NERC FAAM Board. He also holds associate editorships of the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society and Aerosol Science and Technology, as well as a committee member of The Aerosol Society.

Pamela Katic

Vice-Chair, Future Earth Nexus Knowledge-Action Network

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Dr Pamela Katic is a Social Scientist at the Natural Resources Institute (NRI) at the University of Greenwich, focusing on quantitative socio-economic methods. She has a first degree in Economics from the Universidad de San Andres (Argentina), and a Masters in Environmental and Resource Economics and PhD in Economics from the Australian National University. Her PhD thesis was developed under the ANU-UNESCO Chair in Water Economics & Transboundary Water Governance and it entailed applications of optimal groundwater management in the Guarani Aquifer System in South America. In 2011, she joined the West Africa Office of the International Water Management Institute, a CGIAR institution, as a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics. In this position and later as a Research Fellow in Economics in the same institution, she gained considerable experience assessing the constraints and opportunities of innovative agricultural investments and policies in developing countries. She has led and participated in over twenty innovative interdisciplinary research projects and has been active in public forums such as agricultural sector working groups and teams advising the implementation of agricultural research for development programs in the West Africa region. Pamela’s research has been translated into high-quality articles in some of the world’s leading water, environmental and economics journals and she has presented her work in a variety of regional and high-profile international conferences. She has also taken an active role in non-profit initiatives such as the Food, Water, Energy and Environment network, where, as the Volta Basin Chair, leads activities in the region to provide decision-makers at all levels with the knowledge and frameworks to effectively manage trade-offs. She has field experience in numerous African countries (especially in West Africa) and South America. She is fluent in Spanish (mother tongue), English, and speaks some French and Portuguese. She has strong analytical skills in the following methods: econometrics; Bayesian models; cost-benefit and cost-effectiveness analysis; policy analysis matrices, SAM/CGE modelling; hydro-economic modelling; dynamic optimization; and mathematical programming.

Peter Smith

Chair in Plant & Soil Science, University of Aberdeen

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After obtaining a PhD in 1991, Pete Smith worked as a Higher- then Senior-Scientific Officer at the MAFF Central Science Laboratory until 1994. He then worked as a Band 6 and Band 5 Senior Research Scientist at Rothamsted Research before joining the University of Aberdeen as a Senior Lecturer in 2001. He became a Reader in 2003, and Professor of Soils & Global Change in 2005. His main areas of expertise are in modelling greenhouse gas / carbon mitigation, bioenergy, biological carbon sequestration, global food systems modelling and greenhouse gas removal technologies. He is co-leader with Prof Jo Smith of the Environmental Modelling Group (2 Academic staff, 2 Senior Research Fellows, 15 Post-docs, 12 PhDs). He is also Science Director of Scotland's Climate Change Centre of Expertise (www.climatexchange.org.uk), and was Director of Food Systems of the Scottish Food Security Alliance-Crops (www.sfsa-crops.org), and Theme Leader of the University-wide theme, Environment and Food Security (www.abdn.ac.uk/environment-food-security/), until 2015. He is editor for Global Change Biology and Global Change Biology Bioenergy. He was a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award holder (2008-2013), Royal Society Research Fellow (2008-2013), and is a Fellow of the Society of Biology (FSB; elected 2008), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE; elected 2009), a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Acedemy (FNA; elected 2017); a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences (EurASc; elected 2018) and a Fellow of the Royal Society (London; elected 2017).

Marco Sacchi

Royal Society University Research Fellow, University of Surrey

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Dr Marco Sacchi was awarded a PhD in Chemistry at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland. In his PhD work he studied the effect of molecular vibrations and surface structure on the chemisorption of methane. At the end of his PhD he won a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship and joined the Surface Science Research Group (SSRG) at the University of Cambridge, led by Dr Stephen J. Jenkins and Prof Sir David King. In 2013 he was elected Research Fellow of Hughes Hall. In his research he employs first-principles computational methods and parallel computing to investigate quantum effects in biological molecules (including DNA), dynamics on surfaces and catalysis on 2D materials. In 2014 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship and he joined the University of Surrey. His current research interests include: Quantum Biology, Surface Dynamics and 2D nanomaterials.