The NERC/UKRI ‘Constructing a Digital Environment’ Programme (www.digitalenvironment.org) is an exciting challenge, set to develop for the first time the thinking and practice around a ‘digitally enabled environment’, providing benexfits for policy makers, businesses, communities and individuals. The focus of the programme is the combination of environmental science, with computer science, data science and behavioural science.
Key to the programme is the appointment of an Expert Network of leading influencer-practitioners, thought-leaders, and scientific and technical authorities whose work will identify best practices in ‘digital environment’ and help influence UK environmental policy thinking, drawing on expertise in the methodologies and tools for assessing, analysing, monitoring and forecasting the state of the natural environment. There are three groups of experts in the network:
NERC Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) Early Career Researchers Dr Tom August |
 Dr Alex Bush |
 Dr Alejandro Coca-Castro |
 Dr Claire Harris |
 Dr Sam Harrison |
 Dr Peter Martin |
 Dr Alessandro Novellino |
 Dr Jonathan Paul |
 Dr Maria Pregnolato |
 Dr Remy Vandaele |
 Dr Burcu Yüksel Ripley |
 Dr Hua Zhong |
 Dr Michael Aspinall |
 Dr Liz Bagshaw |
 Dr Thomas Beach |
 Emma Bee |
 Dr Anshuman Bhardwaj |
 Dr Devanjan Bhattacharya |
 Dr Deepayan Bhowmik |
 Professor Gordon Blair |
 Professor Abbe Brown |
 Dr Jenny Brown |
 Dr Tyler Chafin |
 Professor Albert Chen |
 Dr Leo Chen |
 Dr Louise Darroch |
 Dr Barry Evans |
 Matt Fry |
 Professor Elena Gaura |
 Professor Jane Hart |
 Dr Adrian Hines |
 Dr Bo Hou |
 Dr Scott Hosking |
 Dr Sara Khalid |
 Dr Andrew Kingdon |
 Professor Richard Kingston |
 Dr Amber Leeson |
 Dr Liz Lewis |
 Dr Matt Lewis |
 Professor Iseult Lynch |
 Dr Georgios Maniatis |
 Professor Keiichi Nakata |
 Dr Mark Naylor |
 Professor Nir Oren |
 Dr Matthew Palmer |
 Dr Kirsty Pringle |
 Professor Richard Reeve |
 Professor Marian Scott |
 Dr John Siddorn |
 Dr Lindsay Todman |
 Carl Watson |
 Dr Martin Wearing |
 Prof. Longzhi Yang |
 Archibong Akpan |
 Charles Helleputte |
 Dr Chantal Huijbers |
 Dr Nadeja Komendantova |
 Ole Mark |
 Janet Ranganathan |
 Dr Tinkle Chugh |
 Professor Tom Crick |
 Dr Theo Damoulas |
 Dr Emma Hellawell |
 Courtney Holm |
 Holger Kessler |
 Malcolm Kitchen |
 David Klinges |
 Dr Georgios Leontidis |
 Dr Claire MacIntosh |
 Hector McNeill |
 Dr Keivan Navaie |
 Dr Claire Neil |
 Dr Keith Shepherd |
 Dr Luke Smith |
 Dr Matthew Smith |
 Dr Arthur Thornton |
 Professor Ngozi Unuigbe |
 Dr Victoria Bennett |
 Alexis Hannah Smith |
 John Watkins |
NERC Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) – Early Career Researchers
The Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) – Early Career Researchers are listed below.
Top of pageDr Tom August
Tom August is a computational ecologist at the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology where his research focuses on the nexus between digital innovation, academic research and citizen science.
Tom comes from a background of field research having studied bats’ ecology for his PhD and led expeditions in the tropics. Nowadays his work focuses on new and emerging technologies and how they can be applied in biodiversity research to improve data quality and quantity, and support the dissemination of biodiversity information to decision makers.
Tom has developed expertise in a wide range of tools and techniques relevant to the Digital Environment Programme. Tom has led research on the application of computer vision, passive acoustic monitoring, virtual reality, drones, reproducible science, data visualisation and super-computing. Tom’s research focusses on adding value to data collected by citizen scientists in the UK through the application of new technologies. This citizen science data is collected by over 80 volunteer led schemes and societies that are supported by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology.
Tom is also an avid science communicator and has run a number of public engagement projects aimed at young families. He has also run workshops and hackathons for academics on topics including computer-vision, acoustic monitoring, and socio-ecological data.
tomaug@ceh.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Alex Bush
I am interested in how ecological communities respond to environmental change at large scales, from fields to country-wide, and how that information can be used to support decision making. My background is in the analysis and interpretation of large-scale monitoring programs and datasets, and how novel technologies could play a role in making decisions more statistically robust. This has included many of the issues that exemplify the challenges to understanding landscape-scale change, such as the trade-offs in data quality and extent, the multi-scale nature of many relationships, and systems responding to multiple confounding threats.
I have previously studied the implications of climate change for plants and freshwater biodiversity at multiple scales in Australia, including the implications of acute events like heatwaves. I subsequently worked for the Canadian government developing the use of high-throughput sequencing (DNA metabarcoding) for the national freshwater bio-assessment program. In particular the need for rapid assessment, or remote monitoring, is key in these massive countries where accessing a representative selection of sites is a major challenge.
Access may be easier in the UK, but with so many competing demands on the landscape it is all the more critical to understanding how to strategically maintain ecological integrity among other interests. My current research focuses on precisely how to manage, analyse and interpret monitoring data, collected by a network of in-situ sensors, and how we can maximize remote sensing to generalize our observations.
alex.bush@lancaster.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Alejandro Coca-Castro
Alejandro is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Alan Turing Institute, with a background in Physical Geography. His research focuses on modelling Earth systems and Environmental phenomena using artificial intelligence and data science. His current research involves the development of probabilistic data-driven models for the intelligent fusion of data from a wide range of sources (satellite, reanalysis, in-situ surface sensors, among others) to help predicting environmental and climate variables in terrestrial biomes.
Before joining the Turing, Alejandro contributed to multiple international institutions in the public, research and industry sectors developing pipelines and tools to process and analyse big spatial and non-spatial datasets for decision making, mainly in forest and cultivated systems. Beside his involvement in scientific and applied research challenges, he is an active contributor and lead in open science education and open-source development. For instance, he is founder of the Environmental Data Science Book, a computational notebook community promoting open source software, reproducibility and collaborative research in Environmental science. In addition, he has contributed to software development, tutorials, content and events led by community-driven initiatives including Scivision (core member), the Turing Way (core member), Open Life Science (mentee/mentor) and Pangeo (member).
Alejandro is a topic editor of the Journal of Open Source Education (JOSE) and reviewer of other scientific journals including IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, SciPy Proceedings and International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Congress.
acoca@turing.ac.ukTuring web page
Personal web page
GitHub
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Dr Claire Harris
I am a modeller/statistician with a focus on plant and animal health working for Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland. My work revolves around the modelling of large scale and complex systems with links to climate change, biodiversity and disease control. In particular, I work on simulations of plant biodiversity from small scale patches, such as Scottish peatlands, all the way up to continents, investigating how vegetation and climate interact in the face of unprecedented change. I also have experience and interest in epidemiological simulations and data analysis, including work on COVID-19. I am fortunate to collaborate with various research organisations, including the Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health, Natural History Museum London (NHM), Scottish Government’s Plant Health Centre, Scottish COVID-19 Response Consortium, Natural Resources Wales and PeatlandACTION, and to have received funding from the NERC Landscape Decisions Programme and an EPSRC studentship.
I have always had strongly interdisciplinary research interests and I originally studied Biology with Maths at the University of Birmingham. I moved up to Scotland in 2014 to complete an MSc in Quantitative Methods in Biodiversity, Conservation and Epidemiology, before following on with a PhD in Ecology, both at the University of Glasgow. During my PhD at the University of Glasgow I created EcoSISTEM, an initial prototype for a digital twin of global plant biodiversity. Through a series of NERC Landscape Decisions grants, we have since refined this system at the UK scale with our partners at the NHM. Our recent focus on peatlands has emphasised the complex linked systems that must be considered alongside plants, including weather, hydrology, soil, land-use and agriculture, all of which I hope to interact with as we move forward.
For more details, there is a video overview – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHM3utQddY4&t=31s that I created for our NERC projects, as well as the code – https://github.com/EcoJulia/EcoSISTEM.jl – and associated preprint –https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.12257.
claire.harris@bioss.ac.ukInstitutional web page
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Dr Sam Harrison
Sam is an environmental modeller at the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, with a background in quantum physics. He specialises in the development of geospatial fate and exposure models of potential pollutants in soils and surface waters. Recently, his work has focussed on modelling the fate and bio-uptake of nanomaterials. Through this, he led the development of the NanoFASE model, which represents state-of-the-art in nanomaterial environmental exposure modelling.
More broadly, his work focusses on integrating models to better quantify the impacts of environmental change, giving us deeper understanding of human-environment interactions. His work frequently involves assessing the relevance of such models to regulators and industry, tackling issues around how complex model output can be best used in robust, evidence-based decision making.
Through a background in computational software engineering and web development, Sam has strong interests in how software sustainability best practices and state-of-the-art digital infrastructures can help environmental modelling and model integration. He is a keen advocate of, creator of and contributor to open source software and open science. He is involved in or is a member of a number of networks promoting these goals, such as the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science (CEEDS), Software Sustainability Institute, Open Modeling Foundation and Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System.
Sam is an enthusiastic educator about a variety of software-related topics, and is currently involved in organising the CEEDS Coding Club, a collaborative space for coding-related demonstrations and problem solving.
sharrison@ceh.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Peter Martin
From his undergraduate degree in Geology (Bristol), Peter then undertook at PhD in Physics (also at the University of Bristol) where he examined the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident of March 2011. This multi-dimensional work involved the use of both unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s) equipped with novel radiation detection systems to explore the meter-scale contamination trends, as well as cutting-edge materials science methodologies to examine the microscopic fallout material that was released into the surrounding environment as a result of one of the worst ever nuclear accidents.
Following a brief time working in industry, with his expertise gained in radiation, detection systems and materials science, in 2020 Peter obtained a highly prestigious Royal Academy of Engineering (RAEng) Research Fellowship, where he works alongside other international experts in the field to develop novel sensory platforms for deployment across multiple applications.
peter.martin@bristol.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Alessandro Novellino
I am a Remote Sensing Geoscientist within the Geodesy and Earth Observation capability at the British Geological Survey. My research interests focus on the development of new methods and tools to identify, monitor and model natural and anthropogenic hazards by processing and interpreting radar and multispectral satellite data, in particular a geodetic techique, known as Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar, used to detect small movement of the ground surface. The aim of my work is to use this data for assessing the hazard and risk associated with Earth’s surface phenomena (e.g., landslides).
I work at the frontiers of the fields of geodesy, geomorphology, numerical modeling and risks assessment and my outputs are disseminated through publications and capacity building. The impact of my ouptuts provides tailored solutions to develop risk reduction strategies for global challenges and deliver direct scientific advice to the UK Government. I feel lucky to work in the ‘Golden-Age’ of EO where more than ever satellite data are freely available and easily accessible to everyone, representing an unprecedented incentive for the development of research and commercial services focussed towards the dynamic analysis of Earth’s processes. My long-term vision is to promote the wellbeing of human population and support countries’ towards more sustainable economic models being natural phenomena one of the main challenges recognised in the UN Sustainable Development Goals for underpinning economic development.
alessn@bgs.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Jonathan Paul
I am a Lecturer in Geoscience in the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, University of London. I trained as a geophysicist, specialising in surficial manifestations of sub-plate mantle convection (dynamic topography), but have broad interests in sub-surface hydrology and geohazards. Recently I’ve worked on combining “citizen science” and participatory monitoring approaches with new technologies (e.g. self-built sensors and smartphone apps) to enhance community-level resilience to floods and landslides at several locations across the Global South.
At the moment I lead our new MSc course in Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology; my research is concentrated around three broad themes: (i) the use of rocks as a natural filtration mechanism to generate a new source of drinking water in areas of poor water quality / low and unpredictable quantities; (ii) combining climate observables with epidemiological datasets to generate disease risk maps across the Indian subcontinent; (iii) cooling sub-surface infrastructure such as underground railways in an environmentally sustainable way using groundwater and heat exchangers.
jonathan.paul@rhul.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Maria Pregnolato
Dr Maria Pregnolato is a Lecturer in Infrastructure Resilience, in the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Bristol (UK). Her work focuses on infrastructure resilience, in particular the impact of flooding to road networks and bridges. She holds a Living with Environmental Change (LWEC) EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) Fellowship to investigate the impact of extreme flooding on bridges and transport. Beginning her academic career at Newcastle University (UK), Maria developed an integrated flood-transport model to explore the impact of flooding on road networks and urban resilience. In recent years, she has been focusing on hydrodynamic modelling of flooding impact to bridges, including scour risk management and structural health monitoring. Lately, she is working on smart bridges and Digital Twins, exploring the role of sensing and digitalisation within infrastructural assets.
maria.pregnolato@bristol.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Burcu Yüksel Ripley
Dr Burcu Yüksel Ripley is a Senior Lecturer in Law and the Director of the Research Centre for Commercial Law at the University of Aberdeen. She obtained her LLB and PhD in Private International Law from Turkey, and her LLM in International and Comparative Business Law from England. Before joining the University of Aberdeen, she worked at the University of Ankara (Faculty of Law, Department of Private International Law) and at the Export Credit Bank of Turkey (Turk Eximbank), and she practiced law in Turkey enrolled with the Ankara Bar Association.
Burcu’s research interests are in international law, particularly in private international law, international trade law and international commercial law. Her current research focuses on law and digital technologies, aiming to raise awareness of the legal implications of digital technologies and to offer appropriate legal solutions to facilitate the developments in the area. Burcu is the author and editor of several publications in these fields and a regular speaker at international conferences, workshops and seminars. She has been involved in international collaborative research projects and appointed by courts in the UK and Turkey to give expert opinion evidence.
b.yuksel@abdn.ac.ukPersonal web page
Burcu also organised the Constructing a Digital Environment webinar series Law and Ethics in the Digital Environment.
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Dr Remy Vandaele
I am a postdoc research assistant at the University of Reading. In my current research, I investigate the possibilities brought by artificial intelligence in environmental sciences, and especially in flood management.
My background is in the development of (deep) machine learning and computer vision algorithms to automate image-related tasks in order to alleviate the burden of operators (scientists, monitoring jobs,…) in their daily lives. I have previously worked in several areas: biomedical sciences (anatomical landmark detection and CT-CBCT image registration), mechanical engineering (defect recognition), and environmental sciences (cloud detection on satellite images).
I am currently working on the development of deep learning algorithms able to estimate river levels from CCTV camera images. This is useful in the case of flood events, because current solutions to observe river levels can either provide dense geographical coverage but low temporal resolution (satellite images) or limited geographical coverage and high temporal resolution (river gauges). CCTV cameras, which are relatively cheap and easy to install, could become an intermediary solution, but their images need to be automatically transformed into quantitative data first. In order to perform this task, I develop deep transfer learning methodologies to train convolutional neural networks on opportunistic data such as pre-existing CCTV camera networks, Environment Agency gauge data and digital elevation models.
r.a.vandaele@reading.ac.ukInstitutional web page
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Dr Hua Zhong
Hua Zhong has built experience in both teaching and research as a senior lecturer and researcher in NTU. Hua actively engages with both University and industry partners to create and deliver tailed research opportunities. Hua leads a team in the building services subject area to teach construction technology and building engineering services related modules, in addition to undertaking relevant research, commercial and consultancy activities. Hua has a range of research interests with publications including Digital Building Services Engineering, Lean construction project management, Health and wellbeing building design, Sustainable technology development, ecosystem assessment and management, low carbon and life cycle assessment.
Hua worked as a Building Services consultant in both UK and China before she moved to her academic career. Hua gained a lot of experience in international projects in this field in both the UK and abroad. From the past industry working experience, Hua has gained good building services design knowledge and an established track record of various projects, both new build and refurbishment schemes. The experience covers commercial, Residential, Industrial and Public Health schemes. Hua is conversant with current sustainable design strategies and has designed under this key requirement using dynamic thermal modelling and SBEM software to produce optimum cost-effective regulation-compliant solutions.
Hua is a Charted Engineer and committee member of the Charted Institute of Building Services Engineer (CIBSE). Hua’s role in the CIBSE committee includes leading young engineer-training network and knowledge transfer CPD development, reviewing and writing consultation reports for updating building regulation and industrial code.
hua.zhong@ntu.ac.ukPersonal web page
NERC Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) Senior Experts
The Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) Senior Experts are listed below.
Top of pageDr Michael Aspinall
Senior Lecturer in Digital Electronics at Lancaster University
Michael’s research interest is fast digital instrumentation design and real-time digital signal processing for nuclear materials assay. He completed his PhD in real time digital assay in 2008 at Lancaster University, followed by several years (2009-2015) as a Systems Engineer with Hybrid Instruments, a Lancaster University spin-out company. He returned to academia in 2015.
Michael’s research began during his degree in Mechatronic Engineering (2005) with contributions towards the design and implementation of an advanced neutron spectrometer funded by an EPSRC Instrumentation Development Award (GR/R38538/01). His PhD was sponsored by the Think Crime! EPSRC research project (EP/C008022/1) which formed the DISTINGUISH consortium. His work here specifically focused on real-time digital assay of mixed radiation fields with prominent developments in real-time, digital pulse-shape discrimination of neutrons and gamma rays. During his time in industry he was personally responsible for developing his research into a commercial product (TRL 9), with the first product offering being available in 2010. Sales of this technology to several nuclear establishments (in the UK, USA, Japan, South Korea, China and India) have enabled world-leading advances in nuclear materials assay and directly resulted in > 10 publications and international partnerships, most notably a 5-year collaboration with the IAEA (2010-2015). He oversaw the delivery of the bespoke processing hardware and software for the ADRIANA liquid scintillator array at Lancaster University as part of the National Nuclear User Facility (NNUF) (EP/L025671/1). Michael has maintained a working relationship with Hybrid Instruments ever since.
From 2017 to 2021 he was part of a £1.6M EPSRC funded (EP/P018505/1) TORONE project that developed remotely operated instrumentation for the characterisation of extreme nuclear environments. He holds an EPSRC UK-Japan Civil Nuclear Research Programme (phase 6) to develop radiation tolerant criticality monitoring instrumentation (EP/T013532/1). He is currently leading on the STFC SWIMMR S5 project (ST/W001810/1) to design, implement and deploy a new generation of ground-level neutron monitor to enhance the capabilities of the Met Office Space Weather Operations Centre (MOSWOC).
As an embedded researcher applying transformative technologies for a NERC funded (NE/W007320/1) project, he was involved in developing instrumentation to enable the field deployment of a novel waterborne tritium detection technique developed also at Lancaster University. The technique promises in-situ, near real-time monitoring of tritium in groundwater for use at the Sellafield site, enabling cheaper, faster, wider area monitoring of waterborne tritium and provide an understanding of the migration of more significant radiotoxins around nuclear sites.
m.d.aspinall@lancaster.ac.ukInstitutional web page
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Dr Liz Bagshaw
Liz is a glaciologist exploring new methods to assess the impact of microbial and biogeochemical processes operating in extreme environments. Her research combines engineering with precision biogeochemical techniques to understand microbial and biogeochemical cycles.
Liz develops sensors that can collect and communicate data from extreme environments, including wireless data transfer from subglacial systems over two kilometers deep.
Her multidisciplinary science uses Digital Environment techniques to understand how biogeochemical systems work in a range of geoenvironments in the UK and in the polar regions. Liz undertook her PhD in glaciology at the University of Bristol, exploring biogeochemical processes in Antarctic ecosystems, followed by postdoctoral training in engineering. She is a senior lecturer in Earth Sciences at Cardiff University.
bagshawe@cardiff.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Thomas Beach
Tom is a reader in Construction Informatics, he holds a PhD in Computer Science and has been working in the field of digitisation of the built environment research field for over 10 years.
Tom conducts research into how to apply state of the art computing technologies to deliver a safer, more efficient, less polluting, more resilient built environment. This research extends to the intersection of the built and natural environment and examining how the performance of the build environment impacts on natural processes.
His research focuses on innovation in the built environment field underpinned by data, modelling, artificial intelligence, and optimisation. More specifically: (a) digital twinning of natural and build environments, (b) modelling and storage of digital twin data, (b) the Internet of Things(IoT) and its application to the monitoring and control of the built environment, (c) data analytics including machine learning and artificial intelligence, (d) application of cloud/distributed computing to data storage and processing for built environment applications and (e) the semantics of data within the built environment.
beachth@cf.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Emma Bee
Emma’s particular interests lie within the field of spatial data and its use to better understand natural geological hazards and the impact of such hazards on society. She has been heavily involved with the UK Natural Hazard’s Partnership (NHP), a multi-agency group providing authoritative and consistent information, research and analysis of natural hazards for government and the responder community since its inception in 2011. Through this Partnership, Emma spent six months on a secondment at the Met Office Hazard Centre within its 24/7 Operations Unit to help strengthen partnership working and to get more personal insight into the mechanics of working with meteorological data in an operational setting. She is now Chair of an advisory panel to a Belmont Forum
Grant – Waterproofing Data: engaging stakeholders in sustainable flood risk governance for urban resilience.
Emma has initiated and led projects which aim to analyse data to gain new insights into natural hazards. She is Co-PI of a SHEAR funded LANDSLIP project which focusses on the integration of landscape, meteorological and social dynamics to develop a prototype regional Landslide Early Warning System in India. She is also Co-I of a UKRI-GCRF project Understanding Risks & Building Enhanced Capabilities in Latin American cities led by Warwick University.
As a former Director of the Association Geographic Information (AGI), editor of the AGI’s Foresight Report and member of the Government led Public Sector Mapping Agreement User Group, Emma has a strong network and positive reputation within the UK Geospatial community, in government and industry.
ebee@bgs.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Anshuman Bhardwaj
Anshuman is a Senior Lecturer of Earth Observation and Planetary Sciences at the University of Aberdeen. He specialises in remote sensing of cryosphere, and other planetary surfaces and landforms. Anshuman has previously worked on environmental monitoring projects at the Defence Research and Development Organisation (India), Luleå University of Technology (LTU) (Sweden), and United Arab Emirates University (UAEU). In recent years, he has led research activities on integrating remote sensing and field data to understand the impact of climate change on Himalayan glacio-hydrology, spatial and non-spatial data integration and modelling, and use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for environmental research.
Anshuman is on the editorial board of several reputed remote sensing journals and has acted as an external assessor for the Earth Observation and cryosphere proposals submitted to various international funding agencies. Among several other funded projects, during his tenure at LTU Sweden, Anshuman as the Principal Investigator was awarded a Research Network Grant from the Swedish Research Council to develop and install air quality sensors in high Himalayan mountains to study the impacts of climate change on Himalayan glaciers.
Anshuman has authored over hundred peer-reviewed articles in journals, books, and proceedings. Anshuman’s current research interests mostly focus on semi-automated algorithm development for characterising various environments using remotely-sensed data, analysing ways to effectively use UAVs for environmental research, modelling and monitoring glacial hazards, and studying glacier dynamics in changing climate.
anshuman.bhardwaj@abdn.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Devanjan Bhattacharya
Devanjan’s background is in geomatics and geo-spatial technologies, intelligent geospatial analytics merging remotely sensed data, navigation technologies, informatics and GIS together, which are proving a strong platform to progress towards sustainable smart societies, and he continues his endeavour towards that goal, through research, development and teaching. He has researched on various multidisciplinary domains applied to geo-hazard assessment, smart cities, and citizen-centric challenges through spatial data infrastructures. He is currently a Marie Curie Postdoc Fellow on data-driven innovation at Edinburgh University under TRAIN@ED project, working on the technology side of resolving conflicts, assisting peace-processes and proposing ways of capturing associated environmental impacts.
His current research involves the application of mapping technologies to augment peace-building processes, to implement spatial and mapping solutions and emergency decision making to form a robust spatial support system in critical events. The peace building process requires in-depth data analysis and multi-pronged approach to understand all stakeholders’ perspectives like citizens situations, governmental and non-governmental approaches, peace-builders’ needs, and working with spatial intelligence assisting with better visualizations, layouts and analytics. This is termed PeaceTech, which includes developing tools for conflict analysis and inclusive peacebuilding. The vision is to build a collaborative PeaceTech hub at the University of Edinburgh to harness interdisciplinary research, peace–building practitioners, and technology providers. Devanjan has a PhD and Master of Technology in Geomatics Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee, India.
d.bhattacharya@ed.ac.ukInstitutional web page
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Dr Deepayan Bhowmik
Dr Deepayan Bhowmik a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Data Science in the School of Computing at Newcastle University, UK. He has a PhD in Electronic and Electrical Engineering from the University of Sheffield (UK). His core research includes adaptive signal/image decomposition and model of computations for signal processing system design with applications in environmental monitoring, drone and satellite imagery, IoT enabled sensor signal processing and low power vision systems design on embedded hardware. His current research aligns with the following UN sustainability goals (SDG): #2: Zero Hunger, #5: Gender Equality, #6: Clean Water and Sanitation, #12: Responsible Consumption and Production and #14: Life Below Water. He is keen on developing engineering and AI-based solutions of digital mapping of the environment.
Deepayan.Bhowmik@newcastle.ac.ukPersonal web page
GitHub
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Professor Gordon Blair
Gordon Blair is a Distinguished Professor of Distributed Systems in the School of Computing and Communications at Lancaster University. He is co-author of the highly successful book Distributed Systems: Concepts and Design by Coulouris, Dollimore, Kindberg and Blair, with the 5th edition published in 2011, and is co-Editor in Chief of Springer’s Journal of Internet Services and Applications. He has published over 350 papers in his field, with an h-index of 59, and is on the PCs of major international conferences in distributed systems and middleware.
His current interests lie at the intersection of digital technology and environmental science, which includes the role of i) new sensing technology to provide rich data about the natural environment, ii) cloud computing to offer the elastic capacity to store and process this data, and iii) data science techniques to make sense of the resultant complex data sets and to inform decision making. He holds a prestigious EPSRC Senior Fellowship in Digital Technology and Living with Environmental Change (DT/LWEC), and is co-founder of the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science (CEEDS), a partnership between Lancaster University and the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology. He is also a firm advocate of trans-disciplinary research having previously been Director of a Center of Doctoral Training under the EPSRC Digital Economy programme (HighWire).
g.blair@lancaster.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Abbe E. L. Brown PhD FHEA
Abbe Brown is Professor in Intellectual Property Law at the University of Aberdeen. Her research focusses on the intersection between laws relating to intellectual property, information and other laws relating to key societal challenges. Her recent work has a particular focus on climate change and sustainability. Abbe is the Chair of the British and Irish Law, Education and Technology Association and a member of the Public Benefit and Privacy Panel for Health and Social Care of NHS Scotland.
Before returning to academia, Abbe practised as a commercial and intellectual property litigator in London, Melbourne and Edinburgh. She has a strong interest in public engagement, notably through the Song of the Ocean. Her research has been funded by the Modern Law Review, Carnegie Trust, AHRC, Wellcome Trust, British Academy and EU Horizon 2020.
abbe.brown@abdn.ac.ukPersonal web page
Abbe also presented one of the Constructing a Digital Environment webinars.
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Dr Jenny Brown
Jenny is a coastal oceanographer with a long-standing record in modelling coastal processes and developing decision-support tools to assist shoreline management planning. After completing a PhD in 2007 at Bangor University she joined the National Oceanography Centre. Through research projects investigating the coastal impacts of extreme events she connected with the Northwest Regional Monitoring Strategy. Membership of this group has provided her with a thorough appreciation of the gaps in existing coastal monitoring and forecasting capabilities.
From 2018 she led the NERC WireWall project developing new flood hazard sensors to enable the validation and calibration of hazard warning systems, receiving an Industry Award for Positive Impact. She is committed to developing effective communications to engage others in her research. Recent initiatives include the collaborative development of a poetically narrated coastal walk and the use of portable ‘hands on science’ demonstrations that can be used in schools or at public outreach events. Jenny is also the coastal resilience theme lead for the Liverpool Institute of Sustainable Coasts and Oceans. In joining the NERC Digital Environment expert network she plans to form connections with, and learn from, other disciplines to ensure her research is always at the cutting edge of technology developments and uses best practices in data transfer, management and interrogation.
jebro@noc.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Tyler Chafin
Tyler is a Senior Bioinformatician at Biomathematics and Statistics Scotland (BioSS). After completing a PhD in conservation biology at the University of Arkansas (USA), he was appointed as an U.S. National Science Foundation Fellow working to develop new computational approaches to parse ever expanding genomics datasets to form inferences about how microevolutionary processes influence species’ persistence at the Tree of Life scale.
As a bioinformatician, he now works to harness novel and emerging digital technologies to advance the types of questions we can ask with biological data, and to address the ‘computational shortfall’ bottlenecking scientific impact as global data acquisition outpaces data infrastructure. His research interests centre around interrogating georeferenced DNA sequence data to understand causal relationships and feedbacks between eco-evolutionary processes and the environment. A large part of this work is in driving methods development and innovation to minimize analytical ‘footprint’ in a rapidly expanding digital environment, maximise data benefits through developing best practices and mitigating the impacts of missing data, and drawing upon disparate data types to improve forecasts of how biodiversity components may respond as the natural environment changes.
tyler.chafin@bioss.ac.ukBIOSS web page
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Professor Albert Chen
I am an Associate Professor at the Centre for Water Systems (CWS), University of Exeter specialised in Water and Human Environment studies. My research career began with computer modelling of urban floods and I am enthusiastic in building digital solutions to improve our understanding and management of environment. My vision is unleashing the power of hydroinformatics that enables efficient and effective interventions systematically strengthening the resilience of human and environment to the impacts of water-related hazards, for both the present and the future climate scenarios.
Through my previous and ongoing projects, I have created a series of modelling tools to advance scientific knowledge on the interrelationships between different phenomena, services, and consequences related to water, human and environment. The outputs have helped risk communications among stakeholders and citizens to reach consensus on flood mitigation measure and decision making. I am collaborating with international partners on the standardisation of data models to enhance the interoperability of information between different sectors for interdisciplinary implementations of smart technologies. I also have participated and won in multiple hackathon events, implementing creative digital applications for tackling critical challenges in our society.
I am currently co-leading the Policy Action Group in the European Commission’s ICT4Water cluster to review existing challenges and to identify the advantages and opportunities of integrated ICT applications within water sector. The outcomes will contribute to shaping policy recommendations at super-national, national, and local levels to facilitate the uptake of digital solutions.
A.S.Chen@exeter.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Leo Chen
Dr Leo Chen (BSc, MSc, PhD, CEng, FIET, FIMechE, FRSA, FHEA, SMIEEE) has a high level output of research publications in leading international journals and presentations at international conferences, which related to the research area of artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, robotics and autonomous systems, industry 4.0 and studies in multi-disciplinary contexts, e.g. an academic paper published in a nature family journal – Palgrave Communications, which demonstrates significant research and grant potential in engineering and cross-disciplinary applications. Dr Chen has published 100+ academic articles in both high-impact international academic journals and conferences, 2 academic books, 20+ invited seminars and talks, 10+ authorised patents. Dr Chen is one of an academic journal (JCR Q2) editorial board members, and he has been one of the Guest Editors for 5 special issues in this area. Also, Dr Chen has been a regular reviewer for over 30 journals as a Publons’ top 1% of reviewers in Computer Science and Engineering and Book manuscripts reviewer for Publishers, including: Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, Cambridge University Press, CRC Press. Dr Chen has been the Programme Committee member or organiser for over 10+ international conferences. He has been taking a leading role in the previous and current department to maintain multi-disciplinary research links, and develop external research collaborations both nationally and internationally. He has been actively involved in both academic research and KTP projects as PI and CoI funded by EPSRC (UK), Horizon2020 (EU) and Industrial funding bodies, and as the EPSRC grants Peer Reviewer.
leo.chen@newcastle.ac.ukPersonal web page
Git page
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Dr Louise Darroch
Lou is a Senior Marine Data Manager and Scrum Product Owner at the British Oceanographic Data Centre (BODC) in the National Oceanography Centre. She leads a team of software developers to build integrated sensor data networks using emerging infrastructure technologies and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles.
She has a particular interest in Internet of Things (IoT), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and sensor metadata in data systems. She has delivered solutions that integrate sensor observations at the semantic level and pan-Atlantic observation network level as part of the EU H2020 projects SenseOcean, ENVRI-FAIR and AtlantOS. As co-chair of a Research Data Alliance working group, she has led an internationally endorsed recommendation that enhances interoperability in global sensor networks through instrument persistent identifiers. The solution has been adopted by several European infrastructures. She is currently leading a programme to unlock rich pools of historical sensor observations from BODC through federated networks of APIs and scalable technologies.
Recently, she established an Internet of Things (IoT) data system for novel wave-overtopping sensors as part of the NERC Constructing a Digital Environment CreamT and NERC EOMAD projects. This system demonstrated how nowcast hazard warning capability could be used to enable risk-informed decision-making by coastal communities and transport operators in relation to overtopping risks.
Prior to data management, she was a scientific researcher gaining her PhD in Environmental Sciences, during which she studied sulphides in marine phytoplankton.
lorr@noc.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Barry Evans
Barry is a Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Water Systems (CWS) at the University of Exeter. His research background is varied coving a variety of topics including Flooding, Urban Resilience, Evacuation Modelling, System Dynamics, Serious Games, Citizen Science, and the Circular Economy.
During his PhD at the University of Exeter Barry developed methodologies for pre-processing remote sensing data to be utilised within flood modelling applications. His novel approaches were aimed at the capture and representation of fine scale features to improve accuracy of flood models in dense urban environments without the detriment to the model performance. Upon completing his PhD Barry spent some time in industry working with the insurance sector in the field of catastrophe modelling aiding clients in interpreting complex models and developing new approaches for risk quantification before making the transfer back into academia to work within research.
In Barry’s previous research positions in CWS, he’s developed tools to quantify risks and impacts to urban infrastructure due to flood events with a focus in the field of impacts to transportation networks whilst also working with the School of Built Environment at Massey University in New Zealand supporting a PhD student in the development of Tsunami evacuation models. Separate to his work in natural disasters Barry is also involved in research relating to the water-land-food-energy-climate nexus and the circular economy where he’s been developing models in Python and Julia for use within Serious Games.
Currently Barry is working on several international projects including examining the risks posed to vehicle occupants from flooding, utilising novel technologies within the context of the circular economy of water, and data standardisation to help maximise the access and reusability of data within the water industry.
In joining NERC’s Digital Environment Expert network, Barry is looking forward to being able contribute to the team whilst also broadening his horizons learning from others across a wide variety of research fields.
b.evans@exeter.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Matt Fry
I am an environmental informatics manager at UKCEH where I work with a team of software developers and analysts to produce and manage hydrological datasets, and deliver them to research and to end users, often using APIs and interactive tools such as the CEH Water Resources portal (eip.ceh.ac.uk/hydrology/water-resources). I lead systems development for the UK National River Flow Archive and the COSMOS-UK soil moisture sensor network, and coordinate data activities within the NERC Drought and Water Scarcity programme and the Hydro-JULES project.
I’m particularly interested in the integration of sensor network and other time series monitoring data across the freshwater domain to enable wider research use of monitoring data and the application of machine-drive analyses. I’m currently leading the ENTRAIN feasibility project within the Constructing a Digital Environment programme to take this forward. I am co-chair of the Global Water Information Interest Group of the Research Data Alliance, and the theme lead for Data Acquisition and Infrastructure within the Centre of Excellence in Environmental Data Science (CEEDS).
mfry@ceh.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Elena Gaura
Elena Gaura is a Professor of Pervasive Computing, at Coventry University. Her research sits within the broad area of in the area of Cyber Physical Systems – specifically smart sensing systems, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and the Internet of Things (IoT). She is a keen promoter of knowledge transfer from academia to industry and society at large, particularly focusing on the use of sensing technologies for reducing poverty, increasing health, enabling social mobility, and towards the adoption of wireless technologies, Artificial Intelligence and the Internet to tackle global energy and climate challenges.
Her current innovations are on robust end-to-end multi-sensor cyber-physical systems design and community focused technology integration processes. She applies and validates most of her contributions to knowledge in complex socio-technical energy and environmental systems. In the majority of her projects, Elena brings together multi-disciplinary international teams, across the cyber-physical, energy engineering, systems engineering, anthropology and social sciences – academic and practice domains. She is particularly active in the Energy arena, through Humanitarian Engineering projects worldwide, in grid and off grid settings, working towards viable and sustainable end-to-end designs for energy eco-systems. She works with communities in the UK, Amazon, Philippines, Nepal and Rwanda on energy-for-all solutions enabled by sensing and the Internet and motivated by fair access and environmental concerns. Elena is a Trustee for the Women’s Engineering Society and actively mentors and sponsors women in the engineering profession in the UK and abroad.
e.gaura@coventry.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Jane Hart
With a BSc Physical Geography (University of Reading), and PhD Environmental Science (University of East Anglia), Jane is an expert in glacial sedimentology, glaciology and environmental sensor networks. She is joint leader of the successful Glacsweb project (glacweb.org) that developed the first wireless sensor network in a glacial environment, followed by the first Internet of Things (IoT) system to be deployed in a Mountainous environment (mountainsensing.org), and then the first ‘smart’ tracker, an IoT RTK GNSS system to track glacier motion on two Icelandic glaciers. The overall aim of these projects is to use the latest sensing technology to monitor remote environments in order to understand fundamental processes, develop techniques to sense acute events, and predict environmental responses to climate change.
Jane has experience of fieldwork throughout the arctic, including Iceland, Norway, Alaska, Spitsbergen and Greenland, as well as investigations of Quaternary glacial sedimentology from UK and Ireland, New Zealand, USA and Germany. Her research has been supported by ‘blue chip’ grants and she has published over 80 papers. These have had a large impact on the fields of glacial sedimentology, glaciology and wireless sensor networks and informatics.
Currently Janes sits on the AGU Earth and Space Science Informatics Executive Committee, and is Vice–President of the QRA and Chair of the ‘Funds for Women Graduates’ charity.
jhart@soton.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Adrian Hines
Adrian is Director of JASMIN at the Science and Technology Facilities Council, with responsibility for oversight of the storage and compute services provided by JASMIN (jasmin.ac.uk) to the environmental science community.
Prior to taking on this role, Adrian spent over twenty years working with weather and climate models at the Met Office. During this period, he initially worked on ocean forecast systems, building on his PhD in ocean modelling, before moving on to work on coupled models for climate and for weather forecasting applications. His work on forecast systems involved all stages of the processing chain covering observation processing, data assimilation, model simulations, post-processing, product generation, and product delivery.
Adrian spent six years leading the Met Office Applied Science team, gaining experience of the challenges of deriving useful and actionable information from model data. Adrian subsequently took on leadership of the Met Office Climate Science IT team, moving into the underpinning technical aspects of the science work. The included oversight of work to develop technical infrastructure for modelling and tools for data processing, analysis and delivery.
Adrian’s interests include understanding how model outputs can be made most useful for applications, particularly given the increasing volumes of data and widening diversity of outputs being produced; and understanding how a facility such as JASMIN can best support the environmental science community in delivering digital environment activities.
adrian.hines@stfc.ac.ukInstitutional web page
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Dr Bo Hou
I am a Senior Lecturer (T&R) at the School of Physics and Astronomy, Cardiff University. My research interests include quantum dot synthesis, quantum dot optoelectronics and photonics (PV, LED, Photodetector, Display and Image sensor), microscopy imaging (TEM) and dynamic charge transfer analysis. I received my PhD degree from the University of Bristol (2010–2014) and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford (2014–2018, Wolfson College) and as a Senior Research Associate in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge (2018-2020, St Edmund’s College). I am also serving as an Editorial Board Member of Catalysis, Scientific Reports and Associate Editor of Frontiers in Photonics.
houb6@cardiff.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Scott Hosking
I am an Environmental Data Scientist, Co-Leader of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), and a Senior Research Fellow at The Alan Turing Institute. I am also a Co-Director for the University of Cambridge and BAS Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in the Application of AI to the study of Environmental Risks (AI4ER), a £6m UKRI funded programme to train over 50 top students to become future global leaders in environmental science.
My research group focuses on the development of AI and data science methods for understanding, monitoring and predicting environmental change. More specifically, my projects involve: the intelligent fusion of data from satellite and in-situ surface sensors to help understand our changing planet; probabilistic machine learning for localised climate impacts, including future heatwaves and water security; deep learning frameworks for seasonal forecasting and improving climate models; and computer vision methods for tracking environmental change and wildlife monitoring.
I serve on the steering committee to manage the operational alliance between The Alan Turing Institute and the UK Met Office, and as a board member for the Cambridge Centre for Climate Science.
jask@bas.ac.ukBAS web page
Personal web page
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Dr Sara Khalid
Sara is a Senior Research Associate in Biomedical Data Science and University Research Lecturer at the University of Oxford, where she leads applied machine learning research at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine. Her training is in electronics engineering and intelligent remote monitoring, with applications in biomedical and planetary health informatics.
Sara has served on the NASA Frontier Development Lab Artificial Intelligence Panel and the NASA Climate Challenge Big Think. She is a National Geographic Society Explorer in tracking plastic pollution with remote monitoring and machine learning.
Through this work she is exploring a variety of remote sensing techniques for tracking the migration of plastics from South Asian coastal belt to the Indian Ocean via the Indus River. Currently she is involved in research on linking large health data with environmental and climate datasets from around the world. She is also interested in conservation efforts that combine Artificial Intelligence with citizen science approaches, towards the explainable, real-time use of novel digital methodology for conservation and environmental protection in the real world.
sara.khalid@ndorms.ox.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Mr Andrew Kingdon
Andrew Kingdon is a geoscientist & Petrophysicist who uses informatics technologies to quantify variability and uncertainty in geological systems. He has 31 years’ experience at the British Geological Survey in understanding distribution of the physical properties in the subsurface and its in-situ stress fields. He manages a research programme using advanced analytical tools (statistics / machine learning) to understand uncertainty and heterogeneity in geological systems, tools (NLP) to capture legacy data in context, and to improve geoscience understanding for expert and non-specialist stakeholders (Decision Support Systems and Environmental Digital Twins)
He is responsible for developing tools that permit easy data extraction from complex geodata sources, populating geological volumes to understand heterogeneity and developing models of complex interactions between the geological variability and of subsurface fluid flow. His current research focusses on relationships between geological processes at multiple scale, in-situ stress and implications for informatics to improve modelling and provision of geoscience understanding.
aki@bgs.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Richard Kingston
Richard is a Professor of Urban Planning and GISc and Deputy Director of the Spatial Policy Analysis Lab at the University of Manchester. A large part of his current role is leading NERC’s 5 year Digital Solutions Programme which is investing £8m in the development of an online platform and set of toolkits that will exploit environmental and other data to create innovative digital services that deliver economic, societal and environmental benefits across the UK. You can find further information on that here.
Richard’s research focuses on the role of ICTs in supporting all forms of the planning and development process. With a particular focus on developing participatory decision support solutions, the overall aim of his research is to enhance stakeholder involvement and participation in spatial decision making. His research brings together a number of areas of work, including smart cities, Public Participation GIS, planning support systems and spatial analysis.
richard.kingston@manchester.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Amber Leeson
Amber is a Reader in Glaciology at Lancaster Environment Centre, theme lead for Environment in Lancaster Data Science Institute and Ice/water co-theme lead in the Centre for Excellence in Environmental Data Science. She is a glaciologist with specific expertise in ice sheet hydrology, and leads a research team who are interested in the impact of climate change on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. This is an important field because of the role that the ice sheets play in global sea level; we are expecting ice loss from Greenland alone to contribute up to 23 cm of sea level rise by the year 2100. Amber’s group use a combination of process modelling, remote sensing – and increasingly data science techniques – to study this problem, with the ultimate goal of improving our understanding of the processes leading to ice loss and increasing confidence in our estimates of both past and future ice sheet change.
a.leeson@lancaster.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Liz Lewis
Liz Lewis is a computational hydrologist at Newcastle university. Her research investigates how climate change is affecting hydrological extremes in the UK and around the world.
Liz’s work falls into two categories. The first is about improving the quantity and quality of hydrological data, so that we can examine observations and determine how climate change is already affecting hydrological extremes. This includes investigating the potential application of novel datasets such as citizen science data, community-gathered data, and data hidden in institutional records, as well as creating software to rigorously quality control existing formal data streams. Liz’s second focus is on developing sophisticated computer models to project near-real time to far future flood and drought characteristics and frequencies. In this work Liz uses a national-scale physically-based hydrological model (SHETRAN-GB) to investigate climate impacts on future high and low flows. She is working on a number of projects to couple this hydrological model to other impact models. Liz also works closely with a range of project partners, primarily the Environment Agency, to ensure that the latest scientific and engineering developments are translated into practise.
Elizabeth.Lewis2@newcastle.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Matt Lewis
Matt is a Research Fellow at Bangor University in physical oceanography, with applications to blue economy industries and coastal flood risk. His research uses computer models to numerically simulate ocean-earth processes, including how these processes interact and how they may change in the future. For example, how to downscale climate model information to impact, and marine renewable energy resource mapping. Matt has an interest in combining computer models of biological and physical processes to better understand the marine system.
Within the digital environment theme, Matt wishes to explore three ideas:
- What environmental data can we get from new technologies, and what bias and flaws may there be in such data?
- Can we use environmental data to monitor changes to systems and can we improve hazard warning systems?
- How can we better communicate data, model results and uncertainty?
Matt’s current projects include:
- NERC UK Climate Resilience Programme. Sensitivity of Estuaries to Climate Hazards: SEARCH
- NERC The UK contribution to validating SWOT in the Bristol Channel and River Severn
- EPSRC Research Fellowship in Marine Renewable Energy: METRIC
- EPSRC Supergen ORE flexfund: V-SCORES
- GCRF-NERC SEAMAP (plastic mapping from source to sink in Philippines)
- ERDF project within the renewable energy theme (http://seec.bangor.ac.uk/)
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Professor Iseult Lynch
Iseult Lynch is Professor of Environmental Nanosciences and her research explores the interface between engineered materials and the natural world, including the binding of biomolecules at particle surfaces, the attachment and uptake of particles by living systems, and the consequences of these interactions for both the materials and the organisms. She is increasingly focused on development of computational and in silico approaches to predict these interactions and to support the design of safe and effective functional materials and for mixture (eco)toxicology, so called data-driven or machine learning approaches.
She coordinates the H2020 research e-infrastructure NanoCommons (www.nanocommons.eu) which is developing community standards for management of nanosafety data (with a strong environmental focus) across the entire project lifecycle, from experimental design, through data capture, processing, analysis, storage and FAIRification, as well as tools and standards to support each step. Our goal is to encourage researchers to plan their data management from the project design phase, through development of ontologically annotated data capture templates, use of electronic laboratory notebooks to facilitate data archiving and integration of modelling tools that query and enrich the datasets.
Iseult chairs the newly established IUPAC InChI working group on “InChI for nanomaterials” to develop an extension of the InChI chemical representation standard for nanomaterials, which will facilitate interoperability and identification of individual nanoforms. Iseult leads the environmental pollution solutions theme in the UoB supra-disciplinary Institute for Global Innovation, and is an Associate Editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry journal Environmental Science: Nano.
I.Lynch@bham.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Georgios Maniatis
Georgios is a fluvial geomorphologist interested in the measurement, mapping, and prediction of riverscapes. His long-standing project involves the implementation of new and rapidly developing sensing technologies in sediment transport studies (development of “smart-pebbles”), focusing on problems of data coherence and how they can be resolved. In parallel, he uses High – Resolution Topographical (HRT) techniques (e.g., Terrestrial and Airborne Laser Scanning, UAV-Structure from Motion and more) for detecting changes in environments. Georgios is specifically interested into extending the uses of HRT data for capturing “local” river scales (hundreds of meters of river, over months or years), as those scales affect the health of river habitat and people directly. Finally, he often contributes to the discussion about river classification and how it affects decisions for river management and restoration.
Georgios is currently appointed as a Senior Lecturer of Physical Geography, in the School of Applied Sciences at the University of Brighton. He has a 5- year Engineering Diploma in Environmental Engineering (Technical University of Chania, Crete), an MSc in Freshwater Systems Science (University of Glasgow) and a PhD in Geography and Computing Science (University of Glasgow). During his Post-doc, he developed a data driven decision framework for Scottish Water, supporting the assessment of fluvial erosion risk close to pipe crossings. He has also worked for the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency as a Senior Hydro-morphologist.
G.Maniatis@brighton.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Keiichi Nakata
Keiichi Nakata is Professor of Social Informatics at Henley Business School at the University of Reading, and is currently Head of Business Informatics, Systems and Accounting and Director of Informatics Research Centre. Prior to his current appointment, he was Dean of School of Information Technology at International University in Germany, and held academic and research posts at the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Tokyo and at German National Research Centre for Information Technology.
With a PhD in artificial intelligence and BEng and MEng in nuclear engineering working at a business school, his multi-disciplinary background spans from engineering and computer science to business. His interests lie at the interface between technology, people and society; in particular, he is interested in studying the role of information and management of technology in creating value for people and society, especially in areas that are information intensive such as health and environment. His research topics include applications of data and text analytics, behaviour change support systems, collaborative and participatory systems, cognitive systems engineering, acceptance of IT systems and digital transformation, and he has worked on a number of successful Knowledge Transfer Partnership projects with industry.
At Henley Business School, he teaches information systems and digital business as well as big data in business. He is Fellow of BCS and member of ACM and the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence.
k.nakata@henley.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Mark Naylor
Dr Mark Naylor is a Reader in Computational GeoScience and Hazard Research at the University of Edinburgh.
I am interested in how the earth works – particularly processes from earthquake hazard through to mountain building and river scale erosion through to landscape evolution. These are challenging systems as we can never directly observe many of the process – for example, we cannot embed ourselves 15km under the earth to watch the evolution of an earthquake. However, this does not mean we can say nothing about the processes and their implications for people. The skill is in working out how to make robust statements about the data we can access and being clever about how we collect that data.
Having a strong track record in analysing existing data, over the last 4 years I have been working on collecting my own data. In order to work in hazardous areas, we have been using low cost, low power sensor with telemetry so that we can safely collect data and monitor evolving hazards. We are using our own low cost seismic loggers, hydrophones, underwater cameras, water level sensors, rain sensors and developing other tools in order to monitor critical aspects of the earths system. These have been applied for monitoring bedload transport, debris flows, seismic events and the hydrological system.
mark.naylor@ed.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Nir Oren
I am a professor of Computer Science at the University of Aberdeen. My research interests lie in the area of multi-agent systems, and more specifically formal argumentation theory, normative reasoning, and computational trust theory. I am particularly interested in applying these techniques to complex, multi-party decision-making domains to facilitate explainable decision-making and mitigate against information overload. For example, as part of the EPSRC funded “Scrutable Autonomous Systems” project (EP/J012084/1), I investigated how plans generated by automated systems can be explained to non-experts.
There are myriad applications of my work to the digital environment. For example, computational trust theory can be used to determine which (noisy and unreliable) IoT sensors to query to obtain data, and how this data should be fused to approximate ground truth, while argumentation and normative reasoning can be used to perform automated reasoning at the edge to allow sensors to collaborate to achieve some goals. At a higher level, argumentation can be used to understand how and why specific sensors were queried, to naturally update the network, and to transform data into information which can underpin decision-making while maintaining transparency and explainability.
n.oren@abdn.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Matthew Palmer
Matthew is Chief Scientist of Marine Autonomous & Robotic Systems at the UK National Oceanography Centre. He has led a number of pioneering initiatives and research projects that have accelerated the adoption of robots and autonomous methods towards meeting UK and international visions for digital marine environments. Matthew’s ongoing interests and efforts are focused on enabling ocean observing systems capable of adaptive, intelligent surveying using a network of autonomous vehicles and platforms, guided by self-optimising marine system models.
Matthew works closely with a wide range of stakeholders and partners across research, environmental monitoring, defence and industry sectors. He is an Advisory Board member of the DEFRA Marine Natural Capital & Ecosystem Assessment (mNCEA) programme, where he Chairs the mNCEA Digital Steering group; and sits on the cross-government UK Marine Science Co-ordination Committee (MSCC), on which he Chairs the UK Integrated Marine Observing Network.
Matthew brings two decades of science experience to the CDE network throughout which he has proven to be an early adopter of disruptive technologies with a clear end-user focus. He is excited to be part of this group and looks forward to helping to find cross-cutting opportunities within the broad range of skills and experience within the network.
palmer4matt@gmail.comPersonal web page
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Dr Kirsty Pringle
Kirsty is an atmospheric scientist who specialised in developing and testing computer models to examine air pollution and the interaction of air pollution and climate change. She is also interested in public engagement and working to ensure that research is accessible to everyone.
She is involved in two large public engagement projects; the BiB Breathes project in which 200 school children in Bradford have carried small pollution (PM2.5) monitors on their way to and from school to understand when and where children are most exposed to air pollution, and the UKRI funded Homes Under the Microscope project, an ambitious citizen science project in which people collect samples of airborne microplastic in their homes.
Combining her experience with technical development of climate models with an interest in opening up the research process, she is interested in best practices around open source materials. She was a trustee for the Society of Research Software Engineering and since 2020 Kirsty has been the Project Manager of the Software Sustainability Institute which campaigns for better recognition and support for the use of software in research.
k.pringle@epcc.ed.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Richard Reeve
Richard is Professor of Population and Ecosystem Health in the School of Biodiversity, One Health and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Glasgow. He is a strong advocate for cross-disciplinary research, and is a co-director of Glasgow’s Boyd Orr Centre for Population and Ecosystem Health, an award-winning centre which synthesises the expertise and activities of a group of interdisciplinary researchers interested in the ecological health of populations and ecosystems, with a common interest in quantifying, modelling, and describing ecological processes.
He is a modeller with a background in Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence who has worked in the Life Sciences since 2007, providing expert guidance to FAO, WHO and OIE and the UK’s new Office for Environmental Protection, as well as collaborating with experts advising other national and international bodies including IUCN. He sees this network as an excellent opportunity to develop collaborations with more researchers from other disciplines with interests in digitising and analysing the natural environment, and in further developing UK environmental policy thinking in this area.
His work has most recently focused on the development of measures to accurately characterise different aspects of biodiversity in order to help assess change; the development of digital twins for plant biodiversity to reproduce and predict the impact of climate change and land use decisions on ecosystems at a local, national and continental scale; and the development of pipelines to manage data flows in such complex models to ensure that research outputs are FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and are accompanied by accurate provenance, making them traceable to their source data, to enhance confidence in any conclusions based on them that are provided to policy makers.
richard.reeve@glasgow.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Marian Scott, OBE FRSE
Marian is Professor of Environmental Statistics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glasgow; an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI), a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh (RSE) and a chartered statistician of the Royal Statistical Society (RSS). She is a member of the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC), a member of the EU Scientific Committee on Health, Environment and Emerging Risks (SCHEER) and a non executive board member of the James Hutton Institute and was the vice president (International) of RSE 2016-2019.
She is also a member of the board of the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences (ICMS) and the newly formed NERC Advisory Network. Marian’s research interests include model uncertainty and sensitivity analysis; modelling the dispersal of pollutants in the environment (including air and water quality), the science of measurement (specifically radiocarbon dating) and assessment of animal welfare. She was awarded an OBE in 2009 for services to science and won the Barnett award of the RSS in 2019.
marian.scott@glasgow.ac.ukPersonal web page
Find out more about Marian’s research in the Storymap described here.
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Dr John Siddorn
John is Associate Director, Digital Ocean at the National Oceanography Centre (NOC).
John is a nationally recognised expert in the ocean, he sits on the Global Ocean Observing System (GOOS) Steering Committee. He is a member of the WMO Study Group on Ocean Infrastructure Systems (SG OOIS) and the WMO JET-EOSDE Working Group on Rolling Review of Requirements.
His background is in shelf seas modelling and his research has primarily been the development of ocean models, originally POLCOMS and then NEMO.
John has recently moved to the NOC, as a leader of its digital ocean agenda, from the Met Office where he was Head of the Ocean Forecasting R&D Department (OFRD) group and co-chair of the National Partnership for Ocean Prediction (NPOP). As Head of OFRD he had responsibility for developing models and satellite analyses for short-range ocean monitoring and forecasting and producing reanalyses for monitoring marine environment.
John had science leadership roles in the Met Office Ocean Forecasting Research and Development area from 2007 until 2012, when he became lead of the Ocean Modelling Group, providing ocean model development based on NEMO for applications across the Met Office. He became Head of Ocean Forecasting in 2014.
Prior to his career at the Met Office John worked for the Natural Environmental Research Council at Plymouth Marine Laboratory as a mathematical modeller in a biogeochemistry modelling team with the primary responsibility for implementing marine dynamical models.
john.siddorn@noc.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Lindsay Todman
Lindsay is a Lecturer in Agricultural Modelling at the University of Reading who develops and uses models of agricultural systems across scales. Her work has included studying of the dynamics and resilience of soil microbial communities (in grams of soil) through to using crops models at the field scale and even modelling agricultural production and environmental interactions in agricultural landscapes. She has a particular interest in how agricultural systems recover from climatic shocks. She originally trained as an engineer and hydrologist and for the last ten years has been applying her skills in mathematical modelling to agricultural systems.
Typically she uses process based models which represent the processes in these biological systems and require data on the environmental conditions (e.g. weather and soil) as inputs. She has also used statistical approaches to better understand the dynamics of environmental processes that can be observed in time series of environmental data. She aims to use such approaches to better understand the dynamics of agricultural systems so that this understanding can be used to better inform how negative environmental impacts could be mitigated whilst still producing enough food.
l.todman@reading.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Carl Watson
Carl Watson is a Senior Business Analyst with a BSc in Geology, MSc in Computer Science and seventeen years’ experience delivering software projects for large organisations. Experienced in all aspects of the software development lifecycle with a focus on rapidly analysing complex multi-disciplinary systems to identify opportunities for optimised designs that deliver on the highest priority user requirements. I am keen to explore ways of making environmental data more visible, useful and usable through a user centered, design lead approach.
Experience:
2015 – ongoing: Informatics lead for the UK Geoenergy Observatories. Regularly taking part in public engagement activities, focus groups and targeted user research to ensure that we deliver useful, usable and engaging systems.
www.ukgeos.ac.uk/
2019 – ongoing: CoI on RISE funded initiative CAMELLIA, a five year programme bringing together environmental, engineering, urban planning, socio-economic and organisational experts with institutional and industry stakeholders and citizens. To co-develop a systems approach to urban water management. I am responsible for leading the development teams who will provide integrated solutions to enable required housing growth in London whilst sustainably managing water and environment in the city. www.imperial.ac.uk/environmental-and-water-resource-engineering/research/camellia/
2014 – 2017: Work Package lead for Data Acquisition and Management on the EU H2020 COST Action Sub-Urban. This research and knowledge exchange network produced a digital toolkit for city authorities, subsurface experts and decision makers and promoted greater understanding and utilisation of the subsurface in urban planning.
2011 – 2014: CoI and project manager for NERC OpenGeoscience Data Models (Knowledge Exchange project).
Publications: http://nora.nerc.ac.uk/view/author/4457.html
cats@bgs.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Martin Wearing
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh. My research is motivated by the need to improve our understanding of ice sheets and their contribution to sea-level rise. I use a combination of ice-sheet numerical modelling, machine learning and remote-sensing observations to understand the dynamics of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. I’m particularly interested in furthering our understanding of complex ice-sheet processes, which are currently missing from ice-sheet models used to projection future ice-sheet mass loss. These processes include supraglacial and subglacial hydrology, ice damage and ice-shelf buttressing. My approach is to use innovative approaches to harness geophysical observations to improve ice-sheet models.
As a former NERC Embedded Digital Researcher I worked with the remote-sensing data science company EarthWave – https://earthwave.co.uk/ to create a coincident satellite data explorer over Antarctica. As part of this work I am also using neural networks to interpret satellite imagery and ice-sheet model results to investigate the evolution of ice-sheet damage (crevassing and fractures). The objectives of this work were to enhance the digital capabilities of EarthWave and to demonstrate the use of coincident data and neural networks to improve process understanding.
mwearing@ed.ac.ukInstitutional web page
Personal web page
Twitter: @Martin_Wearing
EarthWave: https://earthwave.co.uk/
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Professor Longzhi Yang
Longzhi is a Professor of Computer Science and AI at Northumbria University. His research interests include AI, machine learning, big data, computer vision, intelligent control systems, and the application of such techniques in real-world uncertain environments. His research has been funded by EPSRC, ESRC, Innovate UK, RAEng, Royal Society, and the Industry.
He is the founding Chair of the IEEE Special Interest Group of Big Data for Cyber Security and Privacy, and the Chair of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Big Data Task Force. Professor Yang is a Senior Member of IEEE and a Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy.
longzhi.yang@northumbria.ac.ukInstitutional web page
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NERC Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) International Experts
The Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) International Experts are listed below.
Top of pageDr Archibong Akpan
Archibong is a climate scientist and an IPCC expert reviewer. He has a PhD in Climatology and Climate Change studies from the University of Uyo, Nigeria. His work experience is in measuring weather parameters and quantifying observational datasets to understand climate variability, weather seasonality and patterns across different regions. He has worked at a weather station as Meteorologist II at the Air traffic control unit, Akwa Ibom International Airport, Nigeria and have taught undergraduate and graduate students on numerical weather forecasting, weather measurement and mapping of climate risk on agriculture, coastal communities, health and livelihoods vulnerability at the University of Uyo, Nigeria for the past 5 years.
He also enjoys studying climate change impact on food security, hydrological cycle, socio-economic livelihoods in different geographies and has been actively engaging in vulnerability studies, thermal comfort studies, landuse land cover mapping, and environmental monitoring using remote sensing applications. In 2021, he developed 14 innovative techniques to 3894 smallholders to scale climate-smart agriculture (CSA) practice in 54 farming communities of the Niger-Delta region of Nigeria. He is a Fellow of Climate Change and Climate Service with the Economic Community of West African States. At ECOWAS, he was part of the technical committee that developed the ECOWAS Regional Climate Strategy (RCS) to provide a pathway for carbon neutrality in the 15 West African states by 2030. At the IPCC, he contributed to chapter 1-8 of AR6 which was recently published. He presently works full-time with SubjectToClimate, USA, as Director of Climate Science.
archibong.akpan@subjecttoclimate.orgPersonal web page
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Charles Helleputte
Charles is a partner heading the EU cybersecurity, data, and privacy practice at Steptoe. He focuses on existing EU and national cybersecurity, data, and privacy laws such as the NIS Directive, GDPR or the Cybersecurity Act and on upcoming developments such as the Artificial Intelligence Act, NIS 2, DORA, the Digital Services Act, the Data Governance Act or the ePrivacy Regulation. He provides practical and pragmatic advice to clients faced with increased accountability requirements towards users, helping organizations testing new responses, such as broader use of standards or certification mechanisms across the data lifecycle in a wide range of industries (regulated and not regulated).He has specific experience preparing and managing incidents in a cross-border context, where it is necessary to consider multiple cybersecurity, privacy, and other regulatory and enforcement frameworks (such as NIS, PSD2, CTR, etc.).
Charles is also experienced in representing clients before national and EU supervisory authorities and courts, including the Working Party No. 29 (now the European Data Protection Board).Charles lectures at UCLouvain and is part of the interdisciplinary research group DRAILS (Data, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Law and Society). He holds a Certified Information Privacy Professional/Europe (CIPP/E) certification. He is a former co-chair of the Brussels KnowledgeNet Chapter of the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) and an appointed Legal Expert at ENISA, the European Union Cybersecurity Agency. He is a member of IAPP EU Advisory Board.
chelleputte@Steptoe.comPersonal web page
Charles also presented one of the Constructing a Digital Environment webinars.
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Dr Chantal Huijbers
Dr Chantal Huijbers is based at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, Netherlands. She is the Team Lead of the Biocloud team within the ARISE program, which is developing a digital infrastructure for biodiversity monitoring and species identification in the Netherlands. The Biocloud team is responsible for developing the underlying infrastructure of ARISE, which will facilitate connecting, standardizing, aggregating, contextualizing and linking biodiversity-related data. This includes the architecture and development of data management services, integration services for connecting various data sources to ARISE as well as web interfaces and application programming interfaces (APIs) from which the infrastructure can be accessed.
Prior to her current role, Chantal has worked in Australia where she was a Training and Engagement Manager for digital research infrastructures in the EcoSciences domain. She is passionate about enhancing research through digital solutions and integrating digital technologies into environmental science education. Her background in marine ecology enables her to translate the needs of the scientific community to the developers of digital tools.
chantal.huijbers@naturalis.nlPersonal web page
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Dr Nadeja Komendantova
Dr. Nadejda Komendantova is a group leader at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) where she leads the Cooperation and Transformative Governance (CAT) Group. The group is dealing with systems-level transformations and key transitions for societal resilience and sustainable systems through an enhanced understanding of, and the ability to manage, existing challenges, including social dilemmas and wicked problems of public policy-planning. Digitalisation of market, society and government is at the key research area of the group. The group implemented several projects for the European Commission and a number of national ministries on digitalisation, implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as the impact of digital technologies on society and perceptions of digitalisation from various stakeholders’ groups. CAT group also contributed to a number of policy reports and national strategies on digitalisation.
komendan@iiasa.ac.atPersonal web page
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Dr Ole Mark
Dr Ole Mark is working for Krüger, Veolia, and has experience from all over the world modelling urban waters, i.e. urban hydrology, stormwater management, flood forecasting, climate change and real time control and decision support.
Ole’s research and work has always focused on using research as the tool for practical problem solving, and where software and digital solutions are the transport mechanism to the end users. In his younger days developed numerical engines in the MIKE software from DHI, and later he managed DHIs Danish research portfolio. At present, he works as Head of Innovation in Krüger, Veolia with focus on data driven real time modelling of urban drainage systems, which ends up in Veolia’s Hubgrade Sewerview, digital solutions. During his daily day he is in very close contact with Veolia’s 18 000 staff working with water worldwide, which brings inspiration, insights and collaboration with many researchers internationally.
Furthermore, he is Associate Editor on the Journal of HydroInformatics holds a Ph.D. and the very rare Danish Research Degree “dr. techn”, which is a distinction only awarded to a couple of hundred Danish engineers during the past 100 years.
oma@kruger.dkPersonal web page
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Janet Ranganathan
Janet Ranganathan is the Vice President for Science and Research at the World Resources Institute (WRI), a global research organization that works at the intersection of environment and development in more than 50 countries. She leads WRI’s ‘Data into Action’ strategy, which combines open data platforms, information and communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and human networks to drive more transparent and accountable management of the planet’s resources. This includes overseeing WRI’s growing family of data-driven ‘Watches’, and making sure WRI is a trusted source of actionable information.
Janet oversees research across WRI’s seven programs: Food, Forest, Water, Climate, Energy, Cities and Ocean. She provides leadership support to WRI’s Africa and Brazil operations. During her tenure, Janet has rolled out numerous initiatives, including Resource Watch, Better Buying Lab, and Creating a Sustainable Food Future. Janet founded the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, an international multi-stakeholder partnership, convened by WRI and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The Greenhouse Gas Protocol Corporate Standard is the international accounting and reporting standard for business.
Janet has written extensively on a range of sustainable development topics, including food sustainability, plant-based diets, business and markets, environmental performance measurement, environmental accounting, climate change, greenhouse gas measurement and reporting, ecosystem services, forests, and global environmental governance.
Janet is Vice-Chair of the Ceres Board of Directors and a member of the board of WRI Europe, WRI Africa, and WRI Brazil. She is a member of the Advisory Board of the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative and the Sustainable Development Solutions Network.
janetr@wri.orgPersonal web page
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NERC Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) Expert Network – Alumni
The Constructing a Digital Environment (CDE) programme is grateful for the inputs of former members of the Expert Network. We retain here a listing of these colleagues as Alumni of the group as a source of reference.
Top of pageDr Tinkle Chugh
Dr Chugh is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science, University of Exeter, UK. He currently works in the BIG data methods for improving windstorm FOOTprint prediction (‘BigFoot’) funded by the National Environment Research Council (NERC) UK. In the current position, he works with an interdisciplinary team, including statisticians, mathematicians, and computer scientists on developing machine learning algorithms to use conventional and unconventional big data with high spatial and temporal resolution.
Dr. Chugh obtained his Ph.D. degree in Mathematical Information Technology in 2017 from the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland. His thesis was a part of the ‘Decision Support for Complex Multiobjective Optimization Problems (DeCoMo)’ project, where he collaborated with ‘Finland Distinguished Professor (FiDiPro)’ Yaochu Jin from University of Surrey, UK. He regularly organizes workshops on using machine learning techniques with decision making and evolutionary computation at the University of Exeter and at international conferences, e.g. Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) and IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC). His research interests include machine learning in crowdsourcing data, multiple-criteria decision making, data-driven and Bayesian optimization.
t.chugh@exeter.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Professor Tom Crick, MBE
Tom is Professor of Digital & Policy at Swansea University, with his role split between the £32m Computational Foundry (Faculty of Science & Engineering) and the Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences. Whilst his disciplinary background is in computer science, he has been heavily involved in digital policy in Wales and the UK over the past ten years, cutting across the economy, national infrastructure, environment and education/skills. He is an inaugural Commissioner of the National Infrastructure Commission for Wales (2018-present), and a non-executive director of both Dwr Cymru Welsh Water (2017-present) and Industry Wales (2021-present). Tom chaired the Welsh Government’s review of the ICT curriculum in 2013, and was inaugural chair of the National Network for Excellence in Science & Technology (2017-2019), a £4m strategic investment by the Welsh Government.
He has previously been Vice-President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT (2017-2020) and a member of the expert panel of the Welsh Government’s Review of Digital Innovation and the Future of Work (2019). Tom is a Chartered Engineer and a Chartered Scientist, a Fellow of the IET and BCS, and a Corporate Member of the Institute for Water; he was appointed MBE in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours and made a Fellow of the Learned Society for Wales (the national academy for the arts and sciences) in 2020.
thomas.crick@swansea.ac.ukUniversity web page
Personal website
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Dr Theo Damoulas
Theo is an Associate Professor in Data Science with a joint appointment in Computer Science and Statistics. He is a Turing AI Fellow (2021-2026) having recently received the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Turing AI Acceleration Fellowship in order to lead research on setting the Machine Learning Foundations of Digital Twins. His research interests are in probabilistic machine learning and Bayesian statistics with an emphasis on the study and integration of various forms of structure and inductive biases (structured priors, spatiotemporal dependencies, dynamics, compositions, physical laws, flows, causality, etc) while advancing robust and scalable approximate inference methodologies. His research has broad applications in Digital Twins, Bayesian nonparametrics and spatiotemporal problems in urban science and computational sustainability.
T.Damoulas@warwick.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Emma Hellawell
Dr Emma Hellawell served as an Embedded Digital Researcher the University of Surrey working with LEAP Environmental. She is a Chartered Civil engineer with experience from academia, consultancy and local government in contaminated land assessment and brownfield remediation. Her PhD was at the University of Cambridge investigating the migration of pollutants through soil. She then worked at Atkins where she carried out the site investigation for the Millennium Site (the O2) before becoming a lecturer in civil engineering at the University of Surrey. After a career break, Emma returned to academia and contaminated land research as a Daphne Jackson Fellow. Her current embedded digital research project involves developing a Carbon Reduction Digital Twin for brownfield remediation (CReDiT).
The project directly contributes to the radical rethink required by construction and development for the UK to meet its net-zero carbon commitment by 2050. Brownfield remediation is central to UK residential development policy; however, this process involves major earthwork movements, the use of rapidly reducing resources and disposal of large quantities of contaminated material. There is a need to optimise brownfield remediation to significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the process without compromising the need for suitable site use.
Hence, working with LEAP Environmental, the research is focussed on developing a digital twin of the development site, collating the differing forms of information including site history, geology, and intrusive site investigation results to evaluate potential remediation options. A key component of the digital twin is a module to calculate the carbon footprint of different remediation options.
The carbon footprint module evaluates the different processes involved in remediation, determines the resources used (material and fuel) and the associated carbon emitted by the activity. The module simulates the complex flow (movement) of materials on a remediation site. Different fractions of excavated material have potential reuse or reprocessing options during the remediation process. The use and disposal of this material will significantly affect the sustainability of the remediation process and its carbon emissions.
e.hellawell@surrey.ac.ukInstitutional web page
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Courtney Holm
I’m Courtney Holm. I joined Unilever just over five years ago, coming from sustainability and collaboration specialists 2degrees, where I was Client Director for the Tesco accounts. My career journey has been varied and well rounded, taking me from Environmental Science, Horticulture, entrepreneurship and into technology and sustainable supply chains, leading up to my current role, driving sustainable growth using innovation and technology in Unilever.
I serve on the United Way FAST Advisory Board, and also sit on the First Love Foundation Steering Group. I am also a Demos Helsinki ‘Untitled’ Partner.
The Sustainable Technology team exists to drive sustainable growth through technology and innovation. We are a small, agile, global team who work right across the business to disrupt conventional thinking and ways of around using technology to deliver the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan.
courtney.holm@unilever.comPersonal web page
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Holger Kessler
Holger Kessler holds a degree in Physical Geography and Soil Science from the University of Frankfurt in Germany and worked as a Principal Geologist at the British Geological Survey (BGS) since 1998. At the BGS he was heavily involved in the digital transformation of the organisation, developing 3D geological modelling systems, products and services for public and private sector clients with a particular focus on the infrastructure and water sectors.
He is now seconded to the Geospatial Commission as a Geoscience Technical Advisor working on the development of the UK’s first Geospatial Strategy and the delivery of the National Underground Asset Register pilot programme.
Holger’s passion is to make data, information and models (particularly about the sub-surface) accessible and usable to enable policy makers, regulators, industry and individuals to make better, faster and more evidence based decisions about the environment, especially in respect of environmental change.
holger.kessler@cabinetoffice.gov.ukGeospatial Commission web page
Personal web page
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Malcolm Kitchen
The start of my career at the Met Office was in various fields of atmospheric science – cloud physics, short-wave radiation and rainfall. I worked mainly on field experiments, data analysis and the development of research instrumentation. Following a few years in an operational IT role, I then became the manager of weather radar R&D team, responsible of the technical development of the UK weather radar network. This involved working closely with the owners and users of the network, notably the Environment Agency, NRW and SEPA.
Then followed several years as Head of Observations R&D, responsible for the development of all the UK operational meteorological observing networks (excluding satellites). Most recently, I have returned to science and am currently a science fellow working on new ‘opportunistic’ sources of observations. New sources of observations are essential if we are to support forecasting of the weather in greater detail and more accurately target warnings.
malcolm.kitchen@metoffice.gov.ukPersonal web page
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Dave Klinges
Dave Klinges is a doctoral student at the University of Florida in the United States and a Research Associate of the Smithsonian Institution. His research program is an exploration of how land use influences the ecological structure and function of complex natural landscapes. Current projects include measuring turnover in vertebrate biodiversity across forest degradation gradients in Madagascar, quantifying uncertainties in carbon stocks of coastal wetlands across the continental United States, and modelling landscape thermal connectivity in space and time globally.
Dave’s interests also lie in disseminating sound data management practices in the social and environmental science community, and enhancing the practice and application of near-term ecological forecasting for management-ready products. Read more about Dave’s work at (natureinparadise.github.io).
dklinges@ufl.eduPersonal web page
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Dr Georgios Leontidis
Georgios is the interim Director for Data & AI and an Associate Professor (SL) in Machine Learning at the University of Aberdeen. Before joining the University of Aberdeen, he was a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Lincoln. Georgios did a Marie Sklodowska Curie PhD in Computer Science and also holds an MSc degree in Machine Learning and a BSc in Electronics. His interests revolve around end-to-end intelligent systems and how multimodal data at any resolution, quality and dimension can be curated and used to build digital environments, digital twins and trustworthy AI systems.
Alongside foundational machine learning projects, Georgios has also led several projects related to digital economy & digital environment, yield forecasting, nuclear reactors, and gas turbines, funded by NERC, EPSRC, EU H2020, Data Lab, Innovate UK and industry. More closely related to this expert network are two UKRI projects – a recently finished NERC CDE project titled “Engineering Transformation for the Integration of Sensor Networks“ that used data from the COSMOS-UK sensor network to develop a data imputation system for quality assurance control; and the other one, a newly awarded three-year EPSRC project titled “Enhancing Agri-Food Transparent Sustainability”, where we are developing the Transparent Sustainability Platform – an infrastructure for capture, management and use of sustainability information associated with agri-food supply chains.
georgios.leontidis@abdn.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Claire MacIntosh
Claire is a core scientist at the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO), based at the University of Reading. Her current research develops estimates of global ocean heat content change, exploiting the in-situ Argo measurement network, with a focus on how to measure and communicate uncertainty in these estimates.
Claire’s most recent work tries to answer the question of how we can produce robust estimates of climate-relevant quantities, that formally consider sources of uncertainty. These can include limitations in the observing system, temporal and spatial correlations between measurements, and errors in the estimate of the background state of the system. Building such frameworks increases confidence in our estimates of the climate state and improves our ability to develop and assess models of the climate system.
Claire has a strong interest in data accessibility in its widest sense. She has previously held a role as the coordinator of the industry-academic-government group Space4Climate, and worked on the development of novel climate metrics, to enable comparison of climate forcing agents (e.g. greenhouse gases).
c.r.macintosh@reading.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Hector McNeill
An agronomist, development economist and systems engineer. Alma maters being Cambridge and Stanford Universities. Specialised in sustainable renewable natural resources and agricultural (SRNRA) project design, management and evaluation for international organisations and corporate sectors. This work was undertaken in Brazil, Africa, EU and transition economies.
Manager of NASA-CNAE Project SERE agricultural remote sensing programme, National Space Research Institute of Brazil, research on digital pattern recognition, impacts of coffee leaf rust and frost on production. Remote sensing expert, FAO Plant Production Division, team leader on implementation of world’s first fully digitised crop inventory system. Senior Scientific Officer at EU Information Technology and Telecommunications Task Force (ITTTF) in Brussels, managed programme preparation for digital applications in SRNRA. Environmental Economist for the World Bank G7 Brazilian Rain Forest Trust Fund.
Current emphasis is on more effective use of environmental data in decision analysis models to achieve feasible sustainable production. Development of Locational State Theory research and applications in SRNRA. This relates to specification of full environmental and bio-object property datasets to minimise unexplained variance component of results of experiments and surveys to reduce uncertainty in models on physical and economic sustainability.
Currently developing cloud-based SDGToolkit, a library of analytical tools to support project identification and design for Sustainable Development Goals under Agenda 2030 and RTME (real time monitoring and evaluation system) to make more effective application of OECD DAC evaluation criteria. Chairman of the Open Quality Standards Initiative (OQSI) for the development of due diligence design procedures for projects.
hector.mcneill@boolean.org.ukPersonal web page
Sustainable Development Facility (SDF) web page
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Dr Keivan Navaie
Dr Keivan Navaie is with the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University, UK. His research seeks innovative inter-disciplinary solutions to address fundamental technical and design challenges in Intelligent Cyber Physical Systems and their integrations into day-to-day life to improve its sustainability and anti-fragility.
Keivan’s research covers topics across the following disciplines: Distributed Cloud/Edge Computing, Connectivity Resilience in Cyber-Physical Systems and IoT, Applications of Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, and Cognitive Communications Networks.His background is in Electrical and Computer Engineering and he is on the editorial board of the IEEE Comm. Letters, IEEE Comm. Surveys and Tutorials, Trans. on Wireless Communications, and IEEE Access. Keivan is also active in evidence-based policy making through his involvement with the EU Environment Agency and EU Parliament as an Independent Scientic Expert. Dr. Navaie is a Fellow of IET, Senior Member of the IEEE, Senior Fellow of HEA, and a Chartered Engineer in the UK.
k.navaie@lancaster.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Claire Neil
Claire is a Senior Specialist Scientist for the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA). Previously, she was a Research and Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the University of Stirling where her research specialises in the development of remote sensing algorithms for water quality assessment in optically complex waters including lakes, estuaries and coastal zones. She has particular interest in adapting remote sensing technologies to monitor inland and coastal waters from a regulatory standpoint to enable UK regulators and industry to fully exploit the advantages that Earth Observation can offer for comprehensive water quality monitoring. This is the primary focus of her NERC Knowledge Exchange Fellowship which aims to develop satellite remote sensing as an official data resource for systematic monitoring and assessment of water quality.
Claire has over 10 years’ experience in EO and her expertise includes underwater optical modelling, radiative transfer physics, image/signal processing and algorithm development. Having completed a PhD in Environmental Optics at the University of Strathclyde, Claire undertook a CNES Research Fellowship at Laboratoire d’océanographie de Villefranche (LOV) in the South of France. She returned to Scotland in 2013 where she was employed as a Data Analyst and Modeller at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency. It was here that her interest in developing satellite applications for end-users grew and she has since focused her research on generating algorithms capable of accurately estimating water quality parameters in UK lakes and reservoirs.
claire.neil@stir.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Luke Smith
Luke is a lecturer in data-centric civil engineering, focusing on the role of digital technologies and data science in the design, operation and maintenance of our infrastructure systems. He is leading the technical integration between the UKCRIC Urban Observatories, focusing on schemas, ontologies, vocabularies, standards and linked data approaches to achieving interoperability with design-first APIs. His doctoral research focused on supercomputer-enabled high-resolution flood simulation and forecasting, through which he has experience and interest in GPU-based computation, domain decomposition, and automated workflows for spatial data processing. In industry, he led software projects for clients including British Airways, IKEA, and Home Group.
He is currently principal investigator on REBUSCOV, an IoT and edge-based computing project using computer vision and machine learning to extract new insights from CCTV camera networks, and CHARIoT, producing a toolkit to help local authorities publish their data using open and interoperable standards. He is also involved in the PETRAS IoT Research Hub, and previously worked on NERC-funded projects including SINATRA, TENDERLY, and Flood-PREPARED.
luke.smith@ncl.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Matthew Smith
Matthew’s entire career has been towards enabling new business and societal value from biological and environmental information. He is currently Chief Product Officer at Agrimetrics, ensuring the delivery of products that accelerate new value in agri-food systems from data. Prior to that he spent 12 years at Microsoft where initially he worked in an ecology research group before spending 4 years as architect and director of business development setting up and coordinating innovation projects with companies worldwide, specialising in agricultural and environmental applications. Matthew began his career obtaining a first degree in Ecology and in his spare time working on ecological research projects involving field research, phylogenetic analyses and predictive modelling, especially of crop plants.
Matthew then worked as Conservation Projects Officer at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, developing digital aids to conservation enforcement authorities harnessing the expertise of international scientists. In his spare time he continued with ecological modelling which won him a place at the Santa Fe Complex Systems Summer School. Shortly after he began a PhD in Applied Mathematics aiming to explain and predict the spatio-temporal dynamics of cyclic animal populations. Matthew now strives to make real the potential promised by science and technology – to enable new value from Agrimetrics and wider afield through different voluntary advisory positions he holds for research and business.
matthew.smith@agrimetrics.co.ukPersonal web page
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Dr Keith Shepherd
Keith Shepherd leads the Research and Development Theme on Land Health Evaluation, Restoration and Investment Decisions and is Principal Soil Scientist at the World Agroforestry (ICRAF). He also serves as Head of Diagnostics and Decision Science with Innovative Solutions for Decision Agriculture (iSDA) and as Chair of Agricultural Applications at ProbabilityManagement.org.
His research focuses on measuring and monitoring land/soil health, deployment of sensors along the agricultural value chain, and improving stakeholder decision making through decision science. Keith has pioneered a Soil-Plant Spectral Diagnostics Laboratory for high throughput analysis of soil and plant samples using only light (infra-red, x-ray), and has supported uptake of the technology by national and development institutions across the tropics. His research on decision analysis focuses on use of communicating and leveraging uncertainty to improve the quality of development decision-making. With 40 years’ experience in tropical land management, Keith has also worked with Hunting Technical Services; the University of Reading, the International Rice Research Institute, the International Centre for Research in the Dry Areas, and the Agricultural Research Division of the University of Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland. He holds a BSc in Soil Science and PhD in Agricultural Botany, both from the University of Reading.
k.shepherd@cgiar.orgPersonal web page
Keith also organised the Constructing a Digital Environment webinar series Data for Decision Making.
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Dr Arthur Thornton
Arthur is Associate Director at Atkins Infrastructure. From a PhD in Biotechnology Arthur has over 25 years developing and delivering strategic research, innovation and collaboration within water and environment with experience spanning many sectors, with a particular focus on infrastructure. His team is responsible for the development and deployment of environmental models used extensively by the UK environment agencies and water industry and delivering environmental reporting (Pollution Inventory) and modelling software (SAGIS), and catchment investment decision support tools. the team also provides consultancy addressing emerging environmental challenges. Arthur has Developed and managed Research and Innovation Partnerships including the UK Chemical Investigations Programme, this programme underpins chemical policy and the National Environment Programme. He has developed projects addressing challenges such as AMR, microplastics and emerging chemical risks. Including developing response strategies and economic impact assessments for Defra. Arthur has led open innovation, managing collaborative research, including working with Small and Medium Sized Enterprises, he invented the Digital Intelligent Brokerage, a digital incubator platform delivering innovation engagement across-sectors: water, telecommunication, waste, energy and transport.
Arthur supports University Engagement Research Programmes Including: Centre for Doctoral Training (Environmental Big Data) NERC. Leading collaborations with UK and international universities and supporting university spin-out enterprises. Sponsoring, mentoring and co-supervising PhDs. Delivered EU funded International PhDs programmes under Horizon 2020 and FP7. His experience also includes resilience and security, developing a risk-based approach to decontamination of transport systems to minimise the migration of contamination.
arthur.thornton@atkinsglobal.comPersonal web page
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Professor Ngozi Finette Unuigbe
Ngozi is both an administrator and astute academic of over 12 years, with a doctorate in International Environmental Policy, Law and Ethics. Her core areas of research include Biodiversity Conservation, Environmental Regulation, Rights of Nature and matters incidental to Ecological Integrity.
In addition to competitive grant application writing skill, building financial partnerships and overseeing implementation of funded projects, Ngozi has experience in engagement with civil society and decision makers at governmental, private sector and grass root levels; planning and management of large fora for stakeholder and academic exchanges; she is familiar with the dynamics and implementation of gender mainstreaming at all levels. She is also experienced in sharing and disseminating policy recommendations in addition to very strong experience in building local and international partnerships for the implementation of national and sub-regional policies.
She has been a key participant in United Nations working groups on Human Rights and the Environment, as well as a member of the technical review committee under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) and Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
Ngozi is a member of a number of National and International professional bodies including IUCN (Ethics Specialist Committee), Ecological Law Governance Association, United Nations in Harmony with Nature Network etc. She is currently a Professor at the University of Benin, Nigeria.
ngozistewart@yahoo.comPersonal web page
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Dr Victoria Bennett
Dr. Victoria Bennett is Division Head of CEDA, the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis based at STFC/RAL, which runs petascale environmental data archives and the JASMIN analysis infrastructure for NERC. Victoria has 20 years’ experience in atmospheric and earth observation data management, including working closely with data providers and users, and handling and processing large and complex datasets. Her experience has given her a good understanding of the challenges in making data accessible and usable by diverse user communities and the importance of standards (formats and metadata), user friendly tools and documentation.
She has led ESA and EC projects on archival and dissemination of Earth Observation (EO) and climate data, as well as activities on data visualisation and exploitation, and sits on several EO, data and e-infrastructure related committees.
She holds a DPhil in Atmospheric Physics from Oxford, an MSc in Oceanography from Southampton, and a BSc in Physics with Study in France from Bristol. She joined STFC RAL Space in 2001, where she initially worked on satellite data analysis for atmospheric monitoring. She joined CEDA in 2005 as an EO data scientist.
victoria.bennett@stfc.ac.ukPersonal web page
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Alexis Hannah Smith
Alexis Hannah Smith is the founder and CEO of automated business intelligence company, IMGeospatial (www.imgeospatial.com), which creates market-leading data intelligence products via machine learning, artificial intelligence, automatic feature extraction and remote-sensed data for multiple industries, globally.
A seasoned entrepreneur, Alexis is passionate about stimulating creativity and innovation to create change for a better world. In 2019, she was recognised by the Geospatial World Forum as one of the geospatial industry’s top female leaders; accepted the coveted Geospatial Start-up of the Year Award at the Geospatial World Forum; was invited to join the Executive Board of the World Geospatial Industry Council; and one of her inventions, AIMEE (Automatic Intelligent Multi-feature Extraction Engine) was selected by Digital Leaders as one of the top 10 AI Innovations of the year.
Current partners and clients include The European Space Agency, The World Bank and numerous utility companies. Alexis has a sound understanding of the global position of the geospatial sector and its potential to create positive change for individuals, communities and society.
Alexis has presented at many high-profile conferences, including the influential World Bank Land and Poverty Conference in Washington DC and was keynote for the office of National Statistics, EFGS conference. She is Co-Chair of Digital Water for the UK Water Partnership and Member of the EU AI Alliance.
Outside of work, Alexis is a keen sportswoman who enjoys skiing, marathon running and sailing. Her yacht master certification enables her to indulge her passion for travel. She is committed to championing diversity and inclusion within the workplace and technical industries at large.
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John Watkins
John Watkins is the NERC Environmental Data Service representative on the network and leads the NERC Environmental Information Data Centre (EIDC) based on the University of Lancaster campus and is Head of Environmental Informatics for the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. He has a background in environmental and computational sciences and has worked on national capability projects within CEH and data intensive environmental research for the past 25 years.
John leads an Environmental Data Science group at Lancaster who deliver the NERC Environmental Data Service for terrestrial and freshwater sciences and develop IT infrastructure for environmental research (e.g. the NERC Data Labs project based at UKRI/STFC JASMIN HPC). He is involved in development of environmental data science methods (e.g. EPSRC Data Science for the Natural Environment and UKRI SPF Change-points for a Changing Planet) and is a theme-lead within the Lancaster Centre of Excellence for Environmental Data Science (CEEDS).
He is also involved in international projects to facilitate environmental informatics having worked on Belmont Forum and Research Data Alliance working groups and is leading information systems development within the EU eLTER ESFRI environmental monitoring network and sits of the International LTER Information Management Committee. John also sits on the UKRI/NERC Information Strategy Group, which advises on research council data policy, and the potential linkage between the NERC Environmental Data Service and UKRI SPF programmes.
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