Water

Damià Barceló is the Director of the Catalan Institute for Water Research (ICRA) in Girona, Spain. His scientific focus is on the method development and monitoring of priority, new, and emerging pollutants, in particular in water quality assessment and management, which has been awarded (among others) with the Spanish King Jaime I Prize for the Protection of the Environment in 2007, the Swedish Recipharm Environmental Award in 2012, and in the same year, the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) 5th Award on Water Management & Protection, Saudi Arabia.

Asit Biswas is the founder of the Third World Centre for Water Management in Mexico, and a distinguished visiting professor at three institutions: the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore; the Wuhan University, China; and the Indian Institute of Technology in Bhubaneswar, India. He won the Stockholm Water Prize in 2006 and was named one of the Top 10 Water Trailblazers of the World by Reuters in 2012. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Water Resources Development, Editorial Board member of the Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, and a Series Editor of several book series like Water Resources Development and Management.

“Water is increasingly becoming a serious constraint for social and economic development of nearly all countries. This is because of poor water management in most parts of the world. The world’s water problems are solvable with current knowledge, technology and available funds. The new Water Channel of Springer, one of the world’s main scientific publishers, will contribute to solve global water problems by providing information in terms of knowledge generation, synthesis, dissemination and application.”

Enrico Drioli is the Founding Director of the Institute on Membrane Technology (ITM) of the Italian National Research Council (CNR); Coordinator of the Erasmus Mundus Doctorate in Membrane Engineering (EUDIME); Visiting Professor at the Department of Energy Engineering, Hanyang University; and Emeritus Professor at the University of Calabria. He was the Dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Calabria, Director of the IMRC-CNR and later Director of the ITM-CNR. He has received several awards including the EMS 2011 “Richard Maling Barrer Prize” for his “outstanding contributions to membrane science and technology”. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Water Science and author of more than 650 scientific papers, 18 patents, and 18 books in the field of Membrane Science and Technology.

Hiroaki Furumai has been an International Water Association (IWA) fellow since 2010, is a member of the IWA Board of Directors, an associate board member of the IWA/IAHR Joint Committee of Urban Drainage, and serves as vice president of the Japan Society on Water Environment. He is an editor of several scholarly journals, including Water Research, Urban Water Journal, and Journal of Japan Water Works Association. His research focuses on sustainable urban drainage management, investigating water pollution control and water quality dynamics, the fate and control of pathogenic microorganisms in urban water cycles, bioremediation of contaminated soil and groundwater, and water quality characterization and its evaluation for sustainable urban water use.

After graduating and working four years for the UNDTC, during which he participated in water resources assessment activities in Bolivia, Jac van der Gun joined the Institute of Applied Geoscience of the R & D organization TNO (Applied Scientific Research) in The Netherlands, where he remained employed until retirement. Jac van der Gun has been lecturing at UNESCO-IHE on groundwater issues for more than thirty years. He was actively involved in establishing the International Groundwater Resources Assessment Centre (IGRAC) and became its first director in 2003. Currently, he is still active in several groundwater-related projects for major international organizations, mostly as a consultant to UNESCO or UNESCO-IGRAC.

Andrey G. Kostianoy is a specialist in physical oceanography and satellite remote sensing. His research has focused on satellite monitoring, oceanography, regional climate change, and environmental problems of the Black, Caspian, Aral, and Baltic sea. He is Vice-President of the international association 'Modelenvironment' (Liege University, Belgium), a member of the Russian National Scientific Committee on Oceanic Research (SCOR), Honorary Member of the Environmental Ocean Team (UK/Italy), Chair of the Technical Committee of International Water Technology Association (Egypt), and one of the lead authors of chapter 3 'Observations: Oceans' in WG1 of the IPCC AR5. He is a editorial board member of several renowned scientific journals focusing on water technology and marine systems and Editor-in-Chief of the Springer book series 'The Handbook of Environmental Chemistry’.

PELA GeoEnvironmental is an international consulting firm providing services in hydrogeology, geology, environmental sciences, engineering and archaeology. Jim LaMoreaux also serves on the Executive Committee of the International Association of Hydrogeologists US National Committee, as Editor in Chief of the international journals Environmental Earth Sciences and Carbonates and Evaporites, and as Editor of several book series. He has been a member of the Water Environment Federation (WEF) for over 30 years and served on the Board of Directors of the American Ground Water Trust and as President and State Director of the Alabama Water Environment Association (AWEA).

Since 1989, Reinhard Niessner has served as the Director of the Institute of Hydrochemistry at the Technical University in Munich, Germany. His research interests are in environmental analytical chemistry, ranging from aerosols to hydrocolloids, to biofilms in the hydro- and atmosphere. An impressive number of original publications (>500), and supervision of 125 PhD theses document his expertise in many areas of analytical chemistry, including (but not limited to) hydrochemical research.

Ronald van Nooyen received his Doctorate in Mathematics and Computer Science in 1992 from the University of Amsterdam. As a mathematician working in the field of operational water management, his research focuses on statistics in hydrology and water management; interval arithmetic and analysis for hydrological and water management issues; automatic control of water systems (sewers, polders, channels); open channel flows; and stage-discharge relationships for structures.

From 1992 to 1998, Úrsula Oswald Spring was the first Minister of Environmental Development in Morelos, Mexico. In 1998, she was elected President of the International Peace Research Association, and between 2002 and 2006 she was General Secretary of Latin-American Council for Peace Research and today Honorific President. She was involved in peace and conflict resolution processes in different countries of Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Spain. She is lead author of WG2 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Special Report on Extreme Events. In 2009 she was elected as the national coordinator of the water research in Mexico to establish a network of water researchers, including scientists, government officials, and representatives of private enterprises for the National Council of Science and Technology.

Bingcai Pan has served as Chair of the National Committee of IWA China Young Water Professionals, and deputy director of the State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Resource Reuse (China) and National Engineering Center for Organic Pollution Control and Resource Reuse (China). His current research focuses on advanced water treatment and reuse, designing and fabricating polymeric nanoporous adsorbents/ nanocomposites with unique properties and high stability for water and wastewater treatment, developing advanced oxidation/reduction processes for organic and ionic pollutant removal (nitrate, perchlorate etc.), and integrated processes for water treatment and reclamation/reuse. He is an editor of several academic journals, including Environmental Science and Pollution Research, Frontiers of Environmental Science and Engineering, and Ion Exchange and Adsorption Resin.

As of 2011, William Shotyk holds the position of Bocock Chair in Agriculture and the Environment at the University of Alberta. Before, in 2000, he joined the University of Heidelberg as Professor, becoming Director of the Institute of Environmental Geochemistry. He focused most of his scientific career on analyzing, understanding, and modeling the impacts of human activities on the geochemical cycles of trace metals at the interface between lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. For his remarkable contributions to the field, he was awarded the 2013 Philippe Duchaufour Medal. His tireless efforts in environmental projects have recently allowed him to establish, in an area north of Toronto, Canada, the Elmvale Foundation and Groundwater Observatory, and the Elmvale Water Festival.

Professor V.P. Singh is a Distinguished Professor and Caroline and William N. Lehrer Distinguished Chair in Water Engineering at Texas A & M University. He received his B.S., M.S., Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees in engineering. He is a registered professional engineer, a registered professional hydrologist, and an Honorary diplomate of ASCE-AAWRE. He has extensively published in the area of hydrology, groundwater, environmental quality, irrigation engineering, climate change, hydrometeorology, water resources, entropy theory, copula theory and water-food-energy nexus. He has received more than 70 national and international awards, including three honorary doctorates. He is a Distinguished Member of ASCE, and a fellow EWRI, AWRA, IWRS, ISAE, IASWC and IE. He is a member of 10 international engineering academies. He has served as President of the American Institute of Hydrology (AIH).

Dimitri Solomatine received his PhD from the Institute of Systems Analysis at the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1984 and he is with UNESCO-IHE Institute for Water Education in Delft from 1990; from 2006 he is the head of the Hydroinformatics Chair Group. His research interests include hydroinformatics, integration of models and remote sensing data, optimization, systems engineering, analysis of models uncertainty, computational intelligence, internet-based computing and decision support. He participated in a number of large-scale research and educational projects, has published over 170 papers, chapters in books and conference proceedings, co-edited several special issues of journals, a book, and regularly organizes special sessions on hydroinformatics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Hydroinformatics and of the Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, served on the International Scientific Committee of all hydroinformatics conferences since 1994. He is the co-founder and chairman of the sub-division on Hydroinformatics of the European Geosciences Union.

Kaoru Takara serves as Director on the Executive Board of the International Water Resources Association (IWRA) and is a Professor at Kyoto University. He has worked extensively on hydrology, water resources engineering, and water-related disaster issues. He has produced 32 Doctors of Engineering (at Kyoto University) during his professorship since 1998, including 21 from Asian, African, European, and South American countries. He has made significant international contributions to UNESCO-IHP, Asia Pacific Association of Hydrology and Water Resources (APHW), and in a number of scientific journals.

Cecilia Tortajada has been an advisor to major international institutions like the FAO, UNDP, JICA, CDG and InWENT (now part of GIZ), and the governments of Cameroon, India, Turkey, Republic of Congo, and others on various aspects of water resources and environmental management and governance-related issues. She is also engaged in independent studies on corporate social responsibilities of major multinational corporations. She is member of the OECD Initiative in Water Governance and Past President of the International Water Resources Association. She is Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Water Resources Development, Associate Editor of Water International, a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, and a Series Editor of several book series like Water Resources Development and Management.

Cliff Voss, a senior scientist with the hydrological research program of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), has over 30 years of project management/implementation and research experience in groundwater resources development and in use of the subsurface for energy production and waste isolation. Since 1994, he has been the Executive Editor of the International Association of Hydrogeologists’ Hydrogeology Journal. He consults extensively on groundwater system evaluation and management and lectures worldwide on these and related subjects. His work has resulted in the development of practical simulation methodologies that have now become standard for use in groundwater resource assessment and for managing both the quantity and quality of water supplies.