Mr. Sivan Velayudhan Valarukattil is currently a Senior Scientist at M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), India. He holds a Post Graduate degree in botany and started his career as a teacher. His area of interest is in biodiversity research and Conservation, particularly angiosperms. He has acquired experience in inventorying, monitoring, and conservation of plant diversity of Western Ghats. He has contributed to documenting the People’s Biodiversity Register (PBR) in many states in India and School Biodiversity Register (SBR) programme. He took part in preparing field identification keys (electronic) for medicinal plants and training manuals for PBR and SBR. Activities of ‘Lifescape’ - a project for popularizing science among laypersons especially students, was coordinated along with many others. As part of the Lifescape project, a publication series in the magazine ‘Resonance’ was also coordinated. During the period 1994-2003 very extensive ecological fieldwork was carried out all along the Western Ghats concerning flowering plants. Since April 2004 working at the Community Agrobiodiversity Centre of MSSRF in various disciplines. He has 20 papers, three popular articles, and one book chapter to his credit.

Ariela is a Costa Rican Architect and Urban Planner with a master’s degree in Urban Planning and Policy Design held at Politecnico di Milano. She counts with 10 years of professional experience in local and multinational firms in her home country and in Milan, where she continues to develop her career. Coming from a country with a recognized trajectory in Sustainable Development, motivated her to focus her academic and professional practice towards this scope of work. Recently, she co-founded Urbanalytica, an organization of data-driven strategies for sustainable communities. Ariela was also selected as a 2021 Climate Ambassador by the Global Youth Climate Network (GYCN) initiative from the World Bank Group, to develop a position paper on Smart and Sustainable cities. Her current area of practice focuses on strategic planning, collaboration with organizations, and the development of a gender-inclusive toolkit for urban areas in Costa Rica.

Louisa is a recent graduate from TU Delft urbanism master program and also holds a bachelor degree in landscape architecture. Louisa has a specific interest in semi-urban landscapes and focuses on the interface between landscape architecture and urban design. She pleads for a rediscovery of the relationship between city and countryside by rethinking current planning practices of the urban-rural boundary. In her graduation thesis she compares the fringe landscapes of our cities with a membrane at macro scale. A distinctive landscape that acts as a spatial layer facilitating interaction between the urban and rural environment. Through research-by-design, she explores what this membrane landscape could look like and how it can add social and ecological value. She is currently working as an urban designer at Witteveen + Bos.

‘I work in the field of sustainable buildings and sustainable energy systems, as well as climate adaptation: anticipating predicted changes in the climate. We conduct research and translate solutions into actions and new concepts. We also look for and find new relationships where none existed before. The Climate Design & Sustainability chair has close links with the technical aspect of Architecture. Our research focuses on sustainable energy systems and climate adaptation, but we also design and create new and specific products.

I obtained my bachelor and master degree at the department of the Built Environment at the university of technology of Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Recently I started as a PhD student at the same university for the Interreg Smart Circular Bridge project. This project has the aim to use structural health monitoring to estimate the degradation and the remaining service life as well as current level of structural safety of pedestrian bridges. My aim in the related PhD research is to investigate the influence of moisture on the long term performance degradation of natural fibre reinforced polyester in the context of a structural health monitoring system.

Prof. Dr. Peter van Duijsen [Prof. of Practice, IIT Guwahati, India] has worked with computer simulation and power electronics for nearly 35 years. After receiving his Masters in Electrical Engineering, and working at the Technical University of Delft, he founded Simulation Research and developed the simulation program CASPOC. He received a PhD degree in 2003 in the field of Modeling and Simulation of Power Electronic Systems. Currently he heads the research and development department at Simulation Research. From 2013 until 2019 he was part-time researcher at the Technical University of Delft in The Netherlands where the focus is on electric machine control, wireless power transfer for EV charging and DC grids for Fast Charging. Since 2008 he is a lecturer at the Korean University of Technology, since 2020 Researcher at the DC-LAB at the THUAS University of Applied Sciences in Delft, The Netherlands and appointed as Professor oP at the IIT-Guwahati-India since 2020. Dr van Duijsen co-authored several textbooks in the field of Power Electronics, Drives, Solar, Wind and electric Vehicles, is involved in the development of educational training hardware in the field of renewable energy and holds a Patent on wireless charging of eBikes.

Graduated as a philosopher of culture I joined the Nature For Health foundation in 2013. Therefore I was a member of the provincial parliament of the Province of North Brabant (leading the GreenLeft Party), and after that an alderman (the first alderman for biodiversity and climate in the Netherlands) and vice mayor in my home town Oisterwijk in the Netherlands, one of the first so called ‘dementia friendly municipalities’ in the Netherlands. Dementia being one of the greatest societal challenges in the Netherlands, and the world. After that I became president of the Dementia Cooperation Oisterwijk, that strives to, because you cannot change people suffering from dementia, change society. And nature can play a part in this. As Nature for Health we have conducted two scientific researches with Dutch Universities on how nature can play a part in this societal challenge. A research on nature interventions, resulting in an Nature4Dem method to improve through nature the quality of life of people suffering from dementia,. And a research ‘Green for Gray’, how you can improve public space for people suffering from dementia. Both researches were nominated for the International Dementia Wards in 2015, category, Dementia Design Innovation of the Year.

Frits van Loon is a Landscape Architect trained at the WUR (Wageningen University , Netherlands). He is now Assistant Professor at the department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Manitoba. He was co-owner of an office for Landscape Architecture and Urban Design in the Netherlands, called Hosper, in Haarlem; designing on all scale levels from regional design to design on public spaces and street furniture. He still has a strong connection with colleagues from the field, and with the Universities of Wageningen and Delft, who are working on the modern-day assignments of climate change, water management, biodiversity and reversing soil degradation. His path took him into education where, together with his colleague dr. Nico Tillie he started the Urban Ecology Lab. The Lab research is on the same topics through the work of students, but closely connected to the real world, which allows for solutions that are not in line with current days policies or workflows. To make this LAB successful students are trained to collaborate as a team, and work in an inclusive way, being aware of their own qualities and that of others and turning them in to use for the benefit of the project and the team. For this, tools and techniques have been developed, which apply on all (design) teams.

mr. Wito Van Oijstaeijen is a doctoral researcher in Environmental Science at the University of Antwerp, faculty of Business and Economics. His research focuses on green infrastructure, ecosystem services valuation and the in-practice use of ecosystem services knowledge within local administrations. Further, mr. Van Oijstaeijen is involved with the interreg 2 seas Nature Smart Cities project, aiming to develop a business model targeted at local authorities to demonstrate the value (qualitatively and quantitatively) of (urban) green infrastructure.

Dirk van Peijpe (1962) is urban designer and director of De Urbanisten. He studied urbanism at the Academy of Architecture and Urban Design in Rotterdam. He advocates an engaged polytechnical urbanism in which the agenda of climate adaptation and ecology is integrated in the design of our urban landscapes and the daily environment of people. Dirk van Peijpe was responsible for the Rotterdam Climate Adaptation Strategy, initiated the ZOHO-Climateproof District in Rotterdam and participated in Rebuild By Design in NY (US). With De Urbanisten he realized Watersquares in Rotterdam and Tiel. He is involved in numerous climate sensitive projects in cities like Rotterdam (NL), Nijmegen (NL), Copenhagen (DK) and Antwerpen (BE). Dirk van Peijpe lectures at the Academy for Architecture in Rotterdam and is a keynote speaker at international conferences on the topic of climatesensitive urbanism and landscape architecture.

Arjan van Timmeren is Full Professor Environmental Technology & Design, at the Faculty of Architecture and Built Environment and Department of Urbanism at Delft University of Technology (TUD) in The Netherlands. Over the years his work has focused on the integration of sustainable development in the field of the built environment in both practice and academia, with lately emphasis on Environmental technology, Urban Metabolism, Circular and Biobased Economy, Green-Blue concepts and smart cities, and -citizens. Besides of the TUD chair, among other, he has also been (co-)founding Scientific Director and now Principal Investigator at AMS Institute (Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions), an initiative by TUD, MIT and WUR in Amsterdam, together with public and private stakeholders and citizen(platforms). At the moment he is Scientific Director of the ‘Rotterdam Delta Resilience Initiative’, a collaboration between City of Rotterdam, TU Delft, Erasmus University and Erasmus Medical Center. Besides, he is project leader of several European and national research projects. Finally, he is the Academic Portfolio Director Sustainable Cities for TUD Extension School and has seats in several (inter)national steering groups, quality teams (for Sustainability/CE), scientific boards (int.conferences), special issue editorships and is lecturing all over the globe as expert and keynote speaker.

Research Scholar in Urban Planning and Sustainability with a focus on river restoration and human culture. Completed bachelor's in Civil Engineering. Has both technical and theoretical knowledge in the field.

Clara is an environmental researcher at PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency. In her work, she seeks to understand how nature can be part of the solution to tackle today's societal challenges such as climate change, environmental pollution and safeguarding peoples' health and well-being. To do so, she often make use of spatial modelling tools assessing biodiversity and nature's contribution to people under different future developing pathways (scenarios). In her PhD, she particularly focus on nature-based solutions for urban sustainability challenges. Over the past years, Clara has gained experiences in various Dutch and international projects (e.g. H2020 project 'NATURVATION' (https://naturvation.eu/)). She has a strong interest in working on the science-policy interface.

Interior and Spatial Designer and PhD candidate in Design at the Politecnico di Milano. His research is focused on the relationship between human beings and non-human agents in common urban spaces. He collaborates in research activities of the POLIMI DESIS Lab - a research lab that operates in multicultural and multidisciplinary contexts about Design projects for Social Innovation and Sustainability - dealing with the reactivation of local communities in urban contexts, such as the “Vocabolario di quartiere” project (2019-ongoing), a participated ad situated vocabulary in the NoLo neighborhood (Milan) developed within “OFF CAMPUS - Il Cantiere per le Periferie”, an initiative promoted by Polisocial, the social engagement and responsibility programme of Politecnico di Milano. Since 2018, he is a teaching assistant at the School of Design of Politecnico di Milano.

Jacques Vink was trained as architect at the Delft University of Technology. He worked for a number of firms in both the Netherlands and abroad, among which: Geurst & Schulze, OMA, Max Dudler (Berlin) Wood Marsh Architecture (Melbourne) and William McDonough & Partners (Charlottesville, US). In 1998 he started the architectural firm RUIMTELAB. RUIMTELAB combines research and design into innovative sustainable architecture and urban designs. Aim is to realise buildings with a minimal ecological footprint using state of the art energy concepts, biobased materials and circular building systems. RUIMTELAB realised a wide range of projects and won several prizes. Its work is published internationally. In 2013 RUIMTELAB started collaborating with ecologists, urban gardeners and biologists to initiate, implement and supervise projects incorporating ecology and nature in urban design and architecture. In 2019 Jacques started Studio Natuurinclusief for consulting and research in the field of nature inclusive design. He is guest lecturer at the Academy of Architecture and the Willem de Kooning Academy both in Rotterdam and parttime at the TU Delft. Among his publications are: Stadsnatuur maken/Making Urban Nature, nai010 publishers (2017), ‘the Ecohouse’ Dash7 (guest editor), nai010 publishers (2013) and Smart Architecture, 010 Publishers (2003).

The need for resilient interfaces between the biosphere and technosphere in urban development is clearer than ever. As researcher Nature-based Solutions I focus on innovating multifunctional Blue-Green Urban Infrastructure.

Mr Vosecky chairsa group of high level experts from corporates, NGOs, city, city companies and academia in order to identity and recommend circular economy interventions for Prague to reach carbon neutrality by 2050.