Iain Stewart

Professor of Geoscience Communication
The El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society, Jordan
The UNESCO Chair for Geoscience and Society at the University of Plymouth, UK

Iain Stewart is the El Hassan bin Talal Research Chair in Sustainability at the Royal Scientific Society (Jordan) and Professor of Geoscience Communication at the University of Plymouth (UK), where he holds the UNESCO Chair for Geoscience and Society. The founding director of the University of Plymouth’s ‘Sustainable Earth Institute’, Iain’s long-standing research interests are in disaster risk reduction, climate change, and Earth science communication. His Earth science communication work has built on a 15-year partnership with BBC Science television, presenting popular documentary series, such as ‘Earth: The Power of the Planet’, ‘Earth: The Climate Wars’, ‘How Earth Made Us’, ‘How To Grow A Planet’, ‘The Rise of the Continents’ and ‘Planet Oil; he was also academic advisor on David Attenborough's acclaimed BBC series ‘Severn Worlds, One Planet’. Awarded an MBE for his services to geography and geology education, he was President of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society and in 2021 was the Communications Lead and Evidence Chair for the Scottish Government's Climate Citizen's Assembly.

Aral I. Okay

Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences
Istanbul Technical University, Turkey

Aral I. Okay is emeritus professor of geology in the Istanbul Technical University. He holds a BSc degree in geology from the University College London and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge. Between 1980-1983 he worked as a geologist at the Geological Survey of Turkey (MTA), and since then he has in the Istanbul Technical University. His research interests are regional geology and tectonics of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea region, and metamorphic petrology. He was a visiting scientist in the University of California Los Angeles (1986), in the University of Bochum, Germany as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow (1995), in the École Normal Superiéure, Paris (1996), in the University of California Santa Barbara as a Fulbright fellow (2005-2006) and in the Freie Universität Berlin (2020, 2022) as a Georg Forster awardee. He has received the Science Prize of the Turkish Scientific Research Council (TÜBİTAK), and is a member of the Turkish Academy of Sciences (TÜBA) since 1996, and a Fellow of the Mineralogical Society of America. For more information see his web page at http://web.itu.edu.tr/~okay/.

Roger Bilham

Senior Research Scientist
Cooperative Institute for Research In Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Roger Bilham is a research scientist in CIRES at University of Colorado Boulder, USA with interests in earthquake, landslide, flood and volcano processes and their impact on society. He uses various terrestrial and remote sensing geodetic methods to capture the deformation of the Earth's crust, and engineering and historical investigative methods to quantify the damage they produce. His current research includes the quantitative study of earthquakes in India and its western margin, and the investigation of aseismic fault slip in Israel, Pakistan, Anatolia and California. In a collaborative project with NED University, Karachi, he and his collaborators have investigated Medieval and pre-historic flooding of the Kashmir Valley. Also, their collaborative investigations with Kandilli Observatory, Istanbul involve measurements of strain and aseismic slip on the northern and eastern Anatolian faults to learn more about the relationship between earthquakes and fault creep.

A.M. Celâl Sengör

Associate Editor, Mediterranean Geosciences Reviews (Springer)
Eurasia Institute of Earth Sciences, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey

A. M. C. Şengör was born in İstanbul, Turkey, in 1955. He obtained, from the State University of New York at Albany, a BSc in 1978, an MSc in 1979 and a PhD in 1982, all in geology. Since then he has been a professor of geology at the İstanbul Technical University and a former chairman of the History of Geology Division of the Geological Society of America. He is the author, editor, co-author or co-editor of 20 books and more than 320 research papers on diverse aspects of geology. Şengör is a member of the Academia Europaea, the Leopoldina German National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a foreign associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the Serbian Academy of Sciences and arts. He also received numerous awards and medals for his work on geology, including the Bigsby Medal of the Geological Society of London, the Lutaud Award of the Academy of Sciences in Paris, the Gustav-Steinmann Medal of the Geologische Vereinigung, the Arthur Holmes Medal of the European Geosciences Union and the Eduard Suess Medal of the Austrian Geological Society.

Zhihua Zhang

Taishan Distinguished Professor, Shandong University, China.

Zhihua Zhang is a Taishan Distinguished Professor at Shandong University (China) and is leading an interdisciplinary big data mining research group. His long-standing researches focus on big earth data, climate change mechanisms, ocean dynamics, environmental evolution and sustainability. Recently, Prof Zhang’s researches have highlighted many times by New Scientist (UK), China Science Daily, and China Social Science Daily, and his four monographs published in Elsevier and Springer have been used widely in 60 countries around the world. Currently, Prof. Zhang is serving as an Editor-in-Chief of Int J Big Data Mining for Global Warming (World Scientific); a Chief Editor of Arab J Geosci (Springer); an Associate Editor of Environ Dev Sustain (Springer), EURASIP J Adv Signal Process (Springer), and Int J Climate Change Strat & Manag (Emerald); a Topical Editor of Big Earth Data (Taylor); and an Editorial Board Member of Earth Sci Informatics (Springer), PLoS ONE, Open Geosci (DeGruyter), Int J Global Warming (Indersci).