Professor Aerts is a visionary leader in climate risk research and has advanced flood simulation methods by coupling hydrological models to socio-economic risk valuation methods at continental and global scales. In his multidisciplinary work, he emphasizes the role of individual behavior in flood risk management. During his time in Germany, Professor Aerts will work on incorporating human behavior and adaption in flood models to unravel the human-nature interactions in flood risk systems.

Professor Bernhardt is an outstanding expert in the fields of biogeochemistry, ecosystem ecology and restoration science. Her research programme is dominanted by a desire to understand how major shifts in chemical regimes affect the ecosystem processes in streams, wetlands and lakes. During her stay in Germany, she continues her research on streams within urban and urbanizing landscapes, streams within the intense region of surface coal mining in the Central Appalachian mountains and coastal wetlands subject to both agricultural legacies and saltwater incursion.

Yona Chen is Professor for Soil Chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. He is one of the leading experts in the field of composting, soil amendment and the related water chemistry. His work adds significantly to the understanding of the distribution of environmental pollutants in farming and to the manifold biochemical reactions in cultivated soils.

Professor Gorelick is a recognized world expert in the quantitative analysis of freshwater resources. He has made pioneering contributions to developing integrated process models to understand coupled human-natural-engineered freshwater systems as well as hydrologic-ecological relationships. In Germany he will expend this work to the nexus between water, energy and food.