Keynote Speakers
Please check back regularly as more information will be added as it is received from each speaker.
Tim Barrows, University of New South Wales Sydney
Tim Barrows is Director of the Elemental Analysis Facility, including the Chronos Radiocarbon Laboratory, at the University of New South Wales Sydney. He is formerly a Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and a Future Fellow at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Tim’s research focuses on using geochronology and geomorphology to study how climate change has affected the Earth within the last glacial cycle, especially during the last glacial maximum. He uses dating techniques to better understand the timing and causes of climate change and measure rates and processes of landscape change. He also improves methodologies for quantifying climate change from proxy climate records, especially cold climate landforms. His work presently focuses on Australasia, Alaska, the Arctic, the UK, Spain and Africa.
Pascale Biron, Concordia University
Pascale Biron has a background in hydrogeomorphology (PhD in geography, Université de Montréal, 1995). She has been a professor in the Department of Geography, Planning and Environment at Concordia University since 1998. Her research focuses on stream restoration for fish habitat, the sustainable management of watercourses in agricultural environments, flood zone mapping and hydrodynamic modelling. In particular, she has worked on the concept of freedom space for rivers, which aims to increase the resilience of river systems.
Prof. Dr. Fahu Chen, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)
Fahu Chen was elected as an Academician to the Chinese Academy of Science in 2015 and as a Member of the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS）in 2016. He is a research professor of Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He was the president (2019-2023) and he is a fellow of China Geography Society, and associate Chairman of the Environment Evolution Commission of IGU since 2012. He was professor of physical geography and Quaternary Science in Lanzhou University between 1994-2018, director of the Key Laboratory of West China's Environmental System (Ministry of Education of China) during 2005-2016, Vice president of the China Society on Tibetan Plateau between 2019-2023, and director of Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research between 2018-2023.
His scientific work involves Quaternary environmental changes (especial during Holocene), climate changes, environmental archeology, Lake and desert evolution and paleolimnology with special focus on paleoenvironmental reconstruction, past human-environment interactions in Arid Central Asia and the Tibetan Plateau. He has published more than 710 papers in peer-reviewed journals of both English and Chinese with more than 440 papers published in SCI journals such as Nature, Science, NCC, NG, NS, NC, Sci. Bull., PNAS, ESR, QSR, which are cited more than 22,700 times by papers of SCI journals with H index of 74. Currently, he is Executive Editors-In-Chief of Science Bulletin, associate editor of Fundamental Research, Frontier of Earth Science, and editor of Journal of Quaternary Science, Palaeogeography-Palaeoclimatology-Palaeoecology.
Dan Hikuroa, Waipapa Taumata Rau - University of Auckland
Dan Hikuroa (Ngāti Maniapoto, Ngaati Whanaunga, Ngāti Mahuta, Pākehā) is a father, surfer, paddle-boarder, gardener, loves the taiao and is an Associate Professor in Māori Studies, Waipapa Taumata Rau - University of Auckland. Dan is an established world expert on weaving indigenous knowledge and science to realise the dreams of the communities he works with. Dan has been spearheading alternative ways of undertaking development and assessing sustainability, including braiding indigenous knowledge and epistemologies with science and into policies, assessment frameworks and decision-support tools. Dan is UNESCO New Zealand Commissioner for Culture, member of Pou Herenga, Māori Advisory to the Climate Change Commission, has key roles within New Zealand’s Centres of Research Excellence, advises national and regional government, communities and philanthropic trusts, member of several significant international research teams and formerly AGU Council. He is member of Ngā Ara Whetū, Te Pūtahi o Pūtaiao and Te Ao Mārama, Research Centres at Waipapa Taumata Rau -University of Auckland
Kat Fitzsimmons, Monash University
Kat Fitzsimmons is a dryland geomorphologist based at Monash University, Melbourne Australia. Her career has been diverse and varied - after completing her PhD (Australian National University, 2007) investigating the Quaternary history of aridity in the arid core of Australia, she shifted focus to the dryland margins, working to understand long-term human-environmental interactions at the World Heritage site of Lake Mungo. This led to a second postdoc in the Human Evolution department at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. There, while also working on archaeological projects in eastern Europe, southern and northern Africa, she became interested in loess as a palaeoclimate archive, and she completed her Habilitation on the topic at the University of Leipzig in 2016. Her forays into loess environments in the Danube basin and other dusty places rapidly drew her to Central Asia, such that from 2017-2021 Kat ran a large project focusing on paleoclimate reconstruction derived from the piedmont loess (and dune) deposits of Kazakhstan and Tajikistan, as Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (Mainz, Germany). In 2021, she became Professor of Terrestrial Sedimentology at the University of Tuebingen, Germany, where she diversified her research into aeolian (and occasionally fluvial and lacustrine) palaeoenvironments across Europe, Australia and Central Asia. She returned to Australia in November 2024 and has been renewing her research interests on the world's driest inhabited continent.
Oliver Korup, University of Potsdam
Oliver Korup likes landscapes and carries out research at the interface between geomorphology, natural hazards, and data science. He has a PhD degree from University of Wellington, New Zealand, and has spent many years studying and admiring the steep and active terrain of the western Southern Alps. He has worked on large landslides, natural dams, outburst floods, sudden sediment pulses, and their consequences for water, sediment, and biomass fluxes in several active mountain belts around the world. Since 2011, he has been professor of natural hazards at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His current research interests involve probabilistic forecasts of potentially destructive Earth surface processes.
Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva, Institute of Geography of the University of Bern
Virginia Ruiz-Villanueva has worked as a Professor at the Institute of Geography of the University of Bern (Switzerland) since 2023, where she leads the Unit of Geomorphology, Natural Hazards, and Risk Research. Virginia, a fluvial geomorphologist, investigates the physical processes shaping rivers and their catchments, focusing on flood dynamics, hillslope-channel coupling, and flow-sediment-large wood interactions. Her research integrates fieldwork, remote and near sensing and geoprocessing, and numerical modelling to analyze cascade processes in mountain rivers. She aims to advance methods for monitoring and modelling fluvial systems, informing sustainable management strategies and environmental policies.
