Executive Committee

Michael Barton is a Professor in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems and in the School of Human Evolution & Social Change, and Director of the Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity at Arizona State University (USA). He also directs the Network for Computational Modeling in Social and Ecological Sciences (CoMSES.Net), an international scientific network to enable accessibility, open science, and best practices for computation in the socio-ecological sciences. His research centers around long-term human ecology and landscape dynamics, integrating computational modeling, geospatial technologies, and data science with geoarchaeological field studies. Barton has directed transdisciplinary research on hunter-gatherers and small-holder farmers in the Mediterranean and North America for over three decades, and collaborates on research on human-environmental interactions in the modern world. He is a member of the open-source GRASS GIS Development Team and Project Steering Committee, dedicated to making advanced geospatial technologies openly accessible to the world. Web page and CV at: http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton

Charlotte Till is an assistant research scientist in the School of Complex Adaptive Systems at Arizona State University. She graduated from ASU with her PhD in Anthropology in Dec 2022 after conducting research to better understand the role of the environment in human migration decision making - principally within areas designated as "at-risk" from physical environmental threats such as sea level rise, subsidence, hurricanes, and flooding. Her research focused on individuals and communities across the US Gulf Coast, with a specific focus on those living in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana. Originally from New Zealand, she has called Arizona home for the past decade. She is deeply interested in how computational tools and technologies can be used to explore complex adaptive systems, explore possible futures, and better inform policy and decision makers at the leading edge of change.

Min Chen is a professor and the Vice Director of Key Lab of Virtual Geographic Environment at Nanjing Normal University, China. His research interests are geographic modeling and simulation and virtual geographic environments. He is the group leader of the Open Geographic Modeling and Simulation System (OpenGMS) team which supports sharing of modeling and simulation resources for geographic applications. Chen is also Chair of the Modeling Geographic System Committee of the International Geographical Union, Co-Chair of Education and Capacity Building for Digital Earth committee of the International Society for Digital Earth, Fellow of International Environmental Modelling and Software Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Stefan Reis is currently president of International Environmental Modelling and Software Society (iEMSs) and has very much enjoyed forming closer links to other learned societies and organisations, including building links to OMF, the Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand (MSSANZ), the International Symposium on Environmental Software Systems (ISESS) and others over the past years. Stefans background is in integrated assessment modelling of air pollution and climate change effects on human and ecosystem health. Stefan holds a position as head of unit for environment and sustainability at the DLR Project Management Agency currently and has been an active researcher in the field of environmental modelling, with a particular focus on the interfaces between environment and health for more than 25 years. Stefan holds a visiting professorship at the University of Edinburgh, School of Chemistry and fellowships with iEMSs and MSSANZ.

Bert Jagers is a Senior Advisor and Researcher at Deltares, the Netherlands. He works in software development that combines satellite data, machine learning, and numerical modeling to simulate and study earth surface processes with a focus on hydrology and biogeomorphology. He aims for impact in rural, urban and coastal challenges by making process knowledge accessible via state-of-the-art software. He plays a leading role in the development of the Deltares Delft3D open source modelling suite, and is active in various international initiatives for model coupling and data standardization such as OpenMI, BMI, and netCDF UGRID. He is member of the Steering Committee of the Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System.

Volker Grimm has been working as an ecological modeler at the UFZ since 1992 and teaching at the University of Potsdam since 1999, where he also holds a professorship in Theoretical Ecology since 2012. Since 1999, he has been trying to improve the practice of agent-based modeling (ABM), resulting in a monograph for ecologists and a textbook for all ABM users. In 2006, he and others proposed a general format for describing ABM, the ODD protocol, which was updated in 2010 and 2020. He has also developed a standard format for documenting the entire modeling process, called TRACE documents. He is currently working on a clone of ODD for model integration and on establishing "Reusable Building Blocks" for ABMs.

Serena Hamilton is a senior research fellow at the Fenner School of Environment & Society and Institute for Water Futures at the Australian National University (ANU). Her research focuses on the use of model-based approaches to make better informed decisions about socio-environmental problems. She is particularly interested in integrated assessment and modelling for co-production of knowledge in transdisciplinary research, and identifying and promoting best practices in modelling development and evaluation. Her recent work includes: designing integrated models for understanding socially inclusive and sustainable pathways in agricultural development in developing countries; and developing and using future scenarios in participatory processes to improve decision making in water.Dr Hamilton is also the managing editor of the open access journal Socio-Environmental Systems Modelling (SESMO).

Andrew Bell is an assistant professor in the Department of Earth & Environment at Boston University. His research profile is focused on co-producing agent-based models of resource systems (irrigation, deforestation, ranching, migration) with non-academic stakeholders and informing them with expert knowledge, surveys, and behavioral experiments. He is also coordinating an initiative to encourage the sharing of reusable building blocks for agent-based models.

Geerten Hengeveld works at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). Geerten has been working with different (socio-) ecological models representing various systems – from global forestry and bioeconomy to individual movement of dolphins and bacteria. Geerten has developed and re-used both toy-models, calibrated mechanistic models, integrated assessment modelling and data-driven models. Geerten’s experience with models is both from developer, model-user and project manager and he has been involved in developing and rolling out model governance and quality assurance at institutional level. Geerten is executive manager of the LTER-LIFE infrastructure. With LTER-LIFE Geerten wants to facilitate ecological researchers in addressing the full complexity of ecosystems across spatial and temporal scales and domain boundaries. This is done by creating virtual laboratories where researchers can combine data and models into digital twins.

Christopher Erdmann is an author, developer, and experimenter in the areas of digital libraries, social networking, library UX, interactive technologies, bibliometrics, and data services in libraries. Prior to joining the American Geophysical Union as the Assistant Director for Data Stewardship, he was an engagement, support, and training expert for the NHLBI BioData Catalyst project at University of North Carolina Renaissance Computing Institute. He has previously worked for organizations such as California Digital Library (Library Carpentry), North Carolina State University, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, European Southern Observatory, Supreme Court of the US, United Nations, University of Washington, Smithsonian, and CNET. Christopher holds an MLIS from the University of Washington iSchool and a BA from the University of California, Davis.

Sandra Gesing is a senior research scientist, the Scientific Outreach and DEI Lead at the Discovery Partners Institute at University of Illinois System, Chicago. She is especially interested in sustainability of research software, usability of computational methods and reproducibility of research results. Prior to the position at DPI, she was an associate research professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a computational scientist in the Center for Research Computing at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, US. Before she moved to the US, she was a research associate at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and in the Applied Bioinformatics Group at the University of Tübingen, Germany. Additionally, she has perennial experience as a project manager and system developer in industry in the US and Germany. She received her German diploma (equivalent to a Master’s degree) in computer science from extramural studies at the FernUniversität Hagen and her PhD in computer science from the University of Tübingen, Germany.

Ismael Kherroubi Garcia is the Founder and CEO of Kairoi, the AI Ethics and Research Governance consultancy. He holds a bachelor’s in Business Management and Administration, and a Master’s in Philosophy of the Social Sciences. His philosophical studies have focused on the conditions that enable multidisciplinarity in scientific projects. Prior to establishing Kairoi in 2022 and joining the Open Modeling Foundation in 2023, he established the Turing Research Ethics Committee (TREx) and processes at the Alan Turing Institute in 2021. He has also worked in finance, sales and human resources, and currently leads the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Network at the RSA (Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce), enabling civil society’s engagement in discussions about cutting-edge technologies. Within the OMF Ismael has been instrumental in facilitating workshops for the ModelShare initiative.

Junzhi Liu is a professor in the Center for the Pan-Third Pole Environment, Lanzhou University (TOP 5 in China in Geography). His research interests mainly include land surface modeling and spatio-temporal data mining. He has published 86 peer reviewed papers, including 9 ESI highly cited papers, and has more than 3000 citations with a h-index of 24. He and his team developed the Spatially Explicit Integrated Modeling System (SEIMS) watershed modeling framework, which has been widely used in different types of watersheds. He won the second prize of natural science from the Ministry of Education, China, in 2017, and the special prize of geographic information technology progress from the China Association for Geospatial Information Society in 2021.

Iestyn Woolway is a Reader at Bangor University, School of Ocean Sciences in Wales. His research focuses on the physical interactions between climate and water, with a particular interest in the physics and hydrology of lakes worldwide. This includes aspects such as climate-induced variations in lake evaporation, water temperature, ice cover and energy fluxes. Using a combination of in-situ, satellite, and modelled data, his research aims to answer key questions that relate to climate-related changes of inland waters. Dr. Woolway graduated from University College London in 2015 with a PhD in Physical Limnology.

Allen Lee is a research software engineer who has been building cyberinfrastructure for computational social science and complex adaptive systems at Arizona State University since 2006; projects include the Digital Archaeological Record, the Social Ecological Systems Library, Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments (SKOPE), the Port of Mars, and CoMSES Net, where he serves as co-director and technical lead. He works to improve the state of open, transparent, reusable, and reproducible computational science as a Carpentries instructor and maintainer for the Plotting and Programming in Python and Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing lessons, and currently serves on the DataCite Services and Technology Steering Group and as a co-chair for the Consortium of Scientific Software Registries and Repositories.

Dr. Takuya Iwanaga is a Research Software Developer with the Institute of Water Futures. His research investigates methods and approaches for the development of integrated socio-environmental models for decision making and policy development under deep uncertainty. He has worked in a range of interdisciplinary contexts combining software and model development expertise and is an active contributor to several open-source software for scientific research. Takuya was recently awarded the Early Career Researcher Excellence Prize from the International Environmental Modeling and Software Society for his work.

Dr. Jazmin Zatarain Salazar is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Technology Policy and Management in the Policy Analysis at Delft University of Technology, where she leads an artificial intelligence lab to support policy analysis. Her research interests lie in advancing multiobjective decision support for environmental and water systems under climate and socio-economic uncertainty. This work requires bridging hydrologic and climate sciences, artificial intelligence, high performance computing, economics, control theory, visual analytics and participatory policy design. She holds a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering from Cornell University, U.S.A., with an emphasis in Environmental and Water Resources Systems Engineering.

Karin Frank served as a Members Council Representative from the inception of the OMF until 2024. Karin is an expert for ecological and social-ecological modeling with a PhD in Mathematics and a habilitation in Applied System Sciences. She has headed the Department for Ecological Modeling (OESA) at the Helmholtz-Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig (Germany) since 2010 and holds a Professorship in the same field in joint appointment with the Institute for Environmental Systems Research at the University of Osnabrück (Germany). She is active in research and teaching in these fields.