 Monique Kuglitsch
Chair, ITU/WMO FG-AI4NM I Innovation Manager at Fraunhofer HHI,Germany
Dr. Monique Kuglitsch is the Innovation Manager at Fraunhofer HHI and Chair of the newly established ITU/WMO Focus Group on AI for Natural Disaster Management. She previously managed operations for the ITU/WHO Focus Group on AI for Health. In her past role at the American Meteorological Society, M. Kuglitsch was the Lead Technical Editor for several journals (including the Journal of Hydrometeorology and Journal of Physical Oceanography) and the Senior International Outreach/Communications Specialist. As a researcher, M. Kuglitsch has investigated past climate change, extreme weather events, and regional climate model projections. M. Kuglitsch has experience in fluvial and limnological field work, geochemical laboratory methods, applied mathematics and statistics, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate.
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Arif Albayrak
Associate Research Engineer, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Maryland, USA, Co-Chair, ITU/WMO Data Working Group
Arif Albayrak is a scientist at NASA’s Biospheric Sciences Laboratory through the Joint Center of Earth System Technology (JCET) at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Mr. Albayrak has a multi-disciplinary background in engineering, applied mathematics, and computer science with over 20 years of work experience specializing in machine learning (ML) algorithms with an emphasis on estimation, classification, and extraction of information patterns from satellite-based sensor data. His research interests include knowledge graphs, natural language processing and semantic image segmentation using deep learning algorithms. He is also a member of the NASA Earth Science Disaster Group (HQ), the Earth Science Information Partners, (ESIP), and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, (AAAI).
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 Sally Radwan
Chief Digital Officer, UN Environment Programme
Golestan (Sally) Radwan (B.Sc., MBA, M.Sc.) is a Computer Scientist with expertise in AI and emerging technologies. Prior to UNEP, Sally served as Advisor to the Egyptian Minister of ICT, where she led the development and implementation of Egypt’s national AI strategy. During this time, she served as an expert and delegate of Egypt to several international organizations working on AI Policy and Regulation including UNESCO, WIPO, ITU, and OECD. She also championed and led two working groups within the African Union and League of Arab States to unify regional efforts around Responsible AI. Sally previously held several executive positions in the technology industry over 17 years, working in Germany, Austria, the UK and the US for companies including Novell GmbH, Avaya Inc. and NTT Data Europe. She earned a B.Sc. in Computer Engineering from Cairo University and an MBA from London Business School, as well as an MSc in Clinical Engineering and Healthcare Technology Management from City University of London. She is currently finalizing her PhD thesis, focusing on AI explainability and its ethical considerations in metagenomics at the Royal Holloway University of London.
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 Benedikt Soja
Assistant Professor, ETH Zurich
Dr. Benedikt Soja is Assistant Professor for Space Geodesy at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. His research focuses on the application of machine learning in geodesy, in particular related to the application of satellite navigation data for Earth observation. He started his scientific career in 2013 as a research assistant in the field of geodesy at the German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam and obtained his Ph.D. from Vienna University of Technology in 2016. He continued his research at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California as a fellow of the NASA Postdoctoral Program. In 2020, he moved back to Europe to establish his current research group at ETH Zurich.
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 Lauren Clay
Disaster Scientist and Public Health Researcher, University of Maryland (UMBC)
Lauren Clay is a disaster scientist and public health researcher. She is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Emergency and Disaster Health Systems at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Her research focuses on the public health impacts of disasters. Her expertise is in disaster food and nutrition insecurity. In 2021, she was awarded NSF CAREER and NSF Convergence Accelerator awards focused on food system resilience to disasters. She was the inaugural Climate and Health Scholar with NIMHD. She has a PhD in Disaster Science and Management from the University of Delaware and a Master of Public Health from Drexel University.
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 Vandana Janeja
Professor of Information Systems Department, University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC)
Vandana Janeja is Associate Dean for Research and Faculty Development in the College of Engineering and Information Technology and a professor of the Information Systems department at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC). She is the director of iHARP, an NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions. Her research is in the area of data science with a focus on spatio-temporal mining, data heterogeneity across multiple domain datasets. Her work brings together important societal projects such as climate change, ethics in data science, misinformation detection and security through the lens of her research in data science.
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 Michael Bennett
Head of Government Solutions - North America, ICEYE
Mike Bennett is the Head of Government Solutions, North America for ICEYE. For nearly 15 years, Mike has worked in the weather and natural disaster industry, from operational forecasting and hazard communication in broadcast meteorology, to peril risk assessment and post-event forensics in the Insurtech space. In his current role, he has worked to help governments and public sector organizations understand and ingest ICEYE’s natural catastrophe insights to improve disaster response efforts, improve humanitarian aid and hazard communications, and fuel alternative risk transfer projects focused on improving recovery outcomes for disaster survivors. While at ICEYE, Mike has also helped to lead the development of the monitoring, forecasting, and targeting operations for ICEYE Flood Insights – the process for which is the precursor to ICEYE's Flood Early Warning machine-learning forecast system.
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 Susu Xu
Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins
Dr. Susu Xu is an assistant professor at the Department of Civil and Systems Engineering. Her research group develops statistical machine learning and multi-modal learning methods to integrate multi-sourced multi-modal crowdsensing and remote sensing data with physical knowledge, to enhance understanding of and enable scalable assessment of cascading and compound hazards and their impacts on buildings, civil infrastructure systems and human society. She has been a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University and a research scientist at the AI research team in Qualcomm Technologies. She received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and Master in Machine Learning from Carnegie Mellon University, and her bachelor’s degree from Tsinghua University. Her research is funded by USGS, NSF, NIST, and US DOT.
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 Michael M. Little
Principle Data Scientist, NASA
Michael Little spent almost 50 years in the business of deploying advanced technology into operational environments. He worked in advanced technology development through the entire life cycle of deployment, operations and maintenance and system retirement/replacement. This has made him quite skeptical of over-hyped technological advances, while still enthusiastic about the potential for the value they have. Most recently, he has worked on projects to realize the value of Foundation Models, Large Language Models and Digital Twins to the Earth and Space Science communities.
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 Ali Mostafavi
Associate Professor, Texas A&M University
Ali Mostafavi is a Zachry Endowed Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Texas A&M University. He is the Director of UrbanResilience.AI Lab whose research focuses on creating advanced computational models and data science algorithms to advance smart and equitable resilience to crises. His research program integrates advanced machine learning and complex systems-based computational modelling into infrastructure resilience assessments in order to understand and predict complex interactions in the nexus of a human-disasters-built environment.
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 Monica Bozeman
Project Manager, NWS Office of Central Processing (CP)
Monica works at the NWS Office of Central Processing (CP) where she is the project manager for two major initiatives. As the AI Language Translation Lead for all of the National Weather Service, Monica works closely with AI Neural Machine Translation models to train them on NWS content to create effective weather messaging in multiple languages. Before joining CP in 2020, Monica was a Meteorologist/Programmer at the National Hurricane Center for 8 years where she was the satellite data focal point, heavily involved in creating AWIPS2 training, and maintained NHC's Automated Tropical Cyclone Forecast (ATCF) software and dataflow. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Meteorology with a minor in Environmental Science from NC State and a Master's in Atmospheric Science from Purdue University.
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 Haig Iskenderian
Technical Staff, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Dr. Haig Iskenderian is a Technical Staff member in the Air Traffic Control Systems Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. Haig leads MIT Lincoln Laboratory's convective weather research and development group, which focuses on developing weather forecasts and applications for the Federal Aviation Administration and NAV CANADA. Haig's research and development focuses on the use of artificial intelligence and image processing techniques to provide fully-automated weather products for aviation decision support.
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 Shanna McClain
Disaster Program Manager, NASA
Dr. Shanna N. McClain is the Disasters Program Manager for NASA’s Earth Science Applied Sciences Program. She and her team promote the use of Earth observations to support decisions made across the disaster cycle and at the intersection of human-environment-climate dimensions. McClain endeavors to define new and innovative opportunities for applying Earth science information through the development of partnerships and projects in fragile and crisis-affected communities in order to build a more risk-informed global society. McClain is the Global Partnerships Coordinator for NASA’s Earth Science Division, where she manages private sector engagement with partners such as Mercy Corps, Google, Conservation International, and Microsoft. She also serves as the Manager of Socioeconomic Assessments for Applied Sciences, where she manages the assessment of the value of Earth science information for the benefit of society and the economy. She currently serves as the Co-chair with the Australian Red Cross to the International Federation of Red Cross Red Crescent Society’s Anticipation Hub Working Group on “Earth Observation for Humanitarian Action.” She also serves on the Committee on Earth Observations (CEOS) and the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) Disasters Working Groups. McClain joined NASA after working with the Environmental Law Institute since 2009 to support policy development and programming on environmental and climate-related migration and displacement and programming on environmental conflict and peace. She previously held consultancies with the Joint UNEP/OCHA Environment Unit focused on the integration of environmental considerations in sudden-onset and protracted humanitarian crises, including developing guidelines for how to prepare for and respond to technological, industrial, and nuclear disasters. McClain holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Resources and Policy from Southern Illinois University. Her doctoral research examined the challenges of integrating three policy priorities – climate change adaptation, response to disasters, and resilience – into multilevel governance frameworks of international river basins. She was awarded a National Science Foundation IGERT Fellowship (2013-2016), which provided her the opportunity to work with the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River (ICPDR) in Vienna, Austria. She was also awarded the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Technology Policy Fellowship (2017-2019), which offered the opportunity to contribute evidence-based scientific knowledge and skills to the development of federal government policies and actions.
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Karl V. Steiner
Vice President, University of Maryland (UMBC)
Dr. Karl V. Steiner serves as the Vice President for Research & Creative Achievement and holds the academic rank of Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and an affiliate appointment as Professor in the Department of Computer Science & Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Dr. Steiner served as Chair of the Board of the International Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (INCS-CoE) in 2023, and currently serves as a member of the Executive Committee of the APLU-Council on Research. Dr. Steiner led UMBC’s effort to achieve Carnegie R1 status, as designated in 2021 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, recognizing UMBC as a Doctoral University with Very High Research Activity and placing the institution among the top 146 research universities in the Nation. Today, UMBC is one of three institutions in Maryland with Carnegie R1 status. Dr. Steiner has been focusing on developing a sustainable research culture at UMBC that has led to a growing national and international research reputation and associated fundingportfolio by building on a vibrant, interdisciplinary and collaborative community supporting research, scholarship, and creative achievement. Between 2021 and 2023, UMBC’s Research & Development Expenditures, as reported to the annual NSF-HERD survey, have increased by 70% to about $145M in 2023. UMBC’s key research themes are focused on Environmental Resilience and Space Sciences, especially Earth & Space Sciences, and Environmental Economics, Ecology & Remediation; on Data Sciences, AI & National Security, with special focus on Cybersecurity, Quantum and AI; Cognitive Computing, and IT for OT; on Health & Life Sciences, including Marine Biotechnology, Aquaculture, and Biosciences and Engineering; on Community, Equity, and Social Justice, including Health Equity and Policy Studies, as well as on Public Humanities and Creative Engagement. Dr. Steiner joined UMBC in September 2013, following a successful research and administrative career at the University of Delaware (UD), where he ascended to the position of Senior Associate Provost for Research Development, and held academic appointments as Professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and in the Biomedical Engineering Program. He served as former Director or Associate Director of the Delaware Health Sciences Alliance, the Delaware Biotechnology Institute, the Fraunhofer Center – Delaware, and the Center for Composite Materials, which is celebrating its 50th Anniversary this year. Dr. Steiner has advised or co-advised 23 Ph.D. and master’s students, and over 40 senior theses by undergraduate students. He has been instrumental in establishing successfulKarl V. Steiner Biography exchange programs with the German Carl Duisberg Society and other academic institutions that have enabled over numerous exchange students from across Europe to conduct a part of their research training at UD.
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 Jeff Liu
Technical Staff Member, MIT Lincoln Laboratory
Jeff Liu is a Technical Staff Member at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) Systems Group. He received his Ph.D. from MIT in Civil Engineering and Computation, and his undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan. His work focuses on applying AI/ML to address challenges in the HADR domain: particularly, leveraging computer vision and natural language processing techniques to process data at scale. He is the lead author of the Low Altitude Disaster Imagery (LADI) dataset, a computer vision dataset of post-disaster aerial imagery.
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