New Wars and Old Plagues

Kirsten de Beurs is a Professor and Chair in the Laboratory of Geo-information Science and Remote Sensing at Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands. She has a background in studying land cover and land use change in Russia and Central Asia. Her research focuses on the analysis of satellite timeseries to detect, assess and attribute ongoing changes of the terrestrial land surface. She combines field data, non-remotely sensed geospatial data (e.g., census data, population data), and expert opinions to arrive at a plausible and parsimonious explanation for the processes that could produce observed land use patterns..

Brad Brayfield is a PhD candidate in the Health and Human Biology Program in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, USA. He has an MS in Microbiology from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he studied the relationship between viral transmission and socio-demographic factors. His research interests encompass the environmental impacts of humans and their consequences on disease emergence. His dissertation will explore human migration during conflict and its influence on disease patterns in the Caucasus.

Ani Melkonyan-Gottschalk is Executive Director of the Centre for Logistics and Traffic at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Melkonyan-Gottschalk has been active in research and teaching activities in fundamental areas of Sustainable Economies and the transformation frameworks towards sustainable and smart governance since more than fifteen years. She has a specific expertise in sustainable and smart (urban) regions, sustainable supply chain management, food systems and resource nexus, holistic (urban) mobility and logistics systems, digital and innovative business ecosystems and sustainable (inclusive) governance models to function efficiently within the future dynamic environments both in the Global North and Global South.