Building Individual, Societal and Digital Resilience

Lazaros Gallos is an Associate Director at DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science at Rutgers University. At DIMACS, he is the current director of the long-running summer REU program - Research Experiences for Undergraduates - on Computer Science and Mathematics. He received his PhD at the University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in Computational Physics. His research interests cover a broad range of problems in complex systems and interdisciplinary applications. His main contributions are on complex network dynamics and information spreading with emphasis on behavior in social networks. He has established many inter-disciplinary collaborations with colleagues from mathematical biology, sociology, neuroscience, etc. He is member of the editorial board of the Nature Scientific Reports, PLOS One, and Entropy journals, and he has been an Editor for the highly selective journal Physical Review X. He is the recipient of the lifetime award for Outstanding Referee from the American Physical Society, and has been recognized four times as a European Physical Society Distinguished Referee.

Johanna Lovecchio is the Director of Program Design for Climate Action at the Climate School at Columbia University. She specializes in climate adaptation planning, policy, and project design that is forward-looking and conscious of community-based and ecosystem resilience and climate justice. As a part of her role, she delivers strategic support, technical design and climate systems research, and local workshops to advance climate action and resilience project design and implementation in partnership with local governments  and civil society around the world. Prior to joining Columbia Climate School, Johanna worked as the Associate Director of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes in GSAPP, where she ran the Resilience Accelerator program. Prior joining Columbia, she was Senior Analyst and Program Manager at HR&A Advisors, where she scaled resilience capacity-building models, including the National Disaster Resilience Competition and Global Resilience Academy programs, developed city- and district-wide climate adaptation plans, such as the Lower Manhattan Climate Resilience Study, and supported the design and evaluation of transformational urban resilience infrastructure investments. As City Planner at the New York City Department of City Planning, she researched planning opportunities in post-industrial, waterfront communities impacted by Hurricane Sandy. Johanna holds a Masters of Urban Planning from the Robert F. Wagner School of Public Service and dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Environmental Studies and Metropolitan Studies from the New York University College of Arts and Sciences. She is a frequent guest speaker and her favorite part of her job is learning from and with her students as Adjunct Faculty at the Climate School. She spends every moment she possibly can by, on, or in the ocean.

Christoph Meinel is Managing and Scientific Director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Engineering (HPI) as well as the Founding Dean of the Digital Engineering Faculty at the University of Potsdam. He is the chair of Internet Technologies and Systems and teaches courses on IT Systems Engineering on HPI’s MOOC platform openHPI, and at the HPI School of Design Thinking. His research currently focuses on security engineering, knowledge engineering, and Web 3.0–Semantic, Social, Service Web. Prof. Meinel is author or co-author of more than 25 books, anthologies, as well as numerous conference proceedings. He has had more than 550 (peer-reviewed) papers published in sci-entific journals and at international conferences and holds a number of international patents. He is a member of the National Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), honorary professor at the TU Beijing and Dalian University of Technology, visiting professor at Shanghai University, concurrent professor at the University of Nanjing, and member of numerous scien-tific committees and supervisory boards.

Rebecca Wright is the Druckenmiller professor of Computer Science and director of the Vagelos Computational Science Center at Barnard. Her research is primarily in the area of information security, including cryptography, privacy, foundations of computer security, and fault-tolerant distributed computing. Dr. Wright serves as an editor of the International Journal of Information and Computer Security and of the Transactions on Data Privacy, and is a member of the board of the Computer Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W). She received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Yale University, a B.A. from Columbia University, and an honorary M.E. from Stevens Institute of Technology. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Distinguished Member of the ACM.

Jan Lüdert is Head of Programs at the German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH) New York. Jan earned a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of British Columbia (UBC). He holds Harvard Kennedy’s School Public Leadership Credential; a First-Class Honors MA in International Relations from the Australian National University; and a BA in Public Policy from Hamburg University for Economics and Politics. He previously served as Associate Professor at City University of Seattle where he was the inaugural Director of Curriculum and Instruction. He held positions as Visiting Research Scholar at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies at City University of New York's Graduate Center as well as Research Associate with the DFG 'Dynamics of Security' project at Philipps Marburg University. He is an alumnus of Seattle's World Affairs Council Fellows and UBC Liu Institute for Global Issues Scholar programs.