Sebastian Puculek (male), is certified (IPMA) project manager, with experience gained in complex international projects in the field of Research & Development. He has many years of experience working on European markets, in particular Polish, Spanish and Nordic countries. In his career he coordinated both Horizon 2020 and commercial projects. In the past, he was also associated with the largest European Knowledge and Innovation Node of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology – EIT Climate-KIC, where he played the role of Business Development Lead for Central and Eastern European countries. As part of his duties, he assisted Polish innovative companies in obtaining financing for the CleanTech projects.
Guillermo Palau Salvador is Full Professor at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. Professor Palau is an expert in applied creativity, innovation, and multidisciplinary team management. His focus lies in systemic innovation, aiding organisations and public institutions in addressing socio-technological transitions. His activities include creativity, design thinking, system analysis, working with future scenarios, and circular economy. In the FARMWISE project, he leads the team that works to provide a systematic approach to understand and address the needs, problems, and opportunities with local multi-stakeholder groups created in each Case Study region.
Wieslaw Fialkiewicz is an assistant professor at Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences (Poland) and the head of Hydrodynamics Modelling Section in the Institute of Environmental Engineering. He was graduated in civil engineering at Agricultural University of Wroclaw (Poland) and in regional hydrology at Wageningen Agricultural University (The Netherlands). During post-doctoral stay in France he specialised in modelling groundwater flow and transport of pollution from diffuse sources at local and regional scales. Whilst his first interest is that of hydrological processes, Wieslaw also has an interest in all interactions between agriculture and the environment including implications for climate change and farm based extension work. He has worked on several international projects related with water (e.g. FOOTPRINT, WATERAGRI, SYMBIOREM). His academic activities are devoted to giving lectures and practical classes in application of computer sciences in environmental engineering. In the FARMWISE project he is leading work package related to water in agriculture and natural areas and he is coordinating the research carried out in Polish case study site.
Deputy Director of the Institute of Soil Science, Plant Nutrition and Environmental Protection. Coordinator of Plant Production Technology Research Center at WUELS. specialist in soil protection and reclamation of degraded lands. Since 2011, I have been employed as an academic teacher and scientist at Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences. In my scientific work I mainly focus on the impact of anthropogenic pollution on the soil environment, sustainable methods of land reclamation with biochar and other bio-waste organic amendments. In Farmwise project I’m responsible for providing innovation number 7 – biochar for improvement of soil quality and water retention capacity. I’m also involved in Task 4.2
Stevo Lavrnić is Associate Professor of Agricultural Hydraulics and Watershed Protection at the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences (DISTAL), University of Bologna (Italy). An environmental engineer by training, he graduated from the University of Novi Sad (Serbia), holds a Master’s degree from IHE Delft Institute for Water Education (Netherlands), and a PhD from the University of Cadiz (Spain). Since joining the University of Bologna in 2017, his research has focused on agricultural water management, nature-based solutions, and the sustainable reuse of non-conventional water resources.
He has contributed to multiple national and European projects as Task and Work Package leader and is a member of the IWA Specialist Groups on Water Reuse and on Small Water and Wastewater Systems. He has more than 40 publications with over 1,000 citations.
In FARMWISE, he co-leads WP3 – “Innovative Solutions in Agriculture: Verification of Solution Scalability and Impacts” – alongside Attilio Toscano, contributing his expertise in constructed wetlands, water treatment, and agricultural water reuse to the consortium’s innovation testing activities.
Elisa Michelini is Associate Professor in Analytical Chemistry at the Department of Chemistry “Giacomo Ciamician”, University of Bologna (Italy). She has more than 20 years’ experience in the development of biosensors, mainly relying on bio-chemiluminescence and colorimetric detection, for monitoring water, environmental and clinical samples. In the last ten years her activity has also focused on smartphone biosensors, paper sensors and biosensors relying on 3D cell models. She coordinated a NATO-SPS project and has been deeply involved in projects funded by the European Commission and PRIMA – Partnership for Research and Innovation in the Mediterranean Area.
She is author of more than 100 articles in high-impact journals (h-index 38) and her work has been cited more than 4,600 times (Scopus). She has received awards including the Nanotech Applications Award (2009), Marlene DeLuca Prize (2012), Genelux Award (2014), and EPA Water Toxicity Sensor Challenge (2022).
Her activity in FARMWISE involves the development of biosensors for water contaminants and their application in selected case studies of the FARMWISE consortium.
Within FARMWISE, she leads Innovation 10 – “Low-cost green biosensors” – bringing her expertise in portable biosensor technologies to the project’s water quality monitoring objectives.
Attilio Toscano is Full Professor of Agricultural Hydraulics and Watershed Protection at the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences (DISTAL), University of Bologna (Italy). A hydraulic engineer with a PhD in Environmental Engineering, his research focuses on sustainable agricultural water management, precision irrigation, and nature-based solutions – particularly constructed wetlands for wastewater treatment and reuse in agriculture.
He has led or contributed to numerous national and European research projects as Work Package leader or coordinator, including WATERAGRI, FIT4REUSE, GREEN4WATER, SWAMP, WATER4CROPS, and CHEM-FREE, and serves as technical-scientific advisor to national agencies and ministries on wastewater infrastructure.
In FARMWISE, he leads WP3 – “Innovative Solutions in Agriculture: Verification of Solution Scalability and Impacts” – as lead beneficiary for the University of Bologna, bringing his expertise in nature-based water treatment and agricultural water management to the consortium’s innovation testing and verification activities.
Martine van der Ploeg is chair and professor of the Hydrology and Environmental Hydraulics group at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. . In her own research, Martine wants to understand how global warming and relatedly the intensification of the water cycle impacts the various processes in the soil, including the carbon and nutrient cycle. While soil water represents only 0.05% of the total amount of fresh water, all terrestrial life depends on it. A change in wetting and drying cycles can have lasting impact on the amount of water soil can store. To study these interactions Martine uses a combination of lab and field studies, remote sensing data and computational models, and she collaborates with various other fields, such as soil biology, biochemistry, and machine learning. In FARMWISE she is involved in risk management, mitigation and adaptation to extreme weather, and the integration of physics-based modelling and ML for better decision support.
Dr. Amir Naghibi (male) is an Assistant Professor in Water Resources Engineering (affiliated to Lund University since 2019) with research background in artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, decision support systems, geospatial modelling, remote sensing, hydrology, hydrogeology, environmental engineering, and land use and climate change impact modelling. Dr. Naghibi completed his PhD at Tarbiat Modares University, Iran, in 2019 on “Developing AI-based decision support system for recharging groundwater resources”. Dr. Naghibi is globally a leading specialist on developing AI-based decision support systems on water quality and quantity, agriculture, environment, and natural hazards in order to facilitate decision-making procedure with a transboundary, international, and systematic mindset at national, continental, and global scales. He has published more than 40 journal papers (H-index of 29; Citations 4,800). He is the developer and coordinator of the course Machine Learning for Water Engineers which is currently taught to Swedish universities and organizations. In FARMWISE, he leads WP5 “AI-based Visual Decision Support and Policy Modelling in European Landscapes for Agriculture and Water Management”.
Kawa Nazemi is Full Professor of Human-Computer Interaction and Visual Analytics at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, where he has directed Information Science programmes since 2017. He holds additional affiliations at Munster Technological University, TU Darmstadt, and the Hesse PhD Centre for Applied Computer Science. His research spans machine learning, data analytics, natural language processing, artificial intelligence, and visual analytics, with a strong focus on human-centred approaches.
Before his professorship, he spent nearly a decade at the Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research, leading the Semantics Visualization research group and developing SemaVis – a prize-winning, adaptive web-based visualisation technology applied across numerous projects and enterprises. He holds a PhD (Dr.-Ing.) in computer science from TU Darmstadt, published as “Adaptive Semantics Visualization”.
He is author of more than 90 publications, serves on multiple programme committees and editorial boards, and has received awards including the Academia Europaea Burgen Scholarship and recognition from the European Association for Artificial Intelligence.
In FARMWISE, he leads WP5 – “AI-based Visual Decision Support and Policy Modelling in European Landscapes for Agriculture and Water Management” – together with Amir, bringing his expertise in visual analytics and human-centred AI to the consortium’s decision support and policy modelling activities.
Senior Research and Innovation Advisor & Managing Director of SITES. Consultant on Financial Perspectives and the Competitiveness and Innovation Programmes. Expert in Smart Specialisation, Circular Economy, and International Cooperation. Specialist in innovation economics. MSc in Economics and Innovation; MSc in Digital Marketing.
Ronny Berndtsson is a professor in water resources engineering at Lund University, Sweden. Presently he is coordinating two major European Union projects: the Horizon 2023 FarmWise project (Future Agricultural Resource Management and Water Innovations for a Sustainable Europe) and the SmartWater4Future (Coupled Urban-Rural Water Infrastructure Management under Hydroclimatic Extremes with Decision Support System). He has published extensively on water resources and sustainable development including climate change and safe access to water (Google scholar H-index 64).
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under GA Nº 101135533
