Tatyana Bileva
Tanja Pipan
Maria Paniw
PhD in Biology from the University of Cádiz in 2016. Currently a researcher at the Spanish National Research Council.
Founding member of the European chapter of the Ecological Forecasting Initiative, aiming to advance the science and applications of forecasts.
Director of 3 long-term biodiversity monitoring initiatives (on plants in heathlands and soil invertebrates in the Kalahari Desert).
Research integrates long-term data on plants and animals with advanced statistical and mechanistic models to predict how populations in drylands respond to extremes and human pressures.
Author of 50 peer-reviewed papers.
Klaas Deneudt
Ana Lillebø
Ana Lillebø holds a PhD in Biology, specialisation in Ecology (2001) from University of Coimbra, Portugal and habilitation in Biology (2023) from University of Aveiro, Portugal. She is a well-established researcher in Coastal Ecosystems with focus on: Coastal Ecosystems Ecological Status & Management; Applied Ecology & Nature-based solutions; Environmental Chemistry & Anthropogenic impacts; EU Policies & Ecosystem Services, in a transdisciplinary context (ORCID: 0000-0002-5228-0329; Scopus h index=44). She was the Scientific Coordinator of CESAM – Centre for Environmental and marine Studies from May 2017 until May 2021. Currently, she is CESAM’s representative and Vice-Chair of AlterNet: A long-term biodiversity, ecosystems, and awareness research network. Since May 2022, she is the Vice-Rector to matters concerning the promotion of quality, communication, effectiveness and efficiency of the University and environmental sustainability.
Andreja Ramšak
Marine biologist specializing in the genetic diversity and connectivity of marine species, the development of molecular tools and the effects of pollution on marine organisms at the subcellular level.
Antonello Provenzale
Research Doctorate in Physics in 1987. Currently, research director at the Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources of CNR; director of the Institute from 2015 to 2024.
Member of the Scientific Council of the CIMA Research Foundation. National coordinator of the LifeWatch Italy JRU. Research activities on the analysis and modelling of climate change impacts on ecosystems and carbon and water cycles, geosphere-biosphere interactions, Critical Zone processes, mountain environments, planetary fluid dynamics.
Golden Badge Award of the European Geophysical Society in 1997. Invited scientist at the Ecole Normale Superieure and at the Université Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris, at the Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva (Israel) and at the University of Colorado in Boulder (USA).
Organizer of summer schools and scientific workshops. Tutor of more than 20 Doctorate Theses. Coordinator of the EU H2020 project “ECOPOTENTIAL” devoted to the use of Earth Observations to improve ecosystem benefits (2015-2019) and of several national projects. Participant and node coordinator in several EU projects. Co-lead of the Action Group “Biodiversity, ecosystems and geodiversity” of EuroGEO and of the GEO Mountains Initiative.
Author of more than 180 papers in international peer-reviewed journals (ISI), h index=51 (Scopus). Author of dissemination books and articles.
Dafinka Grozdanova
Dafinka Grozdanova is an alternate Member of the LifeWatch ERIC General Assembly, and is the National Coordinator and contact person for LifeWatch Bulgaria.
Born in Bulgaria, she graduated at the Agricultural University-Plovdiv, where she obtained a Master’s degree in Plant Health and attended several courses at the Diplomatic Institute Docendo discmus, at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Klingedal Institute for International Relations of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
Eva Chatzinicolaou
Zhiming Zhao
Technical manager of VLIC
He is the technical manager of VLIC and leads the development of innovative Virtual Research Environment (VRE) and Virtual Laboratory (VL) solutions to support advanced data- and computing- intensive research activities. He obtained his PhD in computer science from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) in 2004. He is an associate professor and Chair of the Multiscale Networked Systems (MNS) research group at the Informatics Institute at the University of Amsterdam.
His research interests include Cloud computing, data science, scientific workflow management, Digital Twins, and Blockchain. He coordinates the development of the ENVRI Knowledge Base and Notebook as a VRE (NaaVRE) framework. He is an IEEE senior member and serves as the managing editor of the Journal of Cloud Computing.
Main publications:
1. Li, N., Farshidi, S. & Zhao, Z. Search Multiple Types of Research Assets From Jupyter Notebook. Softw Pract Exp spe.3406 (2025) https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3406
2. Wang, Y., Tripathi, S., Farshidi, S., Zhao, Z.: D-VRE: From a Jupyter-enabled Private Research Environment to Decentralized Collaborative Research Ecosystem. Blockchain: Research and Applications. 100244 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bcra.2024.100244.
3. Zhao, Z., Koulouzis, S., Bianchi, R., Farshidi, S., Shi, Z., Xin, R., Wang, Y., Li, N., Shi, Y., Timmermans, J., Kissling, W.D.: Notebook-as-a-VRE (NaaVRE): From private notebooks to a collaborative cloud virtual research environment. Softw Pract Exp. spe.3098 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/spe.3098.