Dr. Lilian Alessa, University of Idaho President’s Professor of Resilient Landscapes in the Landscape Architecture program, is also Co-Director of the University of Idaho Center for Resilient Communities. She conducts extensive research on human adaptation to environmental change through resilient design at landscape scales. Much of her work is funded by the National Science Foundation, including projects awarded the Arctic Observing Network, Intersections of Food, Energy and Water Systems (INFEWS) and the Dynamics of Coupled Natural Human Systems programs. Canadian-born and raised, Alessa received her degrees from the University of British Columbia. She also uses her expertise in social-ecological and technological systems science to develop ways to improve domestic resource security for community well-being, particularly through the incorporation of place-based knowledge. Her work through the Department of Homeland Security’s Center of Excellence, the Arctic Domain Awareness Center, involves developing social-technological methods to monitor and respond to critical environmental changes. Lil is a member of the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education and is on the Science, Technology and Education Advisory Committee for the National Ecological Observing Network (NEON). Professor Alessa also teaches a university landscape architecture capstone course: Resilient Landscapes with Professor Andrew Kliskey. Professor Alessa’s collaborative grant activity with Professor Andrew Kliskey, since coming to the university in 2013, exceeds 7 million USD to date. She has authored over a 100 publications and reports and has led the development of 2 federal climate resilience toolbox assessments, the Arctic Water Resources Vulnerability Index (AWRVI) and the Arctic Adaptation Exchange Portal (AAEP).

My research uses modeling to understand complex coupled human and natural systems, and can be generally described as computational social science. I am especially interested in modeling water management systems, in both archaeological and contemporary contexts. I have previously developed a framework for modeling general archaeological complex systems, and applied this to the specific case of the Hohokam in southern Arizona. I am currently engaged in research in data mining to understand contemporary water management strategies in the U.S. southwest and in several locations in Alaska. I am also a developer for the Repast HPC toolkit, an agent-based modeling toolkit specifically for high-performance computing platforms, and maintain an interest in the philosophy of science underlying our use of models as a means to approach complex systems. I am currently serving as Communications Officer for the Computational Social Science Society of the Americas.

I am Professor in Computational Resilience Economics at the University of Twente (the Netherlands), which I joined in 2010. In September 2017 I also joined University of Technology Sydney (Australia) as Professor of Computational Economic Modeling working with spatial simulation models to study socioeconomic impacts of disasters and emergence of resilience across scales. I was honored to be elected as a Member of the De Jonge Akademie of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (DJA/ KNAW in 2016) and of Social Sciences Council (SWR/KNAW in 2017). From 2009 to 2015 I have been working part-time as an economist at Deltares – the leading Dutch knowledge institute in the field of water management – specializing in economics of climate change, with focus on floods and droughts management.

About me
Name: Dr. Julia Kasmire
Position: Post-doctoral Research Fellow
Where: UK Data Services and Cathie Marsh Institute at the University of Manchester.
Short Bio
2004 - BA in Linguistics from the University of California in Santa Cruz, including college honours, departmental honours and one year of study at the University of Barcelona.
2008 - MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on the effects of various common simulated population features used when modelling language learning agents.
2015 - PhD from Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at the Delft University of Technology under the supervision of Prof. dr. ig. Margot Wijnen, Prof. dr. ig. Gerard P.J. Dijkema, and Dr. ig. Igor Nikolic. My PhD thesis and propositions can be found online, as are my publications and PhD research projects (most of which addressed how to study transitions to sustainability in the Dutch horticultural sector from a computational social science and complex adaptive systems perspective).
Additional Resources
Many of the NetLogo models I that built or used can be found here on my CoMSES/OpenABM pages.
My ResearchGate profile and my Academia.org profile provide additional context and outputs of my work, including some data sets, analytical resources and research skills endorsements.
My LinkedIn profile contains additional insights into my education and experience as well as skills and knowledge endorsements.
I try to use Twitter to share what is happening with my research and to keep abreast of interesting discussions on complexity, chaos, artificial intelligence, evolution and some other research topics of interest.
You can find my SCOPUS profile and my ORCID profile as well.