Aniruddha Belsare is a disease ecologist with a background in veterinary medicine, interspecific transmission, pathogen modeling and conservation research. Aniruddha received his Ph.D. in Wildlife Science (Focus: Disease Ecology) from the University of Missouri in 2013 and subsequently completed a postdoctoral fellowship there (University of Missouri, May 2014 – June 2017). He then was a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Modeling Complex Interactions at the University of Idaho (June 2017 - March 2019) and later a Research Associate with the Boone and Crockett Quantitative Wildlife Center, Michigan State University (March 2019 - Jan 2021). He was a Research Scientist in the Civitello Disease Ecology Lab at Emory University from Jan 2021 to Jan 2023. Currently, Aniruddha is an Assistant Professor of Disease Ecology at the College of Forestry, Wildlife & Environment / College of Veterinary Medicine at Auburn University.

Bashar Ourabi is a principle consultant at arabianconsult of Syria where he has been chairman since 2003. He holds Bsc. Eng., A Grad. Certificate in Project engineering from the University of Central Florida; and a MS. in Public Administration from the Doha Graduate Institute in Qatar.

Bashar completed his graduate studies at Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and his undergraduate studies at the Unversity of Central Florida. His research interests lie in the area of systems modelling, ranging from theory to design to implementation. He has collaborated actively with researchers in several other disciplines of computer science, system design, and bigData Artificial Intellegence, particularly BigData Expert System and Automated decision Making.

He has served on many international posts overlooking public infrastructure design and operations, varying from public transport, urban design and operations management. These posts spanned over the the US and the Middle East including Florida, UAE and Qatar.

Bashar has served on many conferences and workshop program committees and has succesfully delivered many corporate training programs..

As a data scientist, I employ a variety of ecoinformatic tools to understand and improve the sustainability of complex social-ecological systems.  I also apply Science and Technology Studies lenses to my modeling processes in order to see potential ways to make social-ecological system management more just.  I prefer to work collaboratively with communities on modeling: teaching mapping and modeling skills, collaboratively building data representations and models, and analyzing and synthesizing community-held data as appropriate. At the same time, I look for ways to create space for qualitative and other forms of knowledge to reside alongside quantitative analysis, using mixed and integrative methods.

Recent projects include: 1) Studying Californian forest dynamics using Bayesian statistical models and object-based image analysis (datasets included forest inventories and historical aerial photographs); 2) Indigenous mapping and community-based modeling of agro-pastoral systems in rural Zimbabwe (methods included GPS/GIS, agent-based modeling and social network analysis); 3) Supporting Tribal science and environmental management on the Klamath River in California using historical aerial image analysis of land use/land cover change and social networks analysis of water quality management processes; 4) Bayesian statistical modeling of community-collected data on human uses of Marine Protected Areas in California.

I’ve been building cyberinfrastructure and research software for computational social science and the study of complex adaptive systems at Arizona State University since 2006. Past and current projects include the Digital Archaeological Record, the Virtual Commons, the Social Ecological Systems Library, Synthesizing Knowledge of Past Environments (SKOPE), the Port of Mars, and CoMSES Net, where I serve as co-director and technical lead.

I also work to improve the state of open, transparent, reusable, and reproducible computational science as a Carpentries instructor and maintainer for the Plotting and Programming in Python and Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing lessons, currently co-chair the Consortium of Scientific Software Registries and Repositories and Open Modeling Foundation Cyberinfrastructure Working Group, and serve on the DataCite Services and Technology Steering Group and CSDMS’s Basic Model Interface open source governance council.