Dr. Timothy Nyerges is a Professor Emeritus of Geography at the Department of Geography, University of Washington. Dr. Nyerges was the founding Director of the GIS for Sustainability Management Program (2010-2018) in the Geography Program, and retired from teaching in 2020. He earned his Ph.D. degree in geography from Ohio State University in 1980 and worked in the geographic information systems industry as a software architect for 5 years before joining the faculty at the University of Washington in 1985. His research and teaching specialties include geographic information systems and science, spatial decision support systems and group decision making, geodesign, water, land use/cover, transportation, coastal sustainability management, sustainability modeling using GIS, and development of sustainability information science with particular emphasis on space-time research.

Dr. John A. Gallo is a geographer and landscape ecologist at the Conservation Biology Institute, Corvallis, OR, USA, who works together with conservation practitioners on applied conservation projects. He also explores scientific frontiers with the purpose of advancing innovative strategies and best practices to attain multiple benefits. He employs a variety of areas of expertise in an interdisciplinary approach, including (1) design and application of software for conservation planning, landscape assessment, and habitat connectivity modeling, (2) promoting advances in spatial decision support systems, (3) wildfire mitigation and adaptation analyses and planning, (4) climate change adaptation planning, (5) applying citizen and community science to engage the public and fill data gaps, (6) bringing knowledge graphs and machine learning to conservation applications and (7) engaging partners, stakeholders, and decision-makers in all of the above.

Dr. Keith M. Reynolds was a research forester with the Pacific Northwest Research Station (US Forest Service) since 1987, and worked at the Corvallis Forestry Sciences Lab in Corvallis, Oregon, USA until his retirement on 30 December 2023. Although Dr. Reynolds' advanced degrees are in quantitative plant epidemiology, his primary areas of expertise are in statistics, biomathematics, and knowledge-based systems theory and application. He has been the team leader of the Ecosystem Management Decision Support (EMDS) project at the PNW Station since 1993, designing and implementing spatially enabled decision support technologies for environmental analysis and planning. Since 1997, Dr. Reynolds has worked on a wide variety of specific decision support applications.

Dr. Steven D. Prager is a geographer by training. He has joined the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation after ten years as a professor of geography at the University of Wyoming and eight years as a research scientist with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) based in Cali, Colombia. At the University of Wyoming, he taught and led research in a range of themes mostly centered around spatial modeling and sustainable development. He later brought this experience to CIAT and the world of agricultural research for development. At CIAT, he developed and co-led several different research programs, including the “Global Futures and Strategic Foresight” activity with the Policies, Institutions, and Markets research program of the CGIAR. He also played a critical role in building out a LAC-wide and then global scale program in climate services, several efforts related to Sustainable Food Systems, and the SERVIR Amazonia program designed to bring best in class remote sensing and geospatial analysis to local communities throughout the Amazon Basin. In his new role with BMGF, he is working with the Foundation’s Climate Adaptative Systems team to bring innovations in climate adaptation to serve small-scale producers throughout Africa and South Asia.

Dr. Philip Murphy is the co-founder and CEO of Infoharvest Inc.,  Seattle, WA, a decision support company. He carries out research in Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Neural Network, Knowledge Graphs, Ecosystem simulations, and Information Systems (Business Informatics). His current software projects include a light weight geodesign planning tool for portfolios of projects distributed in space and time, and an open Knowledge Network for regional decision support for socio-ecosystem recovery. He is working with tribes in the Pacific Northwest developing tools simulation tools to evaluate impacts of portfolios of actions in the Puget Sound under climate change scenarios.

Wenwen Li received her B.S. degree in Computer Science at Beijing Normal University in 2004, her M.S. degree in Signal and Information Processing at the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2007, and her Ph.D. in Earth System and Geoinformation Science at George Mason University in 2010. Her research interest is geographic information science with a focus on cyberinfrastructure, big data, semantic interoperability, spatial information retrieval, and distributed geospatial information processing. She heads the CyberInfrastructure and Computation Intelligence Lab in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning. Her research aims to develop integrated, sustainable and smart cyber-infrastructure to revolutionize knowledge discovery in data and computational-intensive geographical sciences. She was the chair of the Association of American Geographers’ cyber-infrastructure specialty group from 2013–2014; a member of the Spatial Decision Support Consortium at the University of the Redlands (2015–); and a graduate faculty member in the Computer Science program at ASU (2016–). She is the 2015 NSF CAREER award winner—NSF’s most prestigious award for junior faculties. In 2021, she received the NSF Mid-Career Advancement Award. In 2023, she was elected Fellow of the American Association of Geographers and Fellow of the University Consortium of Geographic Information Science.