Dr. Maria Cristina Rulli is Full Professor of Hydrology and Water and Food Security  at the Politecnico di Milano and she is deputy president of the Italian Society of Water Engineering since 2021. Her research focus on the interaction between hydrological processes and humanity. Using the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus perspective, she has been investigating the impacts on food and water security induced by global changes. She has focused on the emergent phenomenon of Large Scale Land Acquisition (LSLA) and its implication on water, energy and food security, as well as on water governance, rural livelihoods, and the emergence of water conflicts. Her most recent research concentrates on the nexus between Health and Environment focusing on the potential nexus between the unsustainable food system and the insurgence of diseases (e.g., zoonotic, food related, uncommunicable).

Paolo D’Odorico is the Thomas J. Graff Professor of Natural Resources at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the role of hydrological processes in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and societies. Starting from analyses of mechanisms underlying the coupling between hydrological processes and the biota, his research has contributed to research in ecohydrology. Through field observations and modeling studies he is studying new hydrological, ecological, and aeolian mechanisms of desertification and factors contributing to the resilience of the desert margins. His work has highlighted the effect of environmental variability and positive feedback between vegetation and resource availability on the resilience of savannas, dry tropical forests, freshwater wetlands, mangrove swamps, and seagrass meadows. He investigates the global patterns of water use in agriculture, sustainable irrigation, virtual water trade, and transnational water appropriations and their impacts on water equity, food security, and the environment.

Davide Danilo Chiarelli obtained a MSc degree in Civil Engineering in 2013. At the moment he is a researcher at the DICA department of Politecnico di Milano, where he completed his PhD in July 2018 with a research based on Water and Food Security titled “The Water-Land-Food Nexus”. The main topics he is analyzing include the following: sustainability in the use of natural resources (i.e. water and fertile soil); hydrological effects of land use changes and deforestation, and its related consequences as land erosion and mass movements; crop water demand under present conditions and under climate change scenarios. He strongly believes in the importance of preserving our planet and its (its, not ours!) limited resources and how to achieve this goal it is necessary to start from a good knowledge of the problem and to educate future generations.

Barbara Redlingshöfer is a social ecologist in the Sadapt research unit at INRAE. She has a background in nutrition and home economics (Dipl. Oec. Troph., Justus-Liebig-University Giessen) and a PhD in cultural studies (Dr. phil., Humboldt University Berlin). Her research, which is interdisciplinary in nature, focuses on the socially organised production, distribution, use and final disposal to the environment of food and food-related materials, the so-called social food metabolism. Accounting and analysis of different aspects of social (non-)use of food in different regional (e.g. national, urban) and sectoral settings (e.g. agricultural production, social catering) are among her main research areas, operationalised by quantitative and qualitative methods (material flow analysis, surveys, observations, etc.). Co-author of a UNEP report on consumer food waste, she is also an expert on French food waste policy.

Gilles Billen got his PhD at the Free University of Brussels in 1976, where he later headed the Group of Aquatic Environmental Microbiology for 15 years. He was mostly active in studying microbial processes in estuarine and marine areas, in connection with the cycles of carbon and nutrients. In 1997, he moved to Paris, and joined the CNRS, for taking, until 2007, the direction of the National Research Program on the Seine river (PIREN-Seine). He played a leading role in the development of biogeochemical modelling tools, aimed at testing scenarios for water resources management. He also participated in various international forums, such as the SCOPE-UNESCO Global NEWS program and the NinE (Nitrogen in Europe) ESF Network, and participated to the editorial team of the European Nitrogen Assessment. He is now conducting interdisciplinary research on agro-food systems, developing, among other things, future scenarios for feeding France, Europe and the World with agro-ecological agriculture using no synthetic fertilizers and pesticides.

Eve Fouilleux is a Senior Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Laboratoire Interdisciplinaire Sciences Innovations Sociétés (LISIS), University of Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, and an Associated researcher at the Center for International Research for Agriculture for Development (Cirad), UMR MoISA, Montpellier Interdisciplinary research Center on Sustainable Afrifood systems. She is a political scientist working on global and multilevel policies and politics in the field of food, agriculture and natural resources. She works on public policies and policy-making, through a political sociology perspective, with a special focus on the role of ideas in policy changes in a multilevel governance context. One of her main research question regards how globalisation reshapes the conditions and dynamics of public policy debates. She has published extensively on the European common agricultural policy, on food security policies in Africa, on organic agriculture policies and regulations in France and the EU, on global policies (food security, biodiversity, sustainability voluntary standards, bioeconomy). For some years, her empirical research is mainly focused on organic farming and agroecology policies. She is scientific co-coordinator of a research action project on institutional innovations for organic agriculture in Tanzania, Uganda and Morocco.