Core Team
Katja holds a PhD in Geographic Information Science, with a focus on cognitive and linguistic aspects of space. Her research background includes working with social media and other types of Volunteered Geographic Information to better understand human-environment interaction in various contexts.
Her current research interests focus on environmental citizen science, and its impact on environmental attitudes and values, but also on place-bonding, community-building and wellbeing. She is particularly interested in making citizen science more inclusive by involving participants of different age groups, as well as cultural and linguistic backgrounds. In another line of research, Katja builds upon her previous work on cognitive semantics and explores ways to co-create shared mental models of phenomena such as energy transition, to make citizen science projects in such complex areas more effective and sustainable.
As the current coordinator of the GEO CS Hub project, she is interested in exploring and applying best practices related to the institutionalization of citizen science, and is a member of the ECSA working group “Citizen science at Universities”. She is also keen on developing educational and training materials related to citizen science and environment, and is a member of the Planetary Health Alliance Education Group.
My main research interest is where people, geography, and computer science meet: new modes of production and usage of geographic information (crowdsourced and volunteered), related technological and methodological developments (environmental IoT sensors, machine learning), and the impacts on scientific practice (ethics of consent and preservation of privacy, open and reproducible research). Citizen Science is where all these elements come together.
Karin Pfeffer is a geographer and Professor in Infrastructuring Urban Futures at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente. She studied Geography and Mathematics at the University of Vienna, Austria and obtained a PhD degree in Physical Geography from the University in Utrecht, the Netherlands in 2003. She joined the ITC Faculty in 2017. Before that, she worked at the University of Amsterdam, in the Department of Human Geography, Planning and International Development Studies.
Her research focuses on the use of geographic information technologies for investigating critical urban issues such as deprived settlements, access to infrastructure, and sustainable urban development, and how research can engage with the development of new urban planning practices and tools. She supervises multiple projects in which stakeholder engagement plays a key role in the investigation, for example, to understand how residents practice access to water infrastructure in Lima, Peru; experience the public space in Mexican cities; or how urban professionals experience digital geo-tools to map environmental noise and design potential interventions in the urban space of the city of Bochum. In the most recent project, she explores how people with different abilities can be involved as co-researchers in the design of a maptable application to support the planning of accessible public spaces in a German and a Dutch city.
Wieteke (Louise) Willemen holds the chair of Spatial Dynamics of Ecosystem Services. Her research primarily focuses on making quantitative spatial information on ecosystem services -nature's benefits to people- available to support multi-objective decision-making. Her current research includes ecosystem service mapping and monitoring, impact assessments of integrated restoration, incorporating citizen science in impact research, and prioritization of investments in land degradation actions. She contributes to bridging science-policy through her roles as Coordinating Lead Author of the Land Degradation and Restoration assessment of IPBES, Board of the Executive Committee of Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP, an international network aiming at linking ecosystem service science with practice to enhance communication, coordination and cooperation), active science communication and editorial work for several journals.
Wieteke Willemen has a PhD in spatial modelling from Wageningen University, the Netherlands, and an MSc degree from the same university in Tropical Land Use studies (specialization in plant production systems and GIS). She has worked at several science and policy organizations including Bioversity International in Colombia, the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre in Italy, and Cornell University in the USA, and has collaborated with many on-the-ground partners.
Raul Zurita-Milla is Professor of Spatio-Temporal Analytics and head of the Geo-Information Processing Department at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC). Raul has an MSc degree in Agricultural Engineering from the University of Cordoba (Spain) and another one in Geo-Information Science from Wageningen University. He joined the Faculty ITC in 2008, right after obtaining his PhD degree in Geo-Information Science from Wageningen University.
His main research interest is in the design and use of geocomputational methods to solve complex spatio-temporal problems. Raul’s work typically involves the integration of various raster, vector, and crowdsourced datasets, and the use of machine learning and data mining methods, often coupled with cloud and distributed computing approaches. From an application perspective, he is interested in studying seasonal processes (e.g., agriculture, phenology, and public health). Raul is a firm believer in Open and Team Science and, in this context, he founded the Open Science Community Twente, part of a network of international communities that promote the benefits of open scholarship.
Affiliated Members
Carmen Anthonj is an Assistant Professor on Water security, WASH and Global Health at ITC. Her research focuses on water and health issues in space and time, including water-related health impact assessments, prevention of water-related infectious diseases, the role of drinking water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure and behaviours for human health promotion and the impact that water has on the accessibility of health services, e.g. in times of flooding. She considers water and health challenges from a broader nexus perspective, including links with climate, education, culture, inequality, economy, energy, etc., using local knowledge, perspectives and perceptions as the starting point. Her work is science-policy oriented, looking at how such local knowledge can be used to inform public health planning and decision-making. She conducts empirical research at different levels and with mixed methods and has been collaborating with international organizations (UNICEF, WHO, World Bank), governments, local organizations and research institutes globally.
Carmen Anthonj has a PhD in medical geography from the GeoHealth Centre at the University Clinics of Bonn, Germany, and a Diplom in geography from the University of Bonn (focus on medical geography, transboundary water management and medical geography). She conducted postdoctoral studies at the Water Institute, Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering at the Gillings School of Global Public Health at the University of North Carolina, US before joining ITC in 2020.
Serkan Girgin has established and is currently leading the activities of the Center of Expertise in Big Geodata (CRIB) at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente. CRIB is an overarching facility performing research and collecting, developing, and sharing operational know-how on geospatial big data technologies. Serkan performs research on the performance and effective use of big data, cloud computing, and research data management tools and technologies, and provides advice and consultancy on their adoption for education, research, and capacity development activities. These tools and technologies are very relevant for Geo Citizen Science activities; hence, how to enable better use of them in Citizen Science, especially by pre-University students and teachers is a topic Serkan is currently working on.
He is also an expert on the design and development of geocomputing platforms, GIS and RS applications, environmental information systems, and large-scale web applications. He has designed and developed ITC's Geospatial Computing Platform, and European Commission's Natech Database (eNatech) and Rapid Natech Risk Assessment and Mapping System (RAPID-N). He has MSc and PhD degrees in Environmental Engineering, a second M.Sc. degree in Geodetic and Geographic Information Technologies, and more than two decades of research and consultancy experience in academic, private, and scientific organizations since 1996, including European Commission Joint Research Centre and Space Technological Research Institute of TUBITAK. He is an eScience Center Fellow and SURF Research Support Champion in the Netherlands in 2022.
Rob Lemmens holds a PhD in Geoinformatics from Delft University of Technology. He has expertise in volunteered geo-information, citizen science, geo web technology, Spatial Data Infrastructures, interoperability standards, and semantic modelling.
In his strive for open science and open geo-information, Rob has organised several hackathons and mapathons, together with the Red Cross and set up a concept map for the NWO-funded Smart Emission 2 project. In two European COST projects, he co-created a VGI Knowledge Portal and co-edited a book on citizen science. He worked as a visiting scientist at Google in Mountain View, at the Department of Geography, Hunter College, City University of New York and the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., focusing on semantic models for collaborative mapping.
He is the lead architect of ontology development for the Living Textbook application, which is currently deployed as an editing tool for the EO/GI Body of Knowledge in the http://www.eo4geo.eu/ project. He leads another project on modularising education into fine-granular shareable content.
At the Department of Geoinformation Processing, University of Twente, Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) Rob supervises MSc and PhD student projects in the domain of citizen science, conceptual modelling and linked data. Rob is a council member of the Association of Geographic Information Laboratories in Europe (AGILE).
Nina Schwarz is an Assistant Professor on Human-environment interactions in cities at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and Geo-Information Management. Her expertise is in interdisciplinary projects related to urban development including land use change, urban ecosystem services and the urban climate. For her work, she often uses methods of modelling and simulation, specifically agent-based modelling.
Nina Schwarz holds a PhD social science modelling from the University of Kassel, Germany, and a diploma in environmental sciences from the University of Lueneburg, Germany She worked at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig, Germany, before joining UT in 2017.