Joël Foramitti 

Stay at UFZ: From 04.08.2025 to 04.12.2025

Recent Reserach Topics:

• Agent-Based Modeling
• Climate Policy
• Human Needs
• Provisioning Systems
• Economic Democracy

Current Position and Affiliation: Freelance / Self-employed

Previous Positions :

• Doctoral Researcher, Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• Doctoral Researcher, Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona

Lastest Publications:

• Foramitti, J., Savin, I., & van den Bergh, J. C. (2024). How carbon pricing affects multiple human needs: An agent-based model analysis. Ecological Economics, 217, 108070.
• Foramitti, J. (2023). A framework for agent-based models of human needs and ecological limits. Ecological Economics, 204(A), 107651.

Gabriela Chiquito Gesualdo

Stay at UFZ: From 02.09.2025 to 27.11.2025

Recent Reserach Topics:

• Flash drought: Assessing flash drought events, examining how different water-use sectors experience and respond to them, and integrating findings to support adaptive water management
• Public perception impact of flash drought: Investigating the impacts of flash droughts using media sources, with the goal of advancing event validation and developing an impact database

Current Position and Affiliation: Postdoctoral research associate Department of Geosciences – The Pennsylvania State University (USA)

Previous Positions : 

• PhD student in Hydraulic Engineering and Sanitation, São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo (2019-2023)
• Research Assistant, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Germany (2021)
• Teaching assistant (Applied Hydrology; Wastewater collection systems), São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo (2022-2023)
• Teaching assistant (General Hydrology), São Carlos School of Engineering, University of São Paulo (2020)

Latest Publications:

• Gesualdo, G. C., Benso, M. R., Mendiondo, E. M., Brunner, M. I. 2024. Spatially Com-pounding Drought Events in Brazil. Water Resources Research. https://doi.org/10.1029/2023WR036629
• Gesualdo, G. C., Benso, M. R., Saas, K., Mendiondo, E. M. 2024. Index-based insurance tomitigate current and future extreme events financial losses for water utilities. Int. Jour.of Disaster Risk Reduction. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2023.104218
• Gesualdo, G.C.,Sone, J.S., Galvão, C.O., Martins, E.S., Montenegro, S.M.G.L., Tomasella,J., Mendiondo, E.M. 2021. Unveiling water security in Brazil: current challenges andfuture perspectives. Hydrol. Sci. J. https://doi.org/10.1080/02626667.2021.1899182

Melissa Haeffner

Stay at UFZ: From 12.08.2025 to 09.09.2025

Recent Reserach Topics:

• water justice
• coupled human-water feedbacks
• hydrosocial systems
• sociohydrology
  

Current Position and Affiliation: Portland State University, Associate Professor Environmental Science and Management

• Postdoctoral researcher, Utah State University, Logan, Utah, USA, National Science Foundation iUTAH (2015–2017)
• PhD, Ecology with a specialization in Human-Environment Interactions, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA (2010–2015)
• Master of Science, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (2008–2010)

• Haeffner, M, S Finley,* C de Rivera, E Grosholz, J Gonzalez, V Robertson-Rojas, S Schooler, P Engel-Meyer, S Comet. (2025) Using Q-methodology to explore estuarine restoration narratives: Natural resource managers, coastal managers, and community members Biological Conservation, 309, 111277, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2025.111277.
• Haeffner, M., A Cantor, J Cowal, A Bryant,* D Mani Yaw,* K J Palacios,* D Serna,* B Sprauer,* A Tran-Gruver* (2025) Plural water narratives: An environmental justice lens on a systematic review of Q-methodology water research. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews (WIREs) Water; 12:e70024 1 of 15 https://doi.org/10.1002/wat2.70024
• Haeffner, M, J Cowal, B Walker, C McClellan.* (2024) When overextended surface water allocation turns to groundwater: A Q-methodology of well users’ in Oregon’s high desert. Frontiers in Environmental Science, section Drylands, 12, 1398439.

Juan Sebastian Hernandez-Suarez

Stay at UFZ: From 08.09.2025 to 03.10.2025

Research focus:

• hydrological modeling and water management
• developing integrated models for ecohydrological applications and water allocation in complex and highly-managed watersheds
• numerical modeling, Machine Learning, GIS, remote sensing, and multi-objective optimization to explore human-natural system dynamics, with a focus on water-food-energy security, ecosystem health, and environmental justice

• Postdoctoral Scholar, Earth System Science, Stanford University (2022-2023)
• Researcher, Biosystems Engineering, Michigan State University (2021)
• Graduate Student, Biosystems Engineering, Michigan State University (2016-2021)

• Womble, P., Gorelick, S.M., Thompson, B.H., Hernandez-Suarez, J.S., 2025. A strategic environmental water rights market for Colorado River reallocation. Nature Sustainability
• Paez-Trujillo, A.M., Hernandez-Suarez, J.S., Alfonso, L., Hernandez, B., Maskey, S. and Solomatine, D., 2024. An optimisation approach for planning preventive drought management measures. Science of The Total Environment, 948, p.174842.
• Deb, K., …, Hernandez-Suarez, J.S., …, Nejadhashemi, A.P., 2023. Minimizing Expected Deviation in Upper-level Outcomes Due to Lower-level Decision-making in Hierarchical Multi-objective Problems. IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation.

Sara Lindersson

Stay at UFZ: From 15.09.2025 to 15.10.2025

Research focus:

• Disaster impact data
• Natural Hazards
• Social vulnerability
  

Current Position and Affiliation: Postdoctoral researcher with the Centre of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS) and the Swedish Centre for Impacts of Climate Extremes (climes), Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden (since 2023) and Postdoctoral researcher in project about Climate-Resilient Development, Department of Government, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden (since 2025)

• PhD position, Uppsala University, Sweden (2018-2023) 
• Technical consultant in geospatial analysis and hydraulic modelling, AFRY, Stockholm, Sweden (2015-2018)
  

• Xander, H. et al. (2025) ‘A review of open data for studying global groundwater in social-ecological systems’. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/adf127
  
• Risling, A., Lindersson, S. and Brandimarte, L. (2024) ‘A comparison of global flood models using Sentinel-1 and a change detection approach’, Natural Hazards. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-024-06629-7
• Lindersson, S. et al. (2023) ‘The wider the gap between rich and poor the higher the flood mortality’, Nature Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-023-01107-7

Stefano Terzi

Stay at UFZ: From 01.09.2025 to 30.11.2025

Recent Reserach Topics:

• Development of conceptual socio-hydrological models to identify relations and feedback loops between human activities and water resources
• Modelling the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems Nexus with a focus on the Adige River Basin (Italy)
• Assessing water scarcity and drought risks across multiple water users and sectors with a focus on mountain regions
• Collecting drought impact data through unconventional textual datasets (e.g., text-based newspaper articles)

Current Position and Affiliation: Coordinator of the „Water and Human Systems“ of the Center for Climate Change and Transformation at Eurac Research, Bolzano, Italy (since 2024)

Previous Positions :

• Post-doc researcher at Eurac Research (Center for Climate Change and Transformation), Bolzano, Italy (2019 - 2024)
• Consultant at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Eswatini, Zambia and Zimbabwe (2022 - 2024)
  

Latest Publications:

• Piemontese L., Terzi S., Di Baldassarre G., A. Menestrey Schwieger D., Castelli G. and Bresci E. Over-reliance on water infrastructure can hinder climate resilience in pastoral drylands. Nat. Clim. Chang. 14, 267–274 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01929-z
• Stephan R., Terzi S., Erfurt M., Cocuccioni S., Stahl K., and Zebisch M.: Assessing agriculture’s vulnerability to drought in European pre-Alpine regions , Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci., 23, 45–64, https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-23-45-2023, 2023.
• Terzi S., De Angeli S., Miozzo D., Massucchielli L.S., Szarzynski J., Carturan F., Boni, G., 2022. Learning from the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy to advance multi-hazard disaster risk management. Prog. Disaster Sci. 16, 100268. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pdisas.2022.100268