GLOBAL UNDERSTANDING

Past-President of the IGU and the IYGU’s official applicant to the United Nations; Professor Emeritus of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University and Executive Director Emeritus of the Association of American Geographers (AAG); he edited Global Change and Local Places: Estimating, Understanding, and Reducing Greenhouse Gases and the summary volume of the AAG’s 1995-2002 Global Change and Local Places research project

he is a Vice-President of the IGU, and as a leading environmental scientist in Asia he is involved in several Global Environmental Programs such as the Land Use/Land Cover Change Program

President of the IGU, author of many books in the field of political and social geography, former Chair of the IGU Commission on Political Geography (1996-2004) and guest Professor at several foreign universities

an internationally renowned archaeologist, Secretary General of the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (UISPP), and has published widely on prehistoric arts, the origins of agriculture, heritage management and landscape management

PhD in Stomatology, former research professor of Microbiology and Rector of the Federal Universities of Pelotas and of Vale do Rio Doce University (Brazil) she is currently working as an expert in Integrated Management of Territory and as Scientific Coordinator of – Instituto BioAtlantica – IBIO, Brazil; she is a member of several International Scientific Committees in the field. 

Social geographer at the Friedrich-Schiller-University of Jena, member of the European Research Council (ERC) for Environment and Society, has published widely on the interrelation of Society, Action and Space and the transformation of spatial relations through globalization.