Dr. Kristen Splinter
Dr. Kristen Splinter (she/her) is a Professor and Managing Director of the Water Research Laboratory at UNSW Sydney, Australia. Originally from Canada, her research focuses on understanding and predicting how coastlines change, from individual storms through to long-term coastal evolution. She works across shoreline monitoring, coastal erosion and recovery, remote sensing, and the development of next-generation coastal prediction models that combine physical understanding with data-driven and machine learning approaches.
Kristen is a member of the leadership team of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Our Future Oceans, where she contributes to interdisciplinary research supporting the resilience of coastal and marine environments. Her work is driven by a belief that better coastal futures depend on bringing together diverse knowledge, observations, and technologies to improve our understanding of dynamic coastal systems. She is also co-founder of Comomola (COastal MOrphodynamics and Machine LeArning), an international network connecting coastal scientists and machine learning researchers around the world.
Dr. Catherine Febria
Dr. Catherine Febria (she/her/siya) is an Associate Professor and Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Freshwater Restoration Ecology at the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research and Dept of Integrative Biology. She is a recently appointed member to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Fellows, and, as a Canadian Science Advisor for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission.
For more than 20 years, Catherine has studied local freshwater ecosystems as dynamic socio-ecological systems that require collaboration various disciplines, local communities and Indigenous knowledge systems across Aotearoa-New Zealand and Canada. Her work has been published in Science, Nature Ecology & Evolution, FACETS, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Science, as well as several technical reports on coastal wetland restoration indicators, Windsor’s National Urban Park, to name a few. Her lab hosts a Farm Advisory Board and Indigenous Kinship Circle which together ground the science in local wisdom and expertise. Notably, she and her team engage in local, place-based research in coastal ecosystems that include Hillman Marsh, one of Canada’s largest coastal ecosystem restoration projects to date. In parallel she is active on global science policy and the UN intergovernmental panel on biodiversity and ecosystem services, IPBES, as a nominated Multidisciplinary Expert Panel member where she previously served as the Co-Chair of the Indigenous and Local Knowledge Task Force.