Profiles

Senior Scientist, Geography Institute and Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Switzerland 

Natalie Ceperley is an interdisciplinary ecohydrologist at the Geography Institute of the University of Bern whose work sits at the intersection of hydrology, community knowledge, and environmental resilience of, most often alpine environments or semi-arid agrosavannas. She leads projects that co-create water knowledge with local communities, from meltwater management in the Karakoram to an urban watershed cooperation around Bern, bridging cutting-edge tracers (stable isotopes, environmental DNA) with transdisciplinary and participatory approaches. She co-leads the HELPING Working Group on Co-Creating Water Knowledge within the International Association of Hydrological Sciences (IAHS) and is co-initiating an eDNA for Hydrology network. Her teaching empowers students  to take ownership of environmental monitoring and management, via courses such as self-made geosensing and an emerging forest hydrology teaching lab.

Dr. Faisal Khan is a distinguished biologist, technology innovator and policy entrepreneur who leads the federally-funded Precision Medicine Lab in Peshawar — an interdisciplinary and translational biology research Lab - that started in 2013. His Lab develops and uses tools in systems and synthetic biology for various applications in medicine, environment and the industry. Dr Khan graduated with a Masters and Doctorate from the University of Oxford (UK). More recently, he completed a one-year training in Cancer Biology and Therapeutics at Harvard Medical School and is also an alumnus of the NASA’s STAR-2 program. In 2019, he was nominated as a Young Global Leader from Pakistan by the World Economic Forum. In 2021, he was appointed as Advisor to the Minister for Science and Technology and IT, Government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa where he designed and developed the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Science Agenda launched in 2021.