Benjamin Bechtel holds a professorship in Urban Climatology at the Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany and is the vice director of the Institute of Geography. Before he was Research Associate with the Cluster of Excellence CliSAP, University of Hamburg. His research interests include crowd sourcing and urban remote sensing, in particular the characterization of urban surfaces for applications in urban climatology and beyond. Benjamin Bechtel received the 2021 Timothy Oke Award of the International Association for Urban Climate and the 2013 dissertation award for physical geography in Germany. He serves as the Secretary of the International Association for Urban Climate, Section Editor at PLOS Climate and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Remote Sensing, Advisory board member of the Heidelberg Institute for Geoinformation Technology, former work group leader in the COST action FAIRNESS, member of VDI guideline commissions, and as a reviewer for WMO, international journals, and funding agencies.

Dr Arjan Droste is an assistant professor in urban hydrometeorology at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD degree at Wageningen University, with a thesis titled Understanding the Urban Atmosphere through Conceptual Modelling and Opportunistic Sensing. His work focuses on the observation and analysis of urban atmospheric processes through novel measurement techniques, including crowdsourced data and opportunistic sensing networks. He is particularly interested in how these emerging data sources can enhance our understanding of urban climate variability, surface–atmosphere interactions, and micro-scale weather phenomena. His broader research connects environmental sensing, data quality assessment, and the integration of citizen science into formal meteorological practice.

Daniel Fenner is a Visiting Professor at the Chair of Climatology at Technische Universität Berlin (Germany). Before that, he worked as a PostDoc researcher at the Chair of Environmental Meteorology at the University of Freiburg (Germany), where he conducted an extensive observational campaign (urbisphere-Berlin) and investigated various aspects of the impact of the city on the atmospheric boundary layer with ground-based (remote-sensing) instruments. Prior, he was a PostDoc at the Ruhr University Bochum (Germany), further developing quality-control procedures for crowdsourced data from citizen weather stations and crowdsourcing of such data. He received his PhD at the Chair of Climatology at Technische Universität Berlin, studying urban thermal climate conditions, heatwaves and their interactions. His research interests and expertise lie in urban atmospheric conditions on various spatial and temporal scales, urban boundary layer dynamics, crowdsourcing, urban heat island studies, and urban climate characteristics during heatwaves.

Ariane Middel is an Associate Professor in The GAME School and the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. Her research focuses on how urban form and design affect heat and human thermal exposure in cities. Dr. Middel has advanced urban climate science through applied and solutions-oriented research using unconventional field methods such as MaRTy (a mobile weather station), microclimate simulations, and human-centric modeling. She also pioneered urban climate informatics, a revolutionary research domain leveraging sensors, big data, and artificial intelligence to understand and respond to urban climate challenges. Dr. Middel is the President of the International Association for Urban Climate (IAUC) and serves on the “Built Environment” Board of the American Meteorological Society. At Arizona State University, she directs the Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab.

Dr. Negin Nazarian is a Scientia Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), where she leads the Climate-Resilient Cities Lab. As an urban climatologist, she focuses on the complex interactions between the built environment and climate, with particular attention to heat and wind impacts on people. Her research advances high-resolution urban climate modeling, refines urban canopy parameterizations for regional climate models using physical and AI-based approaches, and leverages urban climate informatics to better understand human exposure to climate challenges. Dr. Nazarian serves as Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century, chairs the American Meteorological Society’s Board on Urban Environment, and is a Lead Author for the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities in the Seventh Assessment Report (AR7).

Sara Top is a postdoctoral researcher in the Atmospheric Physics group at Ghent University (Belgium). Her work focuses on developing cost-effective modeling techniques, including machine learning, to produce high-resolution climate data over cities. She earned her PhD in Atmospheric Physics at Ghent University for analyzing future climate and outdoor thermal comfort scenarios over Eurasia using the physics-based ALARO model. During her doctoral research, she co-developed the regional urban meteorological network VLINDER which was established in collaboration with secondary schools. Throughout her career, Sara has evaluated model simulations with (urban) observations, leading to contributions in the development of the MetObs-toolkit, a Python package for quality control and gap-filling of urban meteorological data. She is passionate about science communication and outreach, exemplified by her co-creation of the LEGO Urban Climate Game. As a co-founder of the AI4UrbanClimate Community, Sara strives to advance, coordinate and accelerate research that focusses on machine learning and AI for urban climate applications.

Ferdinand Briegel is a postdoctoral researcher at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany. His research focuses on modelling the outdoor urban heat stress experienced by pedestrians at high resolution, with a particular emphasis on machine and deep learning methods. He is also interested in hybrid modelling frameworks that integrate numerical and statistical approaches in order to better represent processes from the mesoscale to the microscale. He completed his PhD at the Chair of Environmental Meteorology at the University of Freiburg in Germany. For his doctoral thesis, he developed a multiscale deep learning model to predict human thermal stress in complex urban environments. By coupling physical-numerical microscale models and approximating them with deep-learning architectures, he created a flexible and rapid tool for analysing (future) urban climates at a high resolution. This tool can now be used for various applications, such as evaluating remote-sensing data, assessing densification scenarios, or developing urban heat warning systems.