Dr Clemens Mensink is head of the environmental modelling unit at VITO in Belgium. The unit employs 85 researchers, ICT professionals and technicians. It develops, improves and implements methodologies and computer models to estimate the impact of human activities on air, water and soil quality in a spatial context. Clemens received his PhD (1992) and a post graduate degree (1988) in fluid dynamics from the Von Karman Institute in Belgium. He studied chemical engineering, fluid mechanics and numerical mathematics, and received his MSc (1987) in mechanical engineering from University of Twente in the Netherlands. In 1998 he received the ENERO prize. Clemens is currently president of the International Technical Meeting on Air Pollution Modelling and its Applications. He is an expert in air pollution modelling and author of more than 80 peer-reviewed publications in international journals. He is lecturing air pollution modelling at Ghent University (postgraduate studiesin weather and climate modelling) and University of Hasselt. Wanmin Gong is a research scientist at the Atmospheric Science and Technology Directorate, Science and Technology Branch, Environment and Climate Change Canada, located in Toronto, Ontario. He received his B.Sc. from the Nanjing Institute of Meteorology, P. R. China, and his Ph.D. from the University of Reading, U.K. His main research area is in regional air quality modelling, including model development and evaluation, with a focus on cloud processing and interaction with atmospheric tracers. For this purpose he used an on-line, fully coupled, air quality forecast model to investigate the impact of cloud-aerosol interaction on weather and air quality. More recently, his research activities are focused on the development of air quality modeling capability for the Arctic and Canada's northern region and the investigation, in conjunction with field observations, the sources and processes affectingthe Arctic atmospheric composition and their impact on the Arctic environment and climate. Amir Hakami is an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He joined Carleton University after receiving his Ph.D. from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 and completing postdoctoral work at Caltech in 2007. His expertise is in the general area of air quality modeling, with specialization in development and applications of air pollution sensitivity analysis tools and models. Dr. Hakami's current research foci include air pollution health effects estimation, air pollution economics, decision support systems, uncertainty analysis, inverse modeling, satellite remote sensing of air quality, and long-range transport of pollution. During the last 18 years, Dr. Hakami has made significant contributions to development of sensitivity analysis and probing tools for air quality models in general, and for the USEPA's CMAQ model in particular. He is the lead researcher for implementing adjoint sensitivity analysis method in CMAQ and has previously developed the high-order direct decoupled method (HDDM) for sensitivity analysis which was later implemented in CMAQ and CAMx.
