Hashem Akbari Editor

Ansar Khan is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Lalbaba College, University of Calcutta, India. A global leader in the field of urban climate research, his work incorporates simulation and numerical modeling of tropical climatic events. A key focus of his research is searching for appropriate mitigation strategies and technologies to decrease the overheating of tropical urban areas while also decreasing energy consumption and protecting health. Hashem Akbari is a Professor at the Department of Building, Civil, and Environmental Engineering, Concordia University, Canada. He has conceived, led, and supervised work in heat-island quantification and mitigation in the United States and abroad. Prior to Concordia University, he was a senior scientist and the leader of the Heat Island Group at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, University of California. He is Chief Editor and Editor of several scientific journals and co-author of 5 books on related to the effects of UHIs, and author of almost 239 scientific papers published in peer reviewed international scientific journals. Francesco Fiorito is an Associate Professor of Architectural Engineering, Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy and Senior Visiting Fellow, University of New South Wales, Australia. His research focuses on the development and assessment of new technologies and systems for buildings, with the aim of reducing building energy demand and improve indoor and outdoor comfort. He is in the editorial board of several scientific journals and has published more than 60 research outputs. Sk Mithun is an Assistant Professor of Geography at Haldia Government College, Vidyasagar University, India. His research primarily focuses on urbanization, urban sprawl, modeling urban growth and land use/land cover dynamics. Dev Niyogi is Dave P. Carelton Centennial Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at Jackson School of Geosciences, and Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering in the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He was the most recent chair of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) Board of Urban Environment and elected advisory board member of the International Association of Urban Climate. He is currently serving on the AMS Committee on Applied Climatology, and has previously served on AMS Committee on Agriculture and Forest Meteorology, invited member FGDC Spatial Climate Working Group, Member of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model WG-14 (land surface models), and Member of the AGU Biogeochemistry meetings group/spring meeting student awards chair. He has provided invited testimonies to the National Academy study group, planning summer meetings, and Senate Working groups.