Keynote Speakers


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PROF GABRIEL KATUL

George Pearsall Distinguished Professor, Hydrology and Meteorology, Duke University

Keynote title - Gas transfer across air-water interfaces in inland waters: from micro-eddies to super-statistics.

Gabriel G. Katul received his BE in 1988 at the American University of Beirut (Beirut, Lebanon), his MS in 1990 at Oregon State University (Corvallis, OR) and his PhD in 1993 at the University of California in Davis (Davis, CA). He holds the George Pearsall distinguished professorship at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke University (Durham, NC). He was a visiting fellow at University of Virginia (USA) in 1997, the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (Australia) in 2002, the University of Helsinki (Finland) in 2009, the FulBright-Italy Distinguished Fellow at Politecnico di Torino (Italy) in 2010, the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) in 2013, Nagoya University (Japan) in 2014, the University of Helsinki (Finland) visiting fellow in 2017, the Karlsruher Institute for Technology (Germany) in 2017, Princeton University (USA) in 2020, and CzechGlobe (Brno - Czech Republic) in 2023. He received several honorary awards, including the inspirational teaching award by the students of the School of the Environment at Duke University (in 1994 and 1996), an honorary certificate by La Seccion de Agrofisica de la Sociedad Cubana de Fisica in Habana (in 1998), the Macelwane medal and became thereafter a fellow of the American Geophysical Union (AGU, in 2002), the editor’s citation for excellence in refereeing from the AGU (in 2008), the Hydrologic Science Award from the AGU (in 2012), the John Dalton medal from the European Geosciences Union (in 2018), the Outstanding Achievements in Biometeorology Award from the American Meteorological Society (AMS, in 2021), was elected as a fellow of the AMS (in 2024), and the Hydrologic Science Medal from the AMS (in 2025). Katul was elected to the US National Academy of Engineering (in 2023) for his contributions in eco-hydrology and environmental fluid mechanics. He served as the Secretary General for the Hydrologic Science Section at the AGU (2006-2008). His research focuses on micro-meteorology and near-surface hydrology with emphasis on heat, momentum, scalar, and particulate matter (including aerosols, pollen, and seeds) transport, water movement in the soil-plant-atmosphere system as well as their implications to a plethora of hydrological, ecological, atmospheric and climate change related problems. He is currently serving as one of the editors-in-chief of a new journal published by the Academic Research Alliance (ARC) titled “ARC-Geophysical Research” that seeks to reduce monetary considerations in academic publishing.

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PROF HEIDI NEPF

Donald and Martha Harleman Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Keynote title - Competing influence of vegetation-generated turbulence and sediment cohesion on sediment transport

Dr. Nepf received her doctorate from Stanford University (1992) and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution before beginning her career at MIT in 1993. She is internationally known for her work on the impact of vegetation on currents, waves, and sediment transport. The Nepf Lab develops models of physical processes that determine how natural habitats, such as seagrass, marsh, kelp, and mangroves, provide coastal protection, impact landscape stability, improve water quality, and provide blue carbon reservoirs. She has been recognized by several awards, including: NSF Career Award, the Borland Lecture, the Chapman Lecture, the Harold Schoemaker Best Paper Award [IAHR], 2019 ASCE Hunter Rouse Award, and a Distinguished Alumni Award from Bucknell University. In 2018 she was elected as a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union. In 2023, she was honored to receive the IAHR M. Selim Yalin Lifetime Achievement Award.

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PROF DUBRAVKA POKRAJAC

Emerita Professor, University of Aberdeen

Keynote title - Generalised Shallow Water Equations

Professor Dubravka Pokrajac received all her degrees from the Faculty of Civil Engineering, University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, where she began her academic career in 1983. She joined the lecturing staff at the University of Aberdeen in 1998 as a Lecturer, was appointed Senior Lecturer in 2005, Reader in 2011, and Professor in 2014. From 2014 to 2022, Dubravka served as the Director of Research in the School of Engineering. She retired from the University of Aberdeen in 2024.

Dubravka’s research focuses on porous media flows, turbulent flows over rough walls, and surface-subsurface interactions in fluvial and coastal environments. Her work is based on a rigorously developed theoretical background that underpins numerical modelling and is used for interpreting experimental results. She has made substantial contributions to the development of double-averaging methodology and its application to open channel flows. Recently, she extended this methodology to revisit classical Shallow Water Equations (SWEs) and derive a new generalised version of these equations.

Her experimental work includes detailed laboratory experiments involving steady uniform open channel flow over and within permeable beds, propagation of turbulent bores above permeable beaches, and the associated flow within the beaches, as well as turbulent porous media flows. Her numerical modelling efforts include developing a finite element simulation model of groundwater flow and contaminant transport, and an SWE-based simulation model of bore propagation over a permeable beach coupled with a model of water and air flow within the beach.

Dubravka has published over 100 peer-reviewed technical papers. She served as an Associate Editor for AGU journals Water Resources Research (2011-2021) and Journal of Hydrological Processes (2013-2023). She is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Hydraulic Research. Since 2021, Dubravka has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Belgrade, Serbia.






  • 15 September 2025
  • Torino, Italy
Programme