Keynote speakers

The conference will feature four key speakers who are experts in cutting-edge scientific topics, offering in-depth insights into the latest advancements in their fields.

List of confirmed keynote speakers :

• Manuela Brunner, ETH Zurich and WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, Switzerland: Prof. Manuela Brunner is an assistant professor at the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science at ETH Zurich and the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF in Davos. Before moving to Davos, she studied Geography and Climate Sciences at the University of Bern, obtained a PhD from the Universities of Zurich and Grenoble-Alpes, and did postdocs at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado. Her research focuses on extreme climatic and hydrological events such as floods and droughts. She studies the hydro-meteorological drivers of extreme events, develop methods for their prediction, and assess changes in the water cycle and extremes. Her group at ETH and SLF quantifies the hazard potential and water availability in mountain regions under global change.

• Philip Hess, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Germany: Philip Hess is a postdoc researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Technical University of Munich. His work focuses on developing machine learning applications to improve process-based weather and climate model simulations. He is particularly interested in adapting generative machine learning methods for image-processing and video generation to applications such as dynamical emulation, downscaling, bias correction, and subgrid-scale parameterizations.
  
  
• Sylvie Parey, EDF R&D, France: Sylvie Parey is a senior scientist at EDF-R&D with over 30 years of experience in climate impact studies. For more than 20 years, she has focused particularly on extreme value estimation in the context of climate change. She has co-developed statistical methods to estimate future extreme summer temperatures while accounting for climate change. As part of her work on climate impact studies, she has also developed stochastic weather generators—initially univariate for temperature and precipitation, and later extended to multivariate and spatial models.
  
  
• Nadav Peleg, UNIL Genève, Switzerland: Prof. Nadav Peleg has led the Hydrometeorology and Surface Processes group at the University of Lausanne since 2021. His research focuses on analyzing and modeling hydrometeorological systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales, with a particular emphasis on developing stochastic weather generators (e.g., AWE-GEN-2d) and integrating physically-based mechanisms into statistical frameworks (e.g., TENAX). His group investigates the impacts of climate change on rural and urban catchments, with a strong focus on associated uncertainties. Recent projects include evaluating climate change effects on hydrological processes in Alpine mountain catchments and examining the combined influence of urbanization and global warming on intense rainfall and flooding.