Professor Barbara Kasprzyk-Hordern is Professor of Environmental and Analytical Chemistry at the University of Bath. She leads the Environmental Chemistry and Public Health Research Group and serves as Director of both the Centre of Excellence in Water-Based Early Warning Systems for Health Protection (CWBE) and the NERC Centre for Doctoral Training in Real-Time Digital Water-Based Systems (RED-ALERT CDT).

Her research spans the interconnected fields of environmental, analytical, and water sciences. She has made major contributions to advancing the understanding of the occurrence, fate, transformation, and chemical speciation of both emerging and legacy pollutants in the environment. Her work has also focused on developing and evaluating innovative, evidence-based solutions, including those that are not solely technology-driven, to reduce environmental pollution and its impacts on ecosystems and human health.

Professor Kasprzyk-Hordern’s current research focuses on the development of early warning systems for environmental and public health protection through water -based epidemiology. Her work integrates environmental chemistry, public health, epidemiology, and digital technologies to support the One Health approach and inform policy and decision-making at local, national, and international levels.

Prof. Beate Escher is a leading expert in chemical pollution, revealing how chemical mixtures, even at undetectable levels, can collectively cause toxic effects in humans and the environment. She pioneered a paradigm shift in risk assessment and exposome studies by focusing on mixture effects using high-throughput in vitro bioassays and computational models. Beate Escher obtained her PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH, Zürich, Switzerland and is head of the Department of Cell Toxicology at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Leipzig, Germany, and professor at the Eberhard Karls University Tübingen, Germany. She is also lecturer at ETHZ, Switzerland, holds an honorary professorship at the University of Queensland and an adjunct professorship at Griffith University, Australia. She serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science and is founding editor-in-chief of ACS ES&T Toxicology. In 2023 she won the Outstanding Achievements in Environmental Science and Technology Award by ES&T and ES&T Letters and the ACS Division of Environmental Chemistry.

Prof. Klaus Kümmerer is Professor for Sustainable Chemistry and Material Resources at the public Leuphana University Lüneburg His research and teaching are focused on Green Chemistry, Sustainable Chemistry, Green Pharmacy, Sustainable Pharmacy, Water Chemistry, Benign by Design, Material Ressources, and Ecology of Time. Klaus Kümmerer published extensively. in 2021 he ranked first in Germany, 10th worldwide in Environmental Science, 12th in 2025 according to Stanford ranking. He received several national and international awards for his interdisciplinary work, for example the prestigious Wöhler Award for Sustainable Chemistry by Gesellschaft Deutscher Chemiker (GDCh) in 2023  or the Water Resources Award of the Rüdiger Kurt Bode Foiundation in 1015. In 2024 he has been decorated with the Verdienstkreuz am Bande der Bundesrepublik Deutschland („Bundesverdienstkreuz“, Cross of Merit on Ribbon of the Feral Republic of Germany, awarded by the President of Germany). In 2025 he received honorary doctorates from University of Gent and University of Helsinki. He developed the worldwide unique extra-occupational fully online study programs “Sustainable Chemistry“ (Master of Science) and “Managing Sustainable Chemistry” (Master of Business Administration) at Leuphana University. Klaus Kümmerer advised national and international organisations including UNEP, EU, Governments, parliaments, authorities, NGOs etc. He has several cooperations with industry. He is also founder and CEO of a consulting company (https://edc-com.de/en).

Prof. Thomas Ternes is a leading expert in environmental analytical chemistry and water quality, internationally recognised for his pioneering research on the occurrence, fate and transformation of pharmaceuticals, industrial chemicals and other organic micropollutants in aquatic environments. He studied Chemistry at Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. Currently, he is the Head of the Qualitative Hydrology Division at the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG) in Koblenz and a professor at the University of Koblenz for environmental chemistry and environmental analysis. His research focuses on identifying transformation products of organic micropollutants and understanding their formation and fate in the urban water cycle, with particular emphasis on wastewater treatment and drinking water production. From 2011 to 2017, he led the ERC Advanced Grant project ATHENE, which investigated the microbial transformation of emerging contaminants during biological wastewater treatment. Since January 2022, he has chaired the Water Chemistry Society, a division of the German Chemical Society (GDCh). For more than 14 years he was an editor of the journal Water Research.