Reviewer of the Year

Beginning in 2022, our editors will select a few of our outstanding referees each year to be featured as Reviewer of the Year.

Our featured reviewers are those who have:

  • made a significant and positive contribution to the peer review process, regardless of whether the paper was eventually accepted by the journal;
  • taken both a broad and detailed view of the paper;
  • demonstrated professionalism and compassion in their reviews; and
  • provided comments that truly help the authors to improve their work.

We must note that, while it is our opinion that these referees have provided exceptional reviews, many of our referees meet the above criteria and we regret that we cannot recognize each of them publicly here. We are equally grateful to all of the individuals who agree to review for npj Urban Sustainability, thereby helping to strengthen the scientific record. We hope that by highlighting a few of our most outstanding referees, we can bring attention to the valuable contributions of peer reviewers to the scientific process.

 

Haozhi Pan, PhD 

Haozhi Pan is an Associate Professor in the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Pan works on combining regional economics and spatial data science methods for understanding how cities can achieve economic growth and digital smartness, as well as co-governance goals including carbon neutrality and citizen participation. He received Bachelor of Engineering from Tongji University, a Master degree in Statistics and a PhD in Regional Planning from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Pan has worked for Regional Economics Applications Laboratory (REAL), where he made or operated several regional economic tools for Chicago and Illinois, including socioeconomic forecast 2050, Regional Econometric Input-Output Models, Business Activity Index, and also served as an Associate Director of Landuse Evolution and Environment Impact Assessment Modeling Laboratory.

Pan is currently supported by the national high-level youth talent program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Swedish Formas project “AI-Powered Knowledge Integration for Carbon Neutral Cities.” He has published more than 10 papers that are top 1% of 0.01% most cited in the field of social and other interdisciplinary sciences according to Essential Science Indicators. His contribution in modeling urban land use structure was the most cited paper in the journal Regional Science and Urban Economics (70: 215-228) in 2017-2018 according to Journal Citation Report 2020. In addition, Pan’s research on the interactions between GHG emissions and urban development was reported as a highlighted research piece by the 2020 Annual Report of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (Ambio 49: 1313-1327). Pan served as managing editor for the journal Urban Governance, Young Editorial Board of Journal of Remote Sensing, and the guest editor of Journal of Urban Technology, Environment and Planning – B, Science of the Total Environment. He has also served as the reviewer for international funding and grant including NSFC of China and NFRF of Canada.
 

Ayyoob Sharifi, PhD

Ayyoob Sharifi is Professor at the IDEC Institute, Hiroshima University. He also is a core member of the Network for Education and Research on Peace and Sustainability (NERPS). His research mainly focuses on urban planning and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Ayyoob actively contributes to global change research programs such as Future Earth and has served as a lead author for the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His education and research activities aim to inform actions toward building resilient and sustainable cities. You can follow him on Twitter @AySharifi and LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/asharifi/.

When asked about peer review, Dr. Sharifi says, “npj Urban Sustainability is an emerging journal that publishes cutting-edge research on urban issues. Reviewing papers for the journal allows me to keep abreast of new developments in the field. Further, peer review is essential to ensure the quality and reliability of academic publications”.

 

Peter Klimek, PhD

Peter Klimek is Associate Professor at the Medical University of Vienna and faculty member of the Complexity Science Hub Vienna (twitter handle @CSHVienna). Drawing from his expertise in complexity science, data science, statistics and physics, his research aims to improve our understanding and ability to predict complex socio-economic systems, ranging from human disease over healthcare systems to economic and financial systems.

Peter and his research team developed prediction and stress-test models for how people acquire more and more chronic disorders as they age, how healthcare systems cope with changes in their workforce, and how shocks disrupt economic and financial markets. He invented a novel statistical test to detect signs of electoral fraud and was the first to mathematically prove that governments are bound to become ineffective over time. He authored a textbook Introduction to the Theory of Complex Systems (together with S. Thurner and R. Hanel) and operated a model used by the Austrian government to forecast the COVID-19 epidemics in Austria.

Peter was awarded a PhD in physics in 2010 and a Venia Docendi (habilitation) in computational science in 2018. He is author or co-author of more than 90 publications, presented at more than 60 conferences or invited lectures. In 2021, he received the Paul Watzlawick Ring of Honor (together with Stefan Thurner). In 2022, he was elected Austrian Scientist of the Year 2021.
 

Yonghang Lai, PhD

Yonghang Lai is a postdoctoral fellow in Health and Environmental Risk Division (Japan Environment and Children's Study Programme Office) at National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) in Japan. His research interests lie in air pollution and public health, applying machine learning to investigate the variation of pollutants and chemical substances such as PFAS in human blood associated with exposure. He is also interested in how regulations and residential attitudes influence urban air pollutants.

Regarding peer review, Dr. Yonghang Lai says, "As a reviewer for npj Urban Sustainability, I am regularly exposed to world-class research and expert opinions in the studies of urban sustainability. The work of a reviewer often encourages me to rethink my own work in new ways. I hope to contribute to the growth of this field and see the opportunity in the future." 
 

Annie Matan, PhD

Dr Annie Matan is a walkability, transport and urban planning policy and research professional focused on promoting sustainable transport needs within urban communities. She has a PhD in pedestrian planning and design. Annie’s professional interests include creating sustainable, vibrant and people-focused urban places, focusing on the transport needs of communities. Her research emphasis is on walkability, transport planning and policy and urban design. She has worked for state and local government along with academia and consultancy, including with Gehl Architects in Copenhagen. Currently she is in the transport policy team at the City of Sydney. Prior to this, she was a Senior Project Officer (Transport) at the City of Fremantle, Western Australia, and Lecturer and Research Fellow at Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. With co-author Peter Newman, she released People Cities: The Life and Legacy of Jan Gehl (2016, Island Press; Danish edition, 2016; Chinese edition, 2018; Japanese edition forthcoming). You can find her on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-annie-matan/.

Regarding peer review, Dr. Matan says, "I am a big believer in sharing our good ideas and research findings, and that it is important to support people trying to make the world a better place through their research and practice. I peer review because constructive and considered feedback makes our ideas stronger. And I like to stay up to date with the latest thinking. As a practitioner academic, I also understand the importance of making sure research and new ideas are useful in practice, and I am always thinking about how could I use this in my work.”
 

Nir Barak, PhD

Nir Barak is a faculty member in the department of politics and government at Ben Gurion University. His fields of research are urban politics, environmental politics, and political theory. Barak received his PhD from the Hebrew University (2018) for his research on social and political aspects of urban sustainability and was afterwards a Fulbright Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University (2017-2018), and at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology (2018-2020). His current research focuses on the relationship between national citizenship and urban citizenship (city-zenship) in light of cities’ rising power in national and global politics, and growing demands for more political autonomy vis-à-vis the state. You can follow him on Twitter @nirbarak6 and link to his ResearchGate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nir-Barak-3.

Regarding peer-review for npj Urban Sustainability, Dr. Barak says, “Although the journal is relatively new, it is clear that it will lead interdisciplinary research in the field of urban sustainability.”
 

Felicia Liu, PhD

Felicia Liu is a geographer and a Lecturer in Sustainability in the Department of Environment and Geography at the University of York. She has previously held a junior research fellowship at Jesus College and a postdoctoral research associateship at the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford.

Her research is guided by her curiosity about the interaction between capital, society and nature in the Anthropocene. A core part of her work focuses on sustainable finance as an important tool in (re)mediating the relationship between human and non-human nature in contemporary times. Built upon her PhD that focused on the development of sustainable finance in Asia, her current research looks at sustainable finance in the realms of biodiversity and fintech, including biodiversity finance disclosure and data needs, innovative market instruments for nature finance, and green fintech. Currently, she is a co-investigator of a NERC-funded project that aims to investigate artificial intelligence solutions to overcome data gaps and challenges in biodiversity financing. Additionally, Dr. Liu is interested in how society makes sense of anthropogenic environmental changes, as reflected in her ongoing work on contrasting media portrayal of (un)sustainable agroforestry practices in Southeast Asia, and her investigation into the construction of Seasons of the Anthropocene. You can follow her on Twitter @feliciahmliu

Regarding the topic of urban sustainability, Dr. Liu commented: “the topic of urban sustainability is interdisciplinary so it’s important for researchers and reviewers alike to keep an open mind about innovative and inclusive approaches to conducting research. It is also of paramount importance for the field to actively consider the perspectives of the historically under-represented, such as the Global South, as well as the experience of BME and queer communities. I’m grateful for the opportunity to review for npj Urban Sustainability to support this rapidly growing and highly impactful field of research”.
 

Elizabeth M Cook, PhD

Dr. Elizabeth Cook is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Science, Sustainability at Barnard College-Columbia University, New York, USA. Elizabeth is an urban ecosystem scientist. Her work uses mixed methods to explores cities as complex social-ecological-technological systems. She co-leads a National Science Foundation Growing Convergence project that applies transdisciplinary approaches to explore future sustainability and resilience of North American and Latin American cities to changing climate and extreme events. She works collaboratively with interdisciplinary scientists and local practitioners through participatory methods to envision positive futures and the transformative capacities needed to achieve future climate resilience. She also co-leads the global NATURA network studying and implementing nature-based solutions to improve urban resilience. Her other current projects explore human-environment interactions and people’s perceptions of nature and ecosystem services under changing environmental conditions. You can find more info on these websites: https://envsci.barnard.edu/profiles/elizabeth-m-cook, http://natura-net.org, http://convergence.urexsrn.net/, Twitter: @e_m_cook.


When asked about our journal, Dr Cook says, “npj Urban Sustainability as an important, emerging outlet for trans-disciplinary research that is at the forefront of addressing our most pressing urban sustainability and resilience challenges. I particularly appreciate that npj Urban Sustainability is open access. Open access and the efficient review process are both critical for creating space for rigorous dialogue among community, policy makers, city practitioners, and scientists who all bring unique and diverse approaches to scoping and understanding the complexities of cities in a global context.”
 

Peter van Puijenbroek, PhD

Dr. Peter van Puijenbroek is a scientist working at ‘PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency’. Dr. van Puijenbroek is working on national and global water modelling related to nutrients, biodiversity and pathogens. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency is the national institute for strategic policy analysis in the fields of the environment, nature and spatial planning. His research is to improve the quality of political decision-making by conducting outlook studies, analyses and evaluations. His studies vary from national analysis on nutrient pollution and aquatic biodiversity to global modelling and scenario analysis on the relation between sanitation and wastewater treatment and global nutrient pollution.


Van Puijenbroek statement is that both the national and the global analysis are based on detailed data analysis with process modelling based on socio-economic developments and the consequences of environmental policy. Detailed data analysis is needed to evaluate historical trends and analyze the consequences of the past for the future. Socio-economic drivers are the basis of the Driver-Pressure-State-Impact-Response chain and results in changes in the volume of pollution. Environmental policy can result in effective, sometimes in short time, responses to reduce the impact of pollution. Good process modelling relates these developments on different scales. Including these different aspects makes it possible to calculate the consequences for the Sustainable Development Goals or the impact to human health or biodiversity. To make our work useable for policy makers, scientist have to make the last step to present results not only in scientific papers, but also in reports readable for policy makers (email: peter.vanpuijenbroek#pbl.nl).
 

Johannes H. Uhl, PhD

Dr. Uhl is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado Boulder (USA). He holds a PhD degree in Geographic Information Science from University of Colorado Boulder, and was trained as a Geomatics Engineer at Karlsruhe University of Applied Science (Germany), Polytechnic University of Valencia (Spain), and Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRRJ) (Brazil). He is a Geographic Information Scientist interested in human settlement modelling, in long-term urbanization processes, and in modelling the rural-urban continuum. In his work, he integrates heterogeneous geospatial data sources such as remote sensing data, historical maps, cadastral data, real estate data, and census data to create historical settlement-related data enabling the quantitative analysis of human settlements, built-up areas and road network dynamics over extended time periods, employing spatial modelling techniques as well as methods from computed vision and (un)supervised machine learning. Moreover, Dr. Uhl is interested in uncertainty quantification in geospatial data, spatio-temporal modelling and geovisualization. 

Dr. Uhl received the Gilbert White scholarship from University of Colorado Boulder in 2019, and won the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Pattern Recognition Systems (ICPRS) 2017. He has authored over 30 scientific publications that have appeared in Science Advances, Scientific Data, Communications Earth & Environment, Earth System Science Data, and Remote Sensing of Environment. You can follow Dr. Uhl on Twitter @JohannesHUhl1 and see some of his work displayed in his YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@hisdac_us)

Regarding peer review, Dr. Uhl says, "npj Urban Sustainability is a topical, but interdisciplinary journal that impressively illustrates the variety of disciplines studying urban systems from a multitude of scientific perspectives. Peer-reviewing for npj Urban Sustainability has been a great opportunity for me not only to contribute actively to ensure that scientific publications have adequate quality levels, but also to learn from other scholars and to broaden my horizons regarding the different facets of urban science."
 

Eimear Cleary, PhD

Eimear Cleary is Research Fellow with the WorldPop research group at the University of Southampton. Her research interests focus on exploring how climate, environment and human mobility impact the transmission of infectious and vector-borne disease. Eimear’s PhD research involved using novel epidemiological methods for predicting the spatial predominance of malaria in Melanesia, and was awarded by the Australian National University. Her current work explores the seasonality and spatiotemporal drivers of COVID-19 transmission using Bayesian approaches, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She is also conducting research as part of the MOnitoring Outbreaks for Disease surveillance in a data science context (MOOD) project using epidemiological approaches to assess the travel-related risk of importation and onward transmission of emerging vector-bone and infectious diseases. You can find more information about Eimear and WorldPop’s research at the following links: ORCID:  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2549-8565, group website: https://www.worldpop.org/team/eimear_cleary/


Regarding peer review, Dr. Cleary commented, “I am proud to contribute to the peer review process for npj Urban Sustainability who publishes high quality research exploring the interaction of urbanisation on healthy and inclusive human settlements and improving our understanding of the sustainable shaping of urban environments”.
 

Christian Albert, PhD

Christian Albert is a landscape planner, Professor for Environmental Analysis and Planning in Metropolitan Regions, and Executive Director of the Institute of Geography at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. His research aims at advancing theories and methods of landscape and environmental planning to support spatial transformations to just and sustainable futures for people and nature. Particular foci of his work are options for integrating concepts such as ecosystem services, green infrastructure and nature-based solutions, and the application of innovative methods in planning, including remote sensing, citizen science, and Geodesign. Albert is President of the IALE-D, the German Chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecology, Associate Editor of Ecosystems and People, and was a Lead Author for the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). He teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on environmental analysis and landscape planning and supervises several PhD theses. You can follow him on Twitter @DrChrAlbert.


On reviewing for the journal, Albert says, “npj Urban Sustainability has rapidly emerged as one of the leading journals for novel research on issues pertaining to the sustainable development of cities and regions, particularly focusing on policy-relevant insights and solutions. Reviewing for the journal provides exciting opportunities to learn about and help contribute to the advancement of cutting-edge research in this field of immense societal relevance.”