Prof. Dr.-Ing. Joerg Baumeister has been a practitioner, an educator, a researcher, and a consultant for Architecture and Urban Design for more than 20 years throughout Europe, Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia, and Australia. As a university educator with passion for “his” students, he tries to fuse research, higher education, and implementation in order to create feedback loops to evolve the fields of urban design and architecture. Joerg founded in 2019 the “SeaCities” research laboratory (SeaCities.org) at the Cities Research Institute, Griffith University, to develop water-adapted cities and floating structures. He is consulting governmental institutions on the federal, state, and regional level as well as NGOs and private industry leaders to apply his current research interests which comprise SeaCities, ecological cities, affordable housing in serial building technology, and design innovation through creative thinking. He is an award-winning architect and urban designer and continues to be an enthusiastic speaker at international conferences. Joerg is the DAAD ambassador and the scientist for future.Despina Linaraki is an architect engineer. Despina Linaraki is a Ph.D. researcher at SeaCities, Cities Research Institute, Queensland. She has completed a Master of Science, 2015 from Columbia University in New York, at Advanced Architectural Design and the Development of Global Cities. Furthermore, she holds a Master's of Architectural Engineering, 2013 from Technical University of Crete, in Greece. Since 2014, she is a registered architect in Greece. Having lived experience in different coastal cities around the world, she is researching nature-based solutions for the adaptation of low-lying islands and coastal cities to sea level changes and floods through the interdisciplinary of architecture with the fields of biology and geology.
