Junior-Prof. Dr. Haibing Shao leads the work group Geothermal Systems Analysis (https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=37482) in the Department of Environmental Informatics at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ. He is also jointly appointed as a Junior Professor at the Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg. His research interests are the numerical modelling of coupled processes in shallow and deep geothermal reservoirs. As a senior developer, he has been working with the open-source scientific software OpenGeoSys (www.opengeosys.org) for more than 10 years. He studied environmental engineering at the Tongji University in Shanghai (China) and obtained his Master’s degree at the University of Tübingen. In 2010, heearned his PhD title from TU Dresden, and since then working as a staff scientist at the UFZ. Philipp Hein is at the time of publication enrolled as a PhD student at Technische Universität Dresden and was working as a research assistant at University of Applied Sciences Leipzig as well as a guest scientist at the Department of Environmental Informatics of the Helmholtz Centre of Environmental Research - UFZ Leipzig. His research interests are the sustainable and efficient utilization of shallow geothermal energy and numerical modeling of borehole heat exchanger coupled ground source heat pump systems. Philipp Hein studied mechanical engineering and received a Bachelor and Master degree at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf.Dr. Agnes Sachse is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Environmental Informatics at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research – UFZ in Leipzig, Germany. She studied Geography, Meteorology and Geology and received her doctoral degree in hydrogeology from the Technical University of Dresden in Germany. Her current research interests include the hydrological and hydrogeological modeling on catchment scale, especially the numerical modelling of groundwater recharge and groundwater flow in data scarce regions using OpenGeoSys. She is also responsible for the coordination and implementation of OpenGeoSys-tutorials and lectures.Prof. Dr.-Ing. Olaf Kolditz is the head of the Department of Environmental Informatics at the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ. He holds a Chair in Applied Environmental System Analysis at the Technische Universität in Dresden. His research interests are related to environmental fluid mechanics, numerical methods and software engineering with applications in geotechnics, hydrology and energy storage. Olaf Kolditz is the PI of the OpenGeoSys project (www.opengeosys.org), an open-source scientific software platform for the numerical simulation of thermo-hydro-mechanical-chemical processes in porous media, in use worldwide. He studied theoretical mechanics and applied mathematics at the University of Kharkov (Ukraine) and earned his PhD in 1990 in natural sciences from the Academy of Science of the GDR in geohydrodynamics. Olaf Kolditz is Editor-in-Chief of two international journals: Geothermal Energy (open access) and Environmental Earth Sciences (ISI).
