Marcin Pietrzykowski is a professor in forestry, forest ecology, and forest land reclamation at the Department of Forest Ecology and Reclamation at the Agricultural University in Krakow, Poland. His principal research focuses on the forestry, forest ecology, and forest land reclamation, especially on mine soil including vegetation relationships, trees species response and to reclaimed mine site conditions, nutrient cycling, carbon sequestration, site classification, and forest management on reclaimed mine sites. In 2013, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Virginia, United States. He was awarded the European Award for Sustainable Land Use - CULTURA Prize 2015 by Alfred Toepfer Foundation. He is a member in the American Society of Mining and Reclamation, Society of Ecological Restoration, and the Polish Society of Soil Science. He is an author and co-author of over 150 scientific papers and has patented several inventions for biostabilazation methods of post-industrial sites.
Dr. Prasad is Emeritus Professor, School of Life Sciences, University of Hyderabad (India). He has made outstanding contributions to the fields of bioremediation, bioresources, biomass energy sources, bioeconomy, and to the broad field of environmental biotechnology, all of which are his main areas of expertise. Dr. Prasad has served the Government of India’s Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change as a member of various advisory committees on biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, pollution control and abatement, environmental information systems and bioremediation of contaminated sites. He is an active visiting scientist for several international universities.