Prof. Dr.-Ing. Joerg Baumeister has been a practitioner, educator, researcher and consultant for Architecture and Urban Design for more than 20 years throughout Europe, Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Asia and Australia. As 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. He 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 anenthusiastic speaker at international conferences. He is DAAD Ambassador and Scientist for Future.

Ioana Corina Giurgiu is SeaCities Ph.D. researcher, currently developing a thesis on hybrid water-based urban system designs. She graduated with Honours from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, and as a certified Passivhaus designer and registered architect, she has worked on a number of Passivhaus and energy-efficient projects in UK and Romania. Her research focus is on decreasing the environmental footprint of the built environment via hybrid designs which create symbiotic relationships between natural and built environments.