INQUA Executive

Laura Sadori is an Italian palynologist and archaeobotanist.

She carries out palaeoecological studies, devoting herself to researches aimed to palaeoenvironmental and palaeoclimatic reconstructions in the Mediterranean basin. She aims to evaluate the degree of human impact and of the changes induced by climate.

She cooperates with archaeologists, geologists and architects in the study of a number of Italian and foreign historical and prehistorical sites.

Aritina Haliuc holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Suceava, she is interested in unravelling the Earth's past, and how humans have changed its face. She nurtures a great interest in knowledge sharing, transfer and raising awareness about the state of the environment and the world we live in and the actions that should be taken to protect this natural inheritance.

Freek Busschers is a scientist and project manager at the Department of Geomodelling at TNO - Geological Survey of the Netherlands. Freek ’s research mainly focusses on the development of the southern North Sea Basin during the Quaternary. Looking for fossils as a young boy during holidays in France initiated his interest in the prehistory from a very early age. Freek finished his PhD on the Middle and Late Pleistocene development of the Rhine-Meuse system at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2008 and worked at TNO - Geological Survey of the Netherlands ever since. He currently works on the reconstruction and dating of the now buried southern North Sea Basin paleo landscapes by using the Survey’s extensive borehole and sediment provenance databases and by applying a range of dating techniques such as luminescence dating and biostratigraphy. Freek is an active INQUA member and regards the organisation essential for connecting different Quaternary groups and disciplines all over the world. He was secretary of INQUA-SACCOM since the Nagoya congress in 2015.

Maria Fernanda Sanchez Goñi is Professor of Paleoclimatology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes-Paris Science Lettres (EPHE, PSL University) and works at the EPOC laboratory (Environnements et Paléoenvironnements Océaniques et Continentaux) of the University of Bordeaux. Expert in the study of pollen grains preserved in deep-sea sedimentary sequences, Maria Fernanda works on the dynamics of climate changes, glacial-interglacial and abrupt cycles, over the last million years and, in particular, on the interaction between vegetation-atmosphere-ocean-ice caps, and the impact of these changes on human evolution. He has led or participated in numerous national and international projects such as the ERC Advanced Grant TRACSYMBOLS, the RESOLUTION project funded by the European Science Foundation and the ACER project (Abrupt Climate Changes and Environmental Responses) funded by the International Quaternary Association (INQUA). He is currently President of the French Association for the Study of Quaternary (AFEQ) and a member of the Milutin Milankovitch Medal Committee of the European Geophysical Union (EGU).

Pradeep Srivastava is a Quaternary Geologist trained in sedimentology and luminescence dating as applied to varied settings of continental climate and tectonics. Largely, Pradeep utilizes the river systems to evaluate the impact of climate variability and tectonics on landscapes. Himalaya, Ganga foreland, Namib Deserts and Alluvial plains of SE United States have been major geographic areas of his contributions where he develop records of neotectonic evolution, extreme hydrological events, paleoclimate, palaeoseismology, glacial chronologies etc.

Thijs van Kolfschoten studied Geology and Biology and obtained his PhD in Palaeontology at the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Utrecht (The Netherlands). After a research position at the Institute of Palaeontology, University of Bonn (Germany) he moved to Leiden University (The Netherlands) where he is working as Professor in Palaeozoology and Quaternary Biostratigraphy at the Faculty of Archaeology.

His main fields of interest are Quaternary mammals, biostratigraphy, palaeoecology and taphonomy. His palaeontological research focuses on continental deposits with an age that ranges from the Early Pleistocene until the early Holocene. A major research project is the study of the mammalian vertebrate fossils from a sequence exposed at Schöningen (Germany); a sequence that plays an important role in the debate on the late Middle Pleistocene climatic and faunal history. The Palaeolithic sites of Schöningen yielded a large amount of mammalian remains with features that indicate exploitation by Lower Palaeolithic hominins. The study of these features is also part of the current research project.

During the past decade, changes in Late Pleistocene and early Holocene ecosystems in Europe north of the Alps have been investigated in close collaboration with Russian colleagues; past projects are: The evolution of the mammalian fauna and flora in Western, Central and Eastern Europe during the Pleistocene – Holocene transition (25 - 10 kyr B.P.) combining well-dated flora and fauna data and The Collapse of the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem (COMSEC) investigating the disintegration of the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem at the level of faunal assemblages as well as at species level. Currently, studies on the Late Pleistocene faunal evolution focus on eastern Siberia.

Thijs was President of the INQUA Subcommission (now Section) on European Stratigraphy (SEQS) from 1995 to 2003, and he was President of INQUA Netherlands from 1999 to 2008 when he was the national Delegate representative at the INQUA International Council meetings in Durham (1999), Reno (2003) and Cairns (2007). He has been regional Editor (Europe) of Quaternary International from 2003 to 2015. In addition, he has been a member of SACCOM from 2003 to present, and Secretary of SACCOM from 2011 to 2015. He was member of the steering-committee of APEX (Arctic Palaeoclimate and its Extremes), which forms an umbrella programme for European Arctic palaeoclimate research. He was secretary of the IUGS Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, member of the scientific advisory board of Senckenberg Research Institute (Frankfurt, Germany) and the Centre of Archaeological Sciences (Leuven, Belgium).

Currently, Thijs van Kolfschoten is the director of a well-equipped laboratory for palaeozoological and archaeozoological studies at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University and head of the Bioarchaeology Research Group.