Huge congratulations to Yi Liu and Tommy Wiedmann – Our global influencers.
Published on the 05 January 2022
UNSW Civil & Environmental Engineering researchers Scientia Senior Lecturer Dr Yi Liu and Professor of Sustainability Research Tommy Wiedmann are in the international "Highly Cited Researchers 2021" list from Clarivate.
The annual Highly Cited Researchers list identifies researchers who demonstrate significant influence in their chosen field or fields through the publication of multiple highly cited papers during the last decade. The list includes researchers from 70 countries, whose names are drawn from the publications that rank in the top one per cent by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science citation index. Tommy and Yi joined 34 other UNSW researchers named in the 2021 list.
It’s a major achievement, and we are so proud to have two of our researchers featured in the 2021 list.
About our Highly Cited Researchers:
Dr Yi Liu’s research interests are remote sensing in hydrology, looking at global vegetation dynamics, and climate change and extreme events.
His research highlights include the development of the first global long-term satellite-observed soil moisture record using a unique merging approach, which represents the premier soil moisture dataset used in the hydrological community
His research highlights include the development of the first global long-term satellite-observed soil moisture record using a unique merging approach, which represents the premier soil moisture dataset used in the hydrological community.
Another highlight has been the development of a new technique to map changes in the amount of carbon stored in living plant mass (or "biomass") above the ground over the last four decades, by merging vegetation information from several passive microwave satellites. This allowed Liu and his colleagues to track global changes in biomass from month to month in response to natural, climate related and human activities, something that was not possible before.
Professor Tommy Wiedmann leads the Sustainability Assessment Program within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
Tommy’s research and teaching is based on a long-standing experience in integrated sustainability assessment and environmental footprint analysis. His main research question is how to achieve concurrent human and planetary well-being.
He develops and applies environmental input-output modelling as part of a holistic, systems-based concept to life cycle assessment, industrial ecology and sustainable consumption and production research.
Wiedmann leads the Industrial Ecology Virtual Laboratory e-research infrastructure project and coordinates research projects related to sustainability. In 2012 he received the Thomson Reuters Citation Award in Australia and has been listed as Highly Cited Researcher annually since 2015.
He is a Lead Author on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC (2019-2022), and a chief investigator in a recent study commissioned by the ACT government (Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment), which calculated the total carbon footprint of the ACT, including Scope 3 emissions and modelled scenarios to reduce all emissions in line with a 1.5 degree climate change target approach.
In his previous affiliations with the Stockholm Environment Institute and CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences, Wiedmann coordinated a number of research projects funded by the European Commission and Australian and UK Governments. He led a research project that produced the first time series of the UK's national carbon footprint.