Adam Izdebski, Ph.D. (2011), University of Warsaw, is an environmental historian and leads cross-disciplinary teams studying interactions of pandemics, climate, ecosystems and social change in Europe during the last 3000 years. He works as Independent Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology and is Professor of Human Ecology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Johannes Preiser-Kapeller, Ph.D. (2006), University of Vienna, is a researcher at the Department for Byzantine Research of the Institute for Medieval Research (Austrian Academy of Sciences) and lecturer in Byzantine and Global History at the University of Vienna. His research focuses on the history of Byzantium, the medieval Mediterranean, and the Caucasus in a global perspective, as well as on historical network analysis, complexity studies, and environmental history.