**About the Special Issue Editors**

**Narayanan Kannan**, Dr., is an agricultural engineer with expertise in water resources and hydrology. He received his Ph.D. from Cranfield University in the UK. Presently, he is a research scientist with the Texas Institute for Applied Environmental Research-Tarleton State University at Stephenville, TX, USA. Dr. Kannan's research is focused on the development and application of computer models for solving pressing environmental problems. His expertise includes non-point source pollution modeling, water sustainability analysis, stream health, urban hydrologic modeling, and life cycle analysis. He developed the "Animal Production Life Cycle Analysis Tool" (APLCAT) to estimate the water footprint, energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with beef cattle production. To date, he has published 34 research articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals and presented more than 50 oral and poster presentations at conferences. He is also an associate editor of the *Journal of Soil and Water Conservation*. He has traveled extensively to many countries in connection with international conventions and training people on the use of computer models.

**Aavudai Anandhi**, Dr., is an Assistant Professor in the Biological and Agricultural Systems Engineering (BASE) program in the College of Agriculture and Food Sciences at Florida A&M University. In Dr. Anandhi's group, during research, teaching, and outreach, they often use this concept: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But, there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know". This aids in understanding complex hydrological and ecological processes and their interactions at the food–water–energy (FEW) nexus. We then apply this understanding to improve predictions of the processes and of ecosystem services responses to environmental changes (extreme and mean: climate, water use, and land use). This supports us in developing novel solutions to increase our decision support capability of these critical systems using data, network, and computing resources for synergizing FEW systems to improve efficiency, productivity, and sustainability. We use a mixture of systems thinking approaches, conceptual and structural models, AI, spatial statistics, and machine learning for analysis of the ecosystem services of interconnected FEW systems in affecting human well-being by exploiting new data streams to advance system adaptation, resilience, and stress mitigation. These are well documented in publications (50 peer-reviewed articles; 100 oral and poster presentations; 25 invited talks; 4 book chapters in the past decade) and supported by funding (∼\$12 Million, as PI and co-PI) from various organizations (IUSSTF, NSF, USDA-NIFA, SoTL, USDA-OAP, Tilford, DoE). They have received multiple awards and recognitions, namely: "Emerging Researcher Award" at Florida A&M University, "Teacher of the year" award from the Florida section of ASABE, ASCE's ExCEEd fellow, and the "Blue Ribbon Award" for innovative educational materials from ASABE. Additionally, Dr. Anandhi's work experiences and collaborations with the software industry and state, federal, and non-governmental agencies in India, NY, KS, and FL have provided the skills, expertise, and knowledge to develop a successful program in complex systems engineering in FEW.
