Germany

Dr. Johanna Leissner, trained as a chemist and material scientist, has been managing cultural heritage research for over 20 years. She focuses on the climate change impact on cultural heritage, environmental monitoring of cultural property, and fostering the green transition by implementing sustainability concepts for Green Museums and heritage buildings.

Dr. Leissner chairs the EU OMC expert group Strengthening Cultural Heritage Resilience for Climate Change and is a member of the EU Commission’s Cultural Heritage Forum, founded in 2019. Since March 2024, she has been a Supervisory Board member of the EIT Culture & Creativity programme (2022-2029). She coordinated the German research project KERES (2020-2023), which aimed to protect cultural heritage from extreme climate events and increase resilience, and the EU project Climate for Culture (2009-2014). She is a partner in the Austrian Academy of Science project on future climate change impacts on museum pests and fungi (2021-2024) and the German project on damage prevention for cultural assets in times of climate change (2022-2024).

Dr. Leissner is the German delegate for the Council of Europe’s Strategy “European Cultural Heritage in the 21st Century” (2018) and a member of the UNESCO World Heritage Expert Group on climate change impacts (2017). Since 2005, she has represented the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft at the European Union in Brussels. She co-founded the German Research Alliance for the Protection of Cultural Heritage in 2008 and the Fraunhofer Sustainability Network. From 2001 to 2005, she was the National Expert for “Technologies for the Protection of European Cultural Heritage” at the European Commission in Brussels.

Deniz Özdiren was born in 1998 and is an emerging heritage professional from Cyprus, currently completing her Master’s in World Heritage Studies in Germany. With a background in architecture, she has expertise in conservation, adaptive reuse, community engagement and heritage storytelling.

She has co-organised heritage projects across Cyprus, Italy, Romania and Germany, serves as a coordination member of ESACH, and volunteered for five years with the bi-communal Technical Committee of Cultural Heritage in Cyprus as a Heritage Youth Ambassador. Deniz brings a thoughtful perspective to the Selection Committee, supporting the recognition of exemplary European heritage initiatives.

He is a member of the European Students’ Association for Cultural Heritage (ESACH) and a Young Member of Europa Nostra.