Utrecht University, Department of Science, Technology and Society (UU)
PROSUITE Coordinator Professor Dr. Kornelis Blok studied experimental physics at Utrecht University and received his Ph.D. in 1991 with a thesis "On the Reduction of Carbon Dioxide Emissions." From this early start Kornelis has continued to play a leadership role in the field of energy efficiency improvement and clean energy production, including renewable energy. Kornelis' experience will give a strong start to PROSUITE: he has led research and consulting to help improve the efficiency of industrial energy use, among many other sustainability topics. He initiated the international interest for research into carbon dioxide removal, which will inform a PROSUITE case study. He introduced quantitative measurement of effectiveness and efficiency of energy policies (like long-term agreements on energy efficiency, energy subsidies, and energy efficiency regulation). These competences will help at term to structure the PROSUITE Decision Support System.
Professor Kornelis Blok has been with Utrecht University's Department of Science, Technology and Society since 1983. He supervises the Master programme Energy Science and the track Energy and Resources within the Master programme Sustainable Development. He is a founder and Scientific Director of Ecofys, an international consultancy playing a key role in developing energy and climate policy in Europe, e.g. in the development of the European emission trading system. Ecofys was granted the Erasmus Award for the most innovative company of the Netherlands in 2008. Kornelis Blok was a lead author for the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the institution that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Dr. Martin K. Patel (coordination team; Leader, WP1) is assistant professor at Utrecht University's Department of Science, Technology and Society and coordinates the research cluster "Energy and Materials Demand and Efficiency (EME)". Martin studied chemical engineering at the University of Karlsruhe and has worked at the Italian Agency for New Technologies, Energy and the Environment (ENEA) in Rome. Martin spent seven years with the department "Energy Technology and Energy Policy" of the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research (ISI) in Karlsruhe. In 1999, he earned his PhD from Utrecht University, NL, for his thesis titled "Closing Carbon Cycles – Carbon Use for Materials in the Context of Resource Efficiency and Climate Change". Martin's teaching tasks today fall into the areas of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Chemistry and Sustainable Development (focusing on sustainable energy supply and efficient energy and material use) and Energy & Climate Policy. In PROSUITE, Martin is part of the project Coordinator’s team, and leads the Workpackage 1, “Technology Characterization”.
Dr. Mark Sanders is an assistant professor of macro-economics at Utrecht University and an external research scholar at the research group on Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy of the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany. Mark will bring to PROSUITE his interest in the areas of endogenous growth and the product life cycle as well as their public policy implications. Mark's competence in areas such as trade theory, labor economics and the economics of technical change will also help to inform the PROSUITE Decision Support System.
Dr. Andrea Ramírez has degrees in Chemical Engineering from the National University of Colombia. She taught and worked as engineer/researcher at the Solid Waste Research Program (PIRS) at the same institution. In 2000 Andrea obtained her Master in Human Ecology at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium). Andrea joined Kornelis Blok's team in 2001 and four years later defended her Ph.D. dissertation on "Monitoring Energy Efficiency in the Food Industry". Since May 2005 she has worked as senior researcher on CO2 sequestration and storage at U. Utrecht's Copernicus Institute. Andrea brings to PROSUITE an expertise on building a sustainability framework for carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems. She will help elaborate the PROSUITE CCS case study, applying her insights on coherent transition and implementation strategies for large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage over time.
Dr. Lex Roes studied environmental science at Utrecht University where he graduated in 2004. In 2011, he obtained his PhD for his work on life cycle engineering of nanotechnology- and industrial biotechnology-based products. He has broad experience with environmental life cycle assessment and economic life cycle costing. Within Prosuite he will use this experience in the nanotechnology- and the biorefinery case studies. Lex Roes is appointed as a post-doc.
Mirjam Harmelink has a Master in Technology Management, from University of Technology, Eindhoven, with a specialisation in energy technology. She is a highly experienced expert in the field of climate change, renewables and energy efficiency, with a good overview as well of policies applied in the field of renewables, energy efficiency and climate change across Europe. With her own consultancy, she has focussed on the design, monitoring and evaluation of renewable, energy efficiency and climate change policies. Mirjam's extensive knowledge on the contents combined with broad experience in human resource and project management made her PROSUITE's choice to support the Coordinator as Project Manager.
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Professor Edgar Hertwich (Leader, WP2) has been the director of the Industrial Ecology Programme since August 2003. He is a member of the UNEP Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, where he leads the task force on prioritising polluting and resource using activities. Hertwich is recipient of the Laudise Prize for research in Industrial Ecology by a scientist under 35 years of age, awarded by the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) in 2003. His paper on input-output and life-cycle approaches to sustainable consumption has been selected as a "paper of the year" 2005 by Environmental Science & Technology. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Industrial Ecology and councilor of ISIE. He leads industry funded and EU funded projects. Professor Hertwich has a Ph.D. in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley. Hertwich has worked in the areas of hybrid life-cycle assessment, eco-industrial parks, sustainable consumption and production, pollution and trade, and multimedia fate modeling and risk analysis of toxic pollutants.
In PROSUITE, NTNU is work package leader of WP2. NTNU’s work in WP2 focuses on modeling the full-scale implementation of technologies in the economy, including developing scenarios and LCI data for the future. NTNU participates in the case study of carbon capture and storage in WP6. It contributes in WP7, assisting in transferring methods and data developed in WP2 to the DSS.
Richard Wood is a Senior Researcher at the Industrial Ecology Program at (Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU), and has worked there since completing his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2008. His PhD examined the environmental implications of structural change in the Australian economy. His focus has been on sustainable consumption and production, and he has extensive experience in input-output and associated techniques. Richard’s work has covered multi-regional input-output analysis, time-series analysis; structural decomposition analysis; structural path analysis; indexing techniques; optimisation techniques; and methods for handling large data sets. His applications have included investigating greenhouse gas emissions due to consumption and trade, ecological footprint analysis, material flow analysis, energy use and triple bottom line accounting. He has played a central role in the development of the EXIOPOL/EXIOBASE suite of multi-regional input-output models. Richard co-edited a book launched in June 2010, on the use of input-output analysis for sustainability assessment. Entitled "The Sustainability Practitioner's Guide to Input-Output Analysis", the book offers a non-expert introduction to one of the more powerful tools available for calculating carbon footprints, ecological footprints, LCA, etc.
In PROSUITE he is focusing on applying prospective hybrid LCA techniques to look at the sustainability of the full scale implementation of emerging technologies.
Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
Michael Zwicky Hauschild (Leader, WP3) is a professor and Head of the Quantitative Sustainability Assessment section at the Department of Management Engineering,Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He has been overall responsible for the department’s Life Cycle Engineering research activities, has taught life cycle impact assessment for 20 years and chaired several international working groups and task forces on chemical-related impacts in LCIA under the auspices of Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. Michael also played a leading role in two projects under the European LCA Platform, developing a European LCA handbook and a European Technical Guidance Document for Life Cycle Impact Assessment. Furthermore, he is founding Chair of the Nordic Life Cycle Association (NorLCA) aimed at dissemination of life cycle thinking in the Nordic countries. He has more than 80 publications in international peer-reviewed journals.
Yan Dong is a Ph.D. student at the Quantitative Sustainability Assessment section at the Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Her current research is focused on life cycle impact assessment, with special attention to metal’s impacts in the marine environment. Yan worked with metal contamination remediation for 3 years before. She also worked with sustainable development at UNEP Risø Center for a year. Furthermore, she is an active member of Erasmus Mundus Association and 2 environmental associations in China.
Arne Wangel is an associate professor of the Quantitative Sustainability Assessment section at the Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He is a sociologist trained at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Lund University, Sweden. For the past three years he has been involved in research on social impacts in the life cycle of products and services. Arne is also doing research on how to strategize options to support capacity development in developing countries with regard to the adoption of LFA tools, and he is participating in the Danish Universities initiative ‘Building Stronger Universities’ (primarily in Africa). Arne is also teaching courses on global value chain analysis with a special focus on social impacts.
Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE)
Prof. Jyri Seppälä is a director of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption and Production at the Finnish Environment Institute. He has been in charge of several extensive R&D projects and his main area of specialization has been performing environmental impact assessments of different products, services and sectors (industries, municipalities etc.) in order to improve environmental protection and to increase eco-efficiency. He has developed site-dependent life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) with the help of decision analysis.
Tuomas Mattila is a researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). He specializes in environmentally extended input-output analysis and ecosystem modeling. He has published 19 journal articles and two book chapters on industrial ecology and environmental science. In his spare time Tuomas runs a 200 hectare organic farm.
Universiteit Gent
Jo Dewulf works with the research group ENVOC of the department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology of Ghent University, Belgium where since 2012 he is full professor in Environmental and Clean Technology. After engineering studies he performed post-doc research at both Ghent University and the Delft University of Technology. Key in Jo’s work is managing natural resources in a technically efficient way. His particular expertise in thermodynamics-based sustainability analysis at process, plant and cradle-to-gate level is of value in developing and assessing new technologies. Jo has projects in collaboration with Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Vietnam, etc; he has published more than 150 papers in international journals included in the Web of Science, with more than 2000 citations and an h-index of 27. He was named a laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in 2008.
Steven De Meester graduated from Ghent University in 2008 as engineer in Biosciences with a thesis on microplastics. Since then he has held a position as PhD candidate with the research group EnVOC at the faculty of Bioscience Engineering of Ghent University. He first worked on the startup of Suschem Flanders in collaboration with the chemical industry and is currently working on the PROSUITE project and as an LCA specialist for the OWS company. He is the author or co-author of several reports, international papers and a book chapter. His main area of expertise is the environmental sustainability of the production chain of biofuels and bioproducts (including food & feed). Other than the methodological issues in other aspects of sustainability assessment, Steven’s key interest is constructing reliable data inventories for life cycle assessmentby using Basic Engineering Modules for the prediction of energy and mass flows of future production plants.
Rodrigo Augusto Freitas de Alvarenga, a Brazilian citizen, received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering in 2007 and a master’s degree on Environmental Engineering in 2010, both at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) - Brazil. Since 2010 he has been a PhD candidate at Ghent University (Belgium), working on the environmental assessment of bio-based products. Rodrigo has been working with environmental analysis and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) since 2006, and during this period he has published several articles in conferences and two articles in international peer-reviewed journals.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Sabine Fuss currently works as a Research Scholar and Principle Investigator of several projects in the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program at IIASA. She holds a PhD in economics.
Her main research interests are economic modeling, especially with respect to decision-making under uncertainty; energy and agricultural economics with focus on issues like bioenergy, food security and deforestation; integrated assessment with respect to climate change mitigation and adaptation; and socio-economic benefit assessment of Earth Observation.
In PROSUITE, her work focuses on analyzing the impact of uncertainty on the diffusion of new technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
Wolf Heinrich Reuter is currently a PhD student studying International Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He studied Economics, Information Management and Mathematics in Vienna, and was a Research Assistant at the ESM Program at IIASA.
His research at IIASA focuses on investment analysis under uncertainty and with endogenous prices. His contribution to PROSUITE is his work on modeling the impact of uncertainty on technology adoption.
Dialogik
Ortwin Renn (co-Leader, WP4) serves as full professor and chair of environmental sociology at Stuttgart University. He is a member of the panel on “Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making” of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. His honors include an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and the “Distinguished Achievement Award” of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA). Among his many political advisory activities is his chairmanship of the State Commission for Sustainable Development (German State of Baden-Württemberg). Renn is primarily interested in risk governance, political participation and technology assessment. He has published more than 30 books and 250 articles.
Piet Sellke (co-Leader, WP4) has studied sociology and political science at the University of Stuttgart as well as sociology at the University of Oregon (USA). Since 2004 Piet Sellke is senior researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, since 2006 at the Department for Sociology of Technologies and Environment and with Dialogik gGmbH. His main research interests are security studies, risk perception, risk governance, technology assessment and sustainable development. Besides his work in PROSUITE, Piet Sellke was project leader of the project “Effective Risk Communications for the Improvised Explosive Device Threat”, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Further, Mr. Sellke led the project “Public Information Response and Behavioral Intentions to Terrorism”, in which public perceptions and behavioral intentions in the context of CBRN attacks were investigated and compared between the United Kingdom and Germany. In 2009, Mr. Sellke consulted different research organizations on risk governance of critical infrastructures. Mr. Sellke further is project leader of EVA-SIM (Evacuation Simulation), in which an evacuation scenario is simulated for a community in Germany in case of a major natural hazard. Piet Sellke lectures at the University of Stuttgart social science methodology courses and at the University of Applied Sciences and Design environmental sociology courses.
Regina Schröter, social and political scientist, studied at the University of Stuttgart and completed her studies in 2009. Currently she is a researcher at DIALOGIK. Her research is focused on sustainability, risk research and social system theory. In PROSUITE she is much involved in the development of an indicators set measuring social aspects of sustainability.
Rainer Kuhn studied sociology and political science at the University of Stuttgart. Since October 2010 he has been a junior scientist at DIALOGIK non-profit institute for communication and cooperation research. In December 2010 he became a junior scientist at the Interdisciplinary Research Unit on Risk Governance and Sustainable Technology Development (ZIRN) at the University of Stuttgart. The exploratory focuses of his work are Consensus-building processes, Risk perception and Participation. Rainer’s main focus in the PROSUITE project is the planning and implementation of the group-delphis for an actual selection of quantitative and qualitative social indicators.
GreenDeltaTC (GD)
Dr.-Ing. Andreas Ciroth (Leader, WP7), managing director GreenDeltaTC
Environmental engineer by education, Andreas finished his PhD (error calculation in LCA) in 2001 at the TU Berlin and has been working since then in sustainability consulting. Andreas Ciroth is founder and managing director of GreenDeltaTC. Further, Andreas is Chair of the Work Area ‘Methodology and Data’ in the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle initiative, and member of the advisory councils of ecoinvent and of the US LCI database. He was the first subject editor of the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, for the field uncertainties, nominated in 2004, still holds this position, and is member of the Editorial Board of the Journal. Andreas is leading the openLCA project to create a free, open source sustainability assessment software. He teaches at the University Wuppertal and at the Technical University Darmstadt in Germany.
In PROSUITE, Andreas leads WP7, software development, and is involved in WP2, economic assessment, and WP8, dissemination and training.
Dipl.-Ing. Michael Srocka, head of software development GreenDeltaTC
Michael Srocka is an environmental engineer (TU Berlin 2004) and has worked with GreenDeltaTC for over 7 years, leading IT development for more than half of that time. Michael Srocka is a highly skilled senior programmer, with a special dedication to Java desktop and web applications. He is the technical lead of the openLCA project, and has developed several distinct life cycle software applications, such as the SimaPro Connectors and the e-DEA software. In PROSUITE, Michael lends his programming skills to adapting the openLCA application to the PROSUITE methodology (WP7).
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Prof Dr. Robert U Ayres
Gara Villalba holds a BS degree in Chemical Engineering, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and a PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1999). She's researcher and teacher at the ICTA (Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals), at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Presently, her research is focused on industrial ecology, renewable energy resources, and education in environmental sciences. Within industrial ecology, she concentrates on the accounting of chemicals in our society, from their extraction to their use and final disposal or dissipation, establishing what-if scenarios and questioning present use in view of policy and future needs.
Laura Talens Peiró has a degree in chemical engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de València, BSc in combined studies in engineering and MSc in Clean Manufacturing Technologies from the University of Teesside. In 2009, she gained her Phd in environmental studies with the thesis dissertation “Exergy analysis of biofuels, an application to biodiesel production” at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). (“Exergy” means “the useful work that may be done by a certain quantity of energy”). From November 2009 to March 2011, Laura worked as a post-doc researcher in the project PROSUITE. She studied the metabolism of some key metals used in emerging technologies, as for example lithium for electric vehicles, and their use in mobile phones. In April 2011, she started a Marie Curie IEF fellowship to continue her research on scarce metals in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) at INSEAD. Laura aims to explore further how accounting for exergy can help better assess the efficiency of industrial processes, including complex products like EEE, and renewable energy resources.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH)
Dr. Stefanie Hellweg (Leader, WP6) is full professor of Ecological Systems Design at ETH Zurich. She is currently leading and collaborating on various projects in cooperation with the industry sector and various universities, funded by national and international authorities as well as private companies. Her main research interests are the environmental assessment of products and emerging technologies (e.g. nanotechnology), decision-support tools for specific industrial sectors (e.g. waste management within the cement industry), and the development of impact assessment methodologies (e.g. for water use and indoor exposure).
Stefanie leads the transdisciplinary team of case study investigators in PROSUITE.
Tobias Walser has a Master Degree in Environmental Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ). His current research focuses on the fate and exposure assessment of engineered nanoparticles. He works in the group of Ecological Systems Design at ETH, under the lead of Prof. Stefanie Hellweg. His main task for PROSUITE is the case study on nanotechnology.
Institut Symlog (SYMLOG)
Claire Mays (Leader, WP8) (Harvard AB '81; U. Paris-VII DESS '85) is Programme Manager at Institut Symlog. A social psychologist, Claire was the elected Secretary of the Society for Risk Analysis-Europe and for ten years was Editor of the European Review of Applied Psychology. In PROSUITE, Claire acts as Work Package Leader for WP8, "Dissemination", and partner in WP4 "Social assessment". She brings her experience in coordinating pluridisciplinary and multi-stakeholder study groups in the area of risk assessment and governance, providing stakeholder outreach and involvement competence as well as analytic and editorial skills. University of Technology. Key in Jo’s work is managing natural resources in a technically efficient way. His particular expertise in thermodynamics-based sustainability analysis at process, plant and cradle-to-gate level is of value in developing and assessing new technologies. Jo has projects in collaboration with Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Vietnam, etc; he has published more than 150 papers in international journals included in the Web of Science, with more than 2000 citations and an h-index of 27. He was named a laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in 2008.
Nina Schneider (ICP MA-2 ‘08) worked for ten years as a brand director in corporate strategy and communication before taking degrees in occupational psychology and alternative conflict resolution. She represents the engaged layperson view in environmental communication projects. Nina has been the principal designer and driver behind the PROSUITE Newsletters and has contributed significantly to our website development.
Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology (MTA SZKI)
Anna Vari received her PhD. in Economics in the Budapest University of Economics. She is Professor in the Department of Environmental Economics at the Budapest University of Technical and Economic Sciences. Her main fields of interest include environmental policy, risk analysis, conflict management, and public participation. She was principal investigator of a number of Hungarian and international research projects sponsored by various funding organisations, including the OECD, GEF, UN, REC, IIASA, EBRD, the US NSF, among others. Between 2000 and 2010 she was a consultant to the OECD NEA Forum of Stakeholder Confidence (FSC). As a head of department of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology, she coordinated several Hungarian research teams involved in the following EU FP6 and FP7 projects: Safe Foods, COWAM2, Civil Society for Sustainability (CSS), PROSUITE and InSOTEC.
Zoltan Ferencz is an economist and political scientist. He received his PhD in Sociology at Eötvös Lóránd Science University Budapest, Faculty of Social Sciences in 2012. Zoltan is working as research fellow in the Institute for Sociology - Central for social Sciences at Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His main research topics are: Environmental sociology (floods, radioactive waste, food safety, sustainability; etc.); R&D policy; Social vision for the future; Lifelong learning and research methodology. In the last 8 years he was involved in several international projects (NATO CCMS; FP6 - SAFEFOODS, COWAM2, TLM-NET; FP7 - CSS; PROSUITE; INSOTEC).
Radboud University Nijmegen (RU)
Prof. Dr. Mark Huijbregts is a professor in the area of Integrated Environmental Assessment at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is an expert in the modelling of the behaviour and combined effects of multiple environmental stressors. He has authored over 130 peer reviewed scientific publications, is member of the editorial board of International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment and leads the FP7-project LC-IMPACT on the development of novel, global scale life cycle impact assessment methods. He is also partner in the FP7 projects CADASTER and DESIRE. He also contributed to the development of the Methodology ‘ReCiPe’, a coherent midpoint and endpoint indicator methodology for life cycle impact assessment and the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook, specifically to the ‘Guidance document for LCIA models, methods and factors’.
Dr. Rosalie van Zelm is a tenure track researcher at the Department of Environmental Science, Institute for Wetland and Water Research of RU and an expert in developing life cycle impact assessment models at various geographical scales. She has major experience in methodology improvements in several impact categories, such as water scarcity and land use. She is involved in the FP7-projects LC-IMPACT and TOXTRAIN. She also development models that were used in the development of the Methodology ‘ReCiPe’, a coherent midpoint and endpoint indicator methodology for life cycle impact assessment. Her work is included in the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook, specifically the ‘Guidance document for LCIA models, methods and factors’.
Pré Consultants (PRE)
Mark Goedkoop established PRé in 1990 and pioneered the field of LCA. He is widely recognized as an international thought leader in the field of Sustainability Metrics and Methodology Development. Mark holds an MSc in Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. This may explain his focus on the development of practical, yet scientifically sound, solutions dedicated to improving the environmental and social performance of products and services.Mark’s primary goal is to help companies create value from sustainable products and services. Mark is responsible for the development of pioneering methodologies for impact assessment (Eco-indicator 95/99 and ReCiPe). He published important studies on sustainable consumption, rebounds, and product service systems methodology. He also initiated the development of the world’s most widely used LCA software, SimaPro.
João Fontes is a consultant with a focus on the human element in sustainability issues. He works on projects related to sustainability assessments, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), and social sustainability. He has experience with multi-criteria assessments. João holds a BSc in Information Technology and a MSc in environmental science. João brings wide-ranging international experience to PRé and has worked in culturally diverse environments. He started his career tailoring decisions support systems for companies in Brazil and Europe. He then worked with Fair Trade in a non-profit network and as a freelance consultant. João is a member of the Social Metrics Committee of The Sustainability Consortium.
In PROSUITE, PRé Consultants contribute to the development of an integrated software concept and user interface concepts, both in WP1 and WP7.
Fundação da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia-Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FFCT/UNL)
Paula Antunes (Leader, WP5)
Rui Santos
Nuno Videira
Utrecht University, Department of Science, Technology and Society (UU)
PROSUITE Coordinator Professor Dr. Kornelis Blok studied experimental physics at Utrecht University and received his Ph.D. in 1991 with a thesis "On the Reduction of Carbon Dioxide Emissions." From this early start Kornelis has continued to play a leadership role in the field of energy efficiency improvement and clean energy production, including renewable energy. Kornelis' experience will give a strong start to PROSUITE: he has led research and consulting to help improve the efficiency of industrial energy use, among many other sustainability topics. He initiated the international interest for research into carbon dioxide removal, which will inform a PROSUITE case study. He introduced quantitative measurement of effectiveness and efficiency of energy policies (like long-term agreements on energy efficiency, energy subsidies, and energy efficiency regulation). These competences will help at term to structure the PROSUITE Decision Support System.
Professor Kornelis Blok has been with Utrecht University's Department of Science, Technology and Society since 1983. He supervises the Master programme Energy Science and the track Energy and Resources within the Master programme Sustainable Development. He is a founder and Scientific Director of Ecofys, an international consultancy playing a key role in developing energy and climate policy in Europe, e.g. in the development of the European emission trading system. Ecofys was granted the Erasmus Award for the most innovative company of the Netherlands in 2008. Kornelis Blok was a lead author for the Third and Fourth Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the institution that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
Dr. Mark Sanders is an assistant professor of macro-economics at Utrecht University and an external research scholar at the research group on Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy of the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena, Germany. Mark will bring to PROSUITE his interest in the areas of endogenous growth and the product life cycle as well as their public policy implications. Mark's competence in areas such as trade theory, labor economics and the economics of technical change will also help to inform the PROSUITE Decision Support System.
Dr. Andrea Ramírez has degrees in Chemical Engineering from the National University of Colombia. She taught and worked as engineer/researcher at the Solid Waste Research Program (PIRS) at the same institution. In 2000 Andrea obtained her Master in Human Ecology at the Free University of Brussels (Belgium). Andrea joined Kornelis Blok's team in 2001 and four years later defended her Ph.D. dissertation on "Monitoring Energy Efficiency in the Food Industry". Since May 2005 she has worked as senior researcher on CO2 sequestration and storage at U. Utrecht's Copernicus Institute. Andrea brings to PROSUITE an expertise on building a sustainability framework for carbon capture and storage (CCS) systems. She will help elaborate the PROSUITE CCS case study, applying her insights on coherent transition and implementation strategies for large-scale deployment of carbon capture and storage over time.
Dr. Lex Roes studied environmental science at Utrecht University where he graduated in 2004. In 2011, he obtained his PhD for his work on life cycle engineering of nanotechnology- and industrial biotechnology-based products. He has broad experience with environmental life cycle assessment and economic life cycle costing. Within Prosuite he will use this experience in the nanotechnology- and the biorefinery case studies. Lex Roes is appointed as a post-doc.
Mirjam Harmelink has a Master in Technology Management, from University of Technology, Eindhoven, with a specialisation in energy technology. She is a highly experienced expert in the field of climate change, renewables and energy efficiency, with a good overview as well of policies applied in the field of renewables, energy efficiency and climate change across Europe. With her own consultancy, she has focussed on the design, monitoring and evaluation of renewable, energy efficiency and climate change policies. Mirjam's extensive knowledge on the contents combined with broad experience in human resource and project management made her PROSUITE's choice to support the Coordinator as Project Manager.
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Professor Edgar Hertwich (Leader, WP2) has been the director of the Industrial Ecology Programme since August 2003. He is a member of the UNEP Panel for Sustainable Resource Management, where he leads the task force on prioritising polluting and resource using activities. Hertwich is recipient of the Laudise Prize for research in Industrial Ecology by a scientist under 35 years of age, awarded by the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE) in 2003. His paper on input-output and life-cycle approaches to sustainable consumption has been selected as a "paper of the year" 2005 by Environmental Science & Technology. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Industrial Ecology and councilor of ISIE. He leads industry funded and EU funded projects. Professor Hertwich has a Ph.D. in energy and resources from the University of California, Berkeley. Hertwich has worked in the areas of hybrid life-cycle assessment, eco-industrial parks, sustainable consumption and production, pollution and trade, and multimedia fate modeling and risk analysis of toxic pollutants.
In PROSUITE, NTNU is work package leader of WP2. NTNU’s work in WP2 focuses on modeling the full-scale implementation of technologies in the economy, including developing scenarios and LCI data for the future. NTNU participates in the case study of carbon capture and storage in WP6. It contributes in WP7, assisting in transferring methods and data developed in WP2 to the DSS.
Richard Wood is a Senior Researcher at the Industrial Ecology Program at (Norwegian University of Science and Technology – NTNU), and has worked there since completing his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2008. His PhD examined the environmental implications of structural change in the Australian economy. His focus has been on sustainable consumption and production, and he has extensive experience in input-output and associated techniques. Richard’s work has covered multi-regional input-output analysis, time-series analysis; structural decomposition analysis; structural path analysis; indexing techniques; optimisation techniques; and methods for handling large data sets. His applications have included investigating greenhouse gas emissions due to consumption and trade, ecological footprint analysis, material flow analysis, energy use and triple bottom line accounting. He has played a central role in the development of the EXIOPOL/EXIOBASE suite of multi-regional input-output models. Richard co-edited a book launched in June 2010, on the use of input-output analysis for sustainability assessment. Entitled "The Sustainability Practitioner's Guide to Input-Output Analysis", the book offers a non-expert introduction to one of the more powerful tools available for calculating carbon footprints, ecological footprints, LCA, etc.
In PROSUITE he is focusing on applying prospective hybrid LCA techniques to look at the sustainability of the full scale implementation of emerging technologies.
Technical University of Denmark (DTU)
Michael Zwicky Hauschild (Leader, WP3) is a professor and Head of the Quantitative Sustainability Assessment section at the Department of Management Engineering,Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He has been overall responsible for the department’s Life Cycle Engineering research activities, has taught life cycle impact assessment for 20 years and chaired several international working groups and task forces on chemical-related impacts in LCIA under the auspices of Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry and the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. Michael also played a leading role in two projects under the European LCA Platform, developing a European LCA handbook and a European Technical Guidance Document for Life Cycle Impact Assessment. Furthermore, he is founding Chair of the Nordic Life Cycle Association (NorLCA) aimed at dissemination of life cycle thinking in the Nordic countries. He has more than 80 publications in international peer-reviewed journals.
Yan Dong is a Ph.D. student at the Quantitative Sustainability Assessment section at the Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). Her current research is focused on life cycle impact assessment, with special attention to metal’s impacts in the marine environment. Yan worked with metal contamination remediation for 3 years before. She also worked with sustainable development at UNEP Risø Center for a year. Furthermore, she is an active member of Erasmus Mundus Association and 2 environmental associations in China.
Arne Wangel is an associate professor of the Quantitative Sustainability Assessment section at the Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU). He is a sociologist trained at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Lund University, Sweden. For the past three years he has been involved in research on social impacts in the life cycle of products and services. Arne is also doing research on how to strategize options to support capacity development in developing countries with regard to the adoption of LFA tools, and he is participating in the Danish Universities initiative ‘Building Stronger Universities’ (primarily in Africa). Arne is also teaching courses on global value chain analysis with a special focus on social impacts.
Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE)
Prof. Jyri Seppälä is a director of the Centre for Sustainable Consumption and Production at the Finnish Environment Institute. He has been in charge of several extensive R&D projects and his main area of specialization has been performing environmental impact assessments of different products, services and sectors (industries, municipalities etc.) in order to improve environmental protection and to increase eco-efficiency. He has developed site-dependent life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) with the help of decision analysis.
Tuomas Mattila is a researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE). He specializes in environmentally extended input-output analysis and ecosystem modeling. He has published 19 journal articles and two book chapters on industrial ecology and environmental science. In his spare time Tuomas runs a 200 hectare organic farm.
Universiteit Gent
Jo Dewulf works with the research group ENVOC of the department of Sustainable Organic Chemistry and Technology of Ghent University, Belgium where since 2012 he is full professor in Environmental and Clean Technology. After engineering studies he performed post-doc research at both Ghent University and the Delft University of Technology. Key in Jo’s work is managing natural resources in a technically efficient way. His particular expertise in thermodynamics-based sustainability analysis at process, plant and cradle-to-gate level is of value in developing and assessing new technologies. Jo has projects in collaboration with Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Vietnam, etc; he has published more than 150 papers in international journals included in the Web of Science, with more than 2000 citations and an h-index of 27. He was named a laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in 2008.
Steven De Meester graduated from Ghent University in 2008 as engineer in Biosciences with a thesis on microplastics. Since then he has held a position as PhD candidate with the research group EnVOC at the faculty of Bioscience Engineering of Ghent University. He first worked on the startup of Suschem Flanders in collaboration with the chemical industry and is currently working on the PROSUITE project and as an LCA specialist for the OWS company. He is the author or co-author of several reports, international papers and a book chapter. His main area of expertise is the environmental sustainability of the production chain of biofuels and bioproducts (including food & feed). Other than the methodological issues in other aspects of sustainability assessment, Steven’s key interest is constructing reliable data inventories for life cycle assessmentby using Basic Engineering Modules for the prediction of energy and mass flows of future production plants.
Rodrigo Augusto Freitas de Alvarenga, a Brazilian citizen, received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Engineering in 2007 and a master’s degree on Environmental Engineering in 2010, both at Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC) - Brazil. Since 2010 he has been a PhD candidate at Ghent University (Belgium), working on the environmental assessment of bio-based products. Rodrigo has been working with environmental analysis and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) since 2006, and during this period he has published several articles in conferences and two articles in international peer-reviewed journals.
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Sabine Fuss currently works as a Research Scholar and Principle Investigator of several projects in the Ecosystems Services and Management (ESM) Program at IIASA. She holds a PhD in economics.
Her main research interests are economic modeling, especially with respect to decision-making under uncertainty; energy and agricultural economics with focus on issues like bioenergy, food security and deforestation; integrated assessment with respect to climate change mitigation and adaptation; and socio-economic benefit assessment of Earth Observation.
In PROSUITE, her work focuses on analyzing the impact of uncertainty on the diffusion of new technologies such as Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).
Wolf Heinrich Reuter is currently a PhD student studying International Economics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration. He studied Economics, Information Management and Mathematics in Vienna, and was a Research Assistant at the ESM Program at IIASA.
His research at IIASA focuses on investment analysis under uncertainty and with endogenous prices. His contribution to PROSUITE is his work on modeling the impact of uncertainty on technology adoption.
Dialogik
Ortwin Renn (co-Leader, WP4) serves as full professor and chair of environmental sociology at Stuttgart University. He is a member of the panel on “Public Participation in Environmental Assessment and Decision Making” of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. His honors include an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and the “Distinguished Achievement Award” of the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA). Among his many political advisory activities is his chairmanship of the State Commission for Sustainable Development (German State of Baden-Württemberg). Renn is primarily interested in risk governance, political participation and technology assessment. He has published more than 30 books and 250 articles.
Piet Sellke (co-Leader, WP4) has studied sociology and political science at the University of Stuttgart as well as sociology at the University of Oregon (USA). Since 2004 Piet Sellke is senior researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences, since 2006 at the Department for Sociology of Technologies and Environment and with Dialogik gGmbH. His main research interests are security studies, risk perception, risk governance, technology assessment and sustainable development. Besides his work in PROSUITE, Piet Sellke was project leader of the project “Effective Risk Communications for the Improvised Explosive Device Threat”, funded by the Department of Homeland Security. Further, Mr. Sellke led the project “Public Information Response and Behavioral Intentions to Terrorism”, in which public perceptions and behavioral intentions in the context of CBRN attacks were investigated and compared between the United Kingdom and Germany. In 2009, Mr. Sellke consulted different research organizations on risk governance of critical infrastructures. Mr. Sellke further is project leader of EVA-SIM (Evacuation Simulation), in which an evacuation scenario is simulated for a community in Germany in case of a major natural hazard. Piet Sellke lectures at the University of Stuttgart social science methodology courses and at the University of Applied Sciences and Design environmental sociology courses.
Regina Schröter, social and political scientist, studied at the University of Stuttgart and completed her studies in 2009. Currently she is a researcher at DIALOGIK. Her research is focused on sustainability, risk research and social system theory. In PROSUITE she is much involved in the development of an indicators set measuring social aspects of sustainability.
Rainer Kuhn studied sociology and political science at the University of Stuttgart. Since October 2010 he has been a junior scientist at DIALOGIK non-profit institute for communication and cooperation research. In December 2010 he became a junior scientist at the Interdisciplinary Research Unit on Risk Governance and Sustainable Technology Development (ZIRN) at the University of Stuttgart. The exploratory focuses of his work are Consensus-building processes, Risk perception and Participation. Rainer’s main focus in the PROSUITE project is the planning and implementation of the group-delphis for an actual selection of quantitative and qualitative social indicators.
GreenDeltaTC (GD)
Dr.-Ing. Andreas Ciroth (Leader, WP7), managing director GreenDeltaTC
Environmental engineer by education, Andreas finished his PhD (error calculation in LCA) in 2001 at the TU Berlin and has been working since then in sustainability consulting. Andreas Ciroth is founder and managing director of GreenDeltaTC. Further, Andreas is Chair of the Work Area ‘Methodology and Data’ in the UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle initiative, and member of the advisory councils of ecoinvent and of the US LCI database. He was the first subject editor of the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment, for the field uncertainties, nominated in 2004, still holds this position, and is member of the Editorial Board of the Journal. Andreas is leading the openLCA project to create a free, open source sustainability assessment software. He teaches at the University Wuppertal and at the Technical University Darmstadt in Germany.
In PROSUITE, Andreas leads WP7, software development, and is involved in WP2, economic assessment, and WP8, dissemination and training.
Dipl.-Ing. Michael Srocka, head of software development GreenDeltaTC
Michael Srocka is an environmental engineer (TU Berlin 2004) and has worked with GreenDeltaTC for over 7 years, leading IT development for more than half of that time. Michael Srocka is a highly skilled senior programmer, with a special dedication to Java desktop and web applications. He is the technical lead of the openLCA project, and has developed several distinct life cycle software applications, such as the SimaPro Connectors and the e-DEA software. In PROSUITE, Michael lends his programming skills to adapting the openLCA application to the PROSUITE methodology (WP7).
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)
Prof Dr. Robert U Ayres
Gara Villalba holds a BS degree in Chemical Engineering, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and a PhD from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1999). She's researcher and teacher at the ICTA (Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals), at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Presently, her research is focused on industrial ecology, renewable energy resources, and education in environmental sciences. Within industrial ecology, she concentrates on the accounting of chemicals in our society, from their extraction to their use and final disposal or dissipation, establishing what-if scenarios and questioning present use in view of policy and future needs.
Laura Talens Peiró has a degree in chemical engineering from the Universitat Politècnica de València, BSc in combined studies in engineering and MSc in Clean Manufacturing Technologies from the University of Teesside. In 2009, she gained her Phd in environmental studies with the thesis dissertation “Exergy analysis of biofuels, an application to biodiesel production” at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). (“Exergy” means “the useful work that may be done by a certain quantity of energy”). From November 2009 to March 2011, Laura worked as a post-doc researcher in the project PROSUITE. She studied the metabolism of some key metals used in emerging technologies, as for example lithium for electric vehicles, and their use in mobile phones. In April 2011, she started a Marie Curie IEF fellowship to continue her research on scarce metals in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE) at INSEAD. Laura aims to explore further how accounting for exergy can help better assess the efficiency of industrial processes, including complex products like EEE, and renewable energy resources.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH)
Dr. Stefanie Hellweg (Leader, WP6) is full professor of Ecological Systems Design at ETH Zurich. She is currently leading and collaborating on various projects in cooperation with the industry sector and various universities, funded by national and international authorities as well as private companies. Her main research interests are the environmental assessment of products and emerging technologies (e.g. nanotechnology), decision-support tools for specific industrial sectors (e.g. waste management within the cement industry), and the development of impact assessment methodologies (e.g. for water use and indoor exposure).
Stefanie leads the transdisciplinary team of case study investigators in PROSUITE.
Tobias Walser has a Master Degree in Environmental Sciences from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETHZ). His current research focuses on the fate and exposure assessment of engineered nanoparticles. He works in the group of Ecological Systems Design at ETH, under the lead of Prof. Stefanie Hellweg. His main task for PROSUITE is the case study on nanotechnology.
Institut Symlog (SYMLOG)
Claire Mays (Leader, WP8) (Harvard AB '81; U. Paris-VII DESS '85) is Programme Manager at Institut Symlog. A social psychologist, Claire was the elected Secretary of the Society for Risk Analysis-Europe and for ten years was Editor of the European Review of Applied Psychology. In PROSUITE, Claire acts as Work Package Leader for WP8, "Dissemination", and partner in WP4 "Social assessment". She brings her experience in coordinating pluridisciplinary and multi-stakeholder study groups in the area of risk assessment and governance, providing stakeholder outreach and involvement competence as well as analytic and editorial skills. University of Technology. Key in Jo’s work is managing natural resources in a technically efficient way. His particular expertise in thermodynamics-based sustainability analysis at process, plant and cradle-to-gate level is of value in developing and assessing new technologies. Jo has projects in collaboration with Cuba, Chile, Brazil, Kenya, Vietnam, etc; he has published more than 150 papers in international journals included in the Web of Science, with more than 2000 citations and an h-index of 27. He was named a laureate of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Arts of Belgium in 2008.
Nina Schneider (ICP MA-2 ‘08) worked for ten years as a brand director in corporate strategy and communication before taking degrees in occupational psychology and alternative conflict resolution. She represents the engaged layperson view in environmental communication projects. Nina has been the principal designer and driver behind the PROSUITE Newsletters and has contributed significantly to our website development.
Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology (MTA SZKI)
Anna Vari received her PhD. in Economics in the Budapest University of Economics. She is Professor in the Department of Environmental Economics at the Budapest University of Technical and Economic Sciences. Her main fields of interest include environmental policy, risk analysis, conflict management, and public participation. She was principal investigator of a number of Hungarian and international research projects sponsored by various funding organisations, including the OECD, GEF, UN, REC, IIASA, EBRD, the US NSF, among others. Between 2000 and 2010 she was a consultant to the OECD NEA Forum of Stakeholder Confidence (FSC). As a head of department of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute of Sociology, she coordinated several Hungarian research teams involved in the following EU FP6 and FP7 projects: Safe Foods, COWAM2, Civil Society for Sustainability (CSS), PROSUITE and InSOTEC.
Zoltan Ferencz is an economist and political scientist. He received his PhD in Sociology at Eötvös Lóránd Science University Budapest, Faculty of Social Sciences in 2012. Zoltan is working as research fellow in the Institute for Sociology - Central for social Sciences at Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His main research topics are: Environmental sociology (floods, radioactive waste, food safety, sustainability; etc.); R&D policy; Social vision for the future; Lifelong learning and research methodology. In the last 8 years he was involved in several international projects (NATO CCMS; FP6 - SAFEFOODS, COWAM2, TLM-NET; FP7 - CSS; PROSUITE; INSOTEC).
Radboud University Nijmegen (RU)
Prof. Dr. Mark Huijbregts is a professor in the area of Integrated Environmental Assessment at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is an expert in the modelling of the behaviour and combined effects of multiple environmental stressors. He has authored over 130 peer reviewed scientific publications, is member of the editorial board of International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment and leads the FP7-project LC-IMPACT on the development of novel, global scale life cycle impact assessment methods. He is also partner in the FP7 projects CADASTER and DESIRE. He also contributed to the development of the Methodology ‘ReCiPe’, a coherent midpoint and endpoint indicator methodology for life cycle impact assessment and the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook, specifically to the ‘Guidance document for LCIA models, methods and factors’.
Dr. Rosalie van Zelm is a tenure track researcher at the Department of Environmental Science, Institute for Wetland and Water Research of RU and an expert in developing life cycle impact assessment models at various geographical scales. She has major experience in methodology improvements in several impact categories, such as water scarcity and land use. She is involved in the FP7-projects LC-IMPACT and TOXTRAIN. She also development models that were used in the development of the Methodology ‘ReCiPe’, a coherent midpoint and endpoint indicator methodology for life cycle impact assessment. Her work is included in the International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook, specifically the ‘Guidance document for LCIA models, methods and factors’.
Pré Consultants (PRE)
Mark Goedkoop established PRé in 1990 and pioneered the field of LCA. He is widely recognized as an international thought leader in the field of Sustainability Metrics and Methodology Development. Mark holds an MSc in Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. This may explain his focus on the development of practical, yet scientifically sound, solutions dedicated to improving the environmental and social performance of products and services.Mark’s primary goal is to help companies create value from sustainable products and services. Mark is responsible for the development of pioneering methodologies for impact assessment (Eco-indicator 95/99 and ReCiPe). He published important studies on sustainable consumption, rebounds, and product service systems methodology. He also initiated the development of the world’s most widely used LCA software, SimaPro.
João Fontes is a consultant with a focus on the human element in sustainability issues. He works on projects related to sustainability assessments, CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility), and social sustainability. He has experience with multi-criteria assessments. João holds a BSc in Information Technology and a MSc in environmental science. João brings wide-ranging international experience to PRé and has worked in culturally diverse environments. He started his career tailoring decisions support systems for companies in Brazil and Europe. He then worked with Fair Trade in a non-profit network and as a freelance consultant. João is a member of the Social Metrics Committee of The Sustainability Consortium.
In PROSUITE, PRé Consultants contribute to the development of an integrated software concept and user interface concepts, both in WP1 and WP7.
Fundação da Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia-Universidade Nova de Lisboa (FFCT/UNL)
Paula Antunes (Leader, WP5)
Rui Santos
Nuno Videira