Professor Julia Steinberger researches Ecological Economics at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. After a PhD in experimental physics, Professor Steinberger moved to the interdisciplinary areas of industrial ecology and ecological economics, first as a postdoc at the universities of Lausanne and Zurich, then in Vienna at the Institute of Social Ecology, and subsequently as a professor at the University of Leeds in the UK. Her research examines the connections between resource use (energy and materials, greenhouse gas emissions) and societal performance (economic activity and human wellbeing). From 2017 to 2022, she was the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Leadership Award for her research project ‘Living Well Within Limits’, investigating how universal human well-being might be achieved within planetary boundaries. Since 2023, she co-leads the EU ERC Synergy grant “REAL- A Post-Growth Deal” on post-growth societies. She is Lead Author for the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report with Working Group 3.

Title of lecture:
Living well within limits: is it possible? And what will it take?

John Ochsendorf is an engineer, educator, and designer on the MIT faculty since 2002. He is the MIT Class of 1942 Professor with appointments in the departments of architecture and civil and environmental engineering. Trained at Cornell, Princeton, and the University of Cambridge, he is known for creative research at the intersection of structural engineering and architecture with a particular interest in historic structures. He served as the director of the American Academy in Rome from 2017–2020, and is the founding director of the MIT Morningside Academy for Design.

Title of lecture:
Designing for circularity

Forrest Meggers is an associate professor of architecture at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. His fields of knowledge include building systems design and integration, radiant systems, desiccants, exergy analysis; geothermal energy; seasonal energy storage; building materials; thermodynamics and heat transfer; and heat pumps. Meggers founded and directs CHAOS (Cooling and Heating for Architecturally Optimized Systems) Lab, where he and his research team investigate alternative thermal paradigms to challenge the status quo in thermal system design for the built environment. Meggers has several patents and founded Aquaseek.tech and CHAOSense.com to bring sorption and sensor technology to market while working closely with industry and standards organizations to accelerate critical opportunities for innovation adoption. He prides himself as a bicycle mechanic growing up on a small farm in Iowa, an origin that laid the groundwork for a neverending career of trying to fix broken things.

Title of lecture:
There is no such thing as a comfortable room – new paradigms for heating and cooling

Ruchi Choudhary is Professor of Architectural Engineering in the Engineering Department at University of Cambridge. She specializes in simulation methods for predicting energy demand of the built environment. She is leading the research group on Digital Twins of Built Environment at the Alan Turing Institute (2018-2023). At Cambridge, she leads the multi-disciplinary Energy Efficient Cities Initiative, initially funded by a Science & Innovation award at Cambridge. She is leading projects on modelling underground heat and city-scale geothermal systems, urban farming, and end-use energy demand modelling, with 70 papers in peer reviewed journals. In 2019 she became fellow of the International Building Performance & Simulation Association (IBPSA). She is on the editorial board of J. of Building Performance Simulation, BSER&T the CIBSE Journal, Sustainable Cities and Society, and ICE J. of Smart Infrastructure & Construction.

Title of lecture:
Digital Twins: the hype and the hyper