BGU CIRCULAR ECONOMY SYMPOSIUM
December 25, 2024
Speakers
Dr. Shoshanna Saxe is an Associate Professor in the University of Toronto’s Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering, Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Sustainable Infrastructure and the Director of the Centre for the Sustainable Built Environment. She investigates the relationship between the infrastructure we build and the society we create to identify opportunities – and pathways – to better align infrastructure provision with sustainability.
Her research focuses around two main questions: 1) What should we build? and 2) how should we build it? Saxe is a former Action Canada fellow, sits on Waterfront Toronto’s Capital Peer Review Panel and NASEM Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment.
Dr. Tomer Fishman is an Assistant Professor of Industrial Ecology at the Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) at Leiden University, The Netherlands. His research is focused towards understanding the material stocks that accumulate in our buildings, vehicles, infrastructure, consumer products, green technologies, and other long-lived products, and how they form the interlinkages between wellbeing and welfare, economic development, and the environment. His work combines multiple quantitative approaches, including material flow analysis, geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing, econometrics, and dynamic models.
Tomer is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project Materials-GRoWL, which focuses on the cities and settlements of the Global South aiming to fill gaps in scientific
knowledge of their past and future buildings’ resource use and their roles in wellbeing. . He is work package leader in the Horizon Europe project CIRCOMOD to model circular economy potentials for climate change mitigation. He is also involved in modelling electronics material flows and stocks in the Circular Circuits project of the NWO Dutch Research Council. In the Horizon Europe project FUTURAM on the future availability of secondary resources he is involved in estimating city-level construction and demolition waste flows in the EU. He is also working on assessing the Belt and Road Initiative’s resource impacts vis-a—vis socioeconomic development.
Dr. Makov investigates the potential to address social and environmental challenges through sustainable business practices, technologies, and innovations. Adopting a systems approach, she draws from the fields of data science, public policy, and behavioral economics, and combines methods including machine learning, network analysis, and psychological experiments.
Her goal is to generate insights informing theory, policy, and real-world decision making on issues including pro-social behavior, inequality, and the circular economy.
Dr. Matan Mayer is an Associate Professor at IE University where he teaches courses in architectural design and construction. His research focuses on environmental impact reduction of material use in the built environment through the implementation of life cycle design measures. Mayer’s work has been featured in multiple peer reviewed publications and has been awarded the Peter Rice Prize, the AIA Excellence in Design Award, and the ARCC Research Incentive Award. His previous appointments include a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Harvard Center for Green Buildings and Cities, a doctoral research fellowships at the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design at the University of Stuttgart, and a research fellowship at the Composite Construction Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
Matan is an Editorial Board member at Technology | Architecture + Design (TAD) Journal, where he is also the Issue Editor of the special issue “Circularity” (2023). He holds a post-professional masters and a doctorate from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, as well as a professional B.Arch from Tel Aviv University.
Dr. Atar Herziger is an environmental psychologist whose research focuses on sustainable consumer behavior. She examines the psycho-social and contextual factors that motivate, hinder, and bias consumers’ judgments and behaviors as they relate to sustainability. Her work examines a variety of behaviors, ranging from minimalism, through sustainable diets and second-hand consumption, to electric vehicle adoption. Her projects often employ an experimental or quasi-experimental approach and are conducted in both
lab and field settings. Dr. Herziger’s research has been published in Nature Climate Change, Journal of Environmental Psychology, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, and Ecological Economics, among other journals.
Dr Dafna Goor is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the London Business School. Her research interests include branding, luxury marketing, authenticity, consumer identity, symbolic consumption, status seeking and consumer wellbeing. Her work has been published in the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and in The Research Handbook on Luxury Branding.
Dafna holds a A from TAU and a PhD from Harvard Business School/