Claudia R. Binder, a Swiss, Canadian and Colombian citizen, was born in Montreal and spent most of her childhood in Switzerland and Colombia. She studied at ETH Zurich from 1985 to 1996, earning a degree in biochemistry and then a PhD in environmental sciences. After conducting her post-doctoral research at the University of Maryland in the US from 1996 to 1998, she returned to Switzerland and took a position as a senior research scientist at ETH Zurich, studying the interaction between human and environmental systems at the Institute for Natural and Social Science Interface. In 2006, Binder joined the University of Zurich as an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, and in 2009 moved to the University of Graz in Austria where she served as a full professor of systems science. In 2011, she took a position at the University of Munich’s Department of Geography as a full professor of human-environment relations.
Binder joined EPFL in March 2016 and set up the Laboratory for Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS) at ENAC; she also holds the La Mobilière Chair on Urban Ecology and Sustainable Living.
Her research involves analyzing, modelling and assessing the transition of urban systems towards sustainability. She looks in particular at how we can better understand the dynamics of urban metabolism, what characterizes a sustainable city, and what drives and hinders transformation processes. She does so by combining knowledge from social, natural and data science. Her research focuses on food, energy, and sustainable living and transport in urban systems.
In Switzerland, Binder was appointed to the Research Council, Programs Division of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) in 2016 and serves on the Steering Committee of the SNSF’s National Research Program 71, “Managing Energy Consumption” and the Swiss Competence Centers for Energy Research (SCCER). She is also a member of the Steering Board on Sustainability Research for the Swiss Academies of Arts and Sciences. In 2019, she was elected as a member of the University Council of the University of Munich (LMU).
At EPFL, Binder is the academic director of Design Together, a cross-disciplinary teaching initiative. She was appointed to the management team of the Energy Center in 2018 and as head of the working group on EPFL’s energy and sustainability strategy in 2019.
Maria Anna Hecher obtained her PhD degree at the University of Graz, Austria. In her recent research, she investigated regional energy transitions from a socio-technical perspective. She put a special focus on technology adoption decisions to derive strategies and policy recommendations fostering sustainable transitions. Therefore, she pursued an interdisciplinary approach and combined environmental as well as social science methods (i.e. MFA, ABM, LCA, expert interviews, surveys). After her PhD, she had the chance to put her knowledge into practice and managed a three-year programme on regional sustainabiltiy projects in an energy region in Styria, Austria. In cooperation with local decision-makers, public authorities, schools, companies and the local population, she realized projects in the field of renewable energy and sustainable mobility. Recently, she worked as a consultant in an energy agency for and in the city of Graz. She managed projects in the field of e-mobility and spatial energy planning collaborating with public authorities, energy suppliers, city planners and research institutions. Her work in recent years, has mostly been performed in an inter- and transdisciplinary setting integrating knowledge from different scientific disciplines and fields of practice at the interface between research, politics and society.
I have always had an affinity for environmental sustainability themes and this led me to undertake a course of study in energy engineering, with the hope to directly and personally contribute to the environmental cause.I am currently a PhD candidate at EPFL (C. Binder, HERUS).Besides the academic commitment, I’m a semi-professional inline hockey player for Hockey Club Milano Quanta team. This passion allowed me to live independently in Milan, while having several satisfactions winning the Italian A league twice and two world cup silver medals. Moreover, Politecnico di Milano awarded me with a scholarship for Sport merit (Watch also).
Glòria Serra Coch is an architect by the Polytechnique School of Catalonia (UPC), Architecture School of Barcelona. During her studies and after graduation, she assisted the research team Architecture, Energy and Environment (AiEM), exploring methods of integrating renewable energies in cities as well as finding ways of measuring the impact of urban morphology in energetic parameters.In 2017, she obtained la Caixa Fellowship for Postgraduate Studies to pursue a MS. in Urban Planning at Columbia University, New York. She graduated with a concentration in Urban Analytics and won the Planning Practice Thesis Award, for analyzing the impact of mapping in the historical planning of New York City neighborhoods. At Columbia, she assisted researching the effects of mobility networks in social accessibility, using GIS public data to map individual opportunity based on time-space daily constraints.After graduation, she combined professional practice with academics and research. She started working in the Urban Planning team of CallisonRTKL, where she also got involved with the newly created research division and participated in the first Digital Evolution Lab. At the same time, she also assisted, as adjunct professor, a joint architecture-urban planning studio of Columbia University focused on Puerto Rico’s inner connectivity.
