Jury



2010 Jury

Hillary Brown Ryan Chin Jennifer Corriero Sasha Dichter Mitchell Joachim
Alan Kay Jonathan Rose Susan Szenasy Hardin Tibbs John Thackara José Zaglul


2009 Jury

Adam Bly Bill Browning Jamais Cascio Edie Farwell
Helena Norberg-Hodge John + Nancy Jack Todd Greg Watson


2008 Jury

Janine Benyus Sir Nicholas Grimshaw Hazel Henderson Danny Hillis
Hunter Lovins William McDonough Vandana Shiva



2010 Jury




Hillary Brown

Hillary Brown

As a former design director and Assistant Commissioner at New York City's Department of Design and Construction, Hillary Brown founded its Office of Sustainable Design. She was managing editor of the nationally and internationally recognized City of New York High Performance Building Guidelines, co-author of the U.S. Green Building Council's State and Local Green Building Toolkit, and author of Implementing High Performance Buildings. Additionally, she envisioned and has co-authored the just-released High Performance Infrastructure: Best Practices for the Public Right-Of-Way for New York City and the Design Trust for Public Space.

Currently a practicing architect, she is principal of the firm New Civic Works, where she specializes in green design for schools, universities, public buildings, and infrastructure. She teaches sustainable design at the Princeton and Columbia University Schools of Architecture as well as at the Bard College Center for Environmental Policy, and she is a Fellow of the City University of New York Institute for Urban Systems.

She has served on the Board of Directors of the U.S. Green Building Council and is now a Board Member for the nationally recognized Healthy Schools Network.

A graduate of the Yale University School of Architecture, she has been a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Bosch Public Policy Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, where she examined green building practices in Germany.

Hillary Brown, New Civicworks

 

Ryan Chin
Ryan Chin

Ryan Chin is the Project Leader for the 2009 winning proposal of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge. He is a fourth-year PhD student at the MIT Media laboratory in the Smart Cities research group. He is building the car of the future – a foldable, stackable, sharable, electric, two-passenger city vehicle that rethinks urban mobility. This work, in collaboration with General Motors, takes into account problems of parking, congestion, energy efficiency, pollution, communication, and considers the best and most efficient uses of available resources in urban environments.

In 2007 Chin lead a team of Media Lab students in the creation of the RoboScooter – a lightweight electric folding scooter designed as a clean, green mobility solution for today’s crowded cities. The full-scale working prototype was exhibited at the Milan Motorshow in November 2007. Both key projects serve as platforms for investigating urban design, mass-customization, personalization in product-development processes, and MIT Media Lab technological innovation.

In 2007 Chin co-founded the MIT Smart Customization group with Professors William J. Mitchell, Marvin Minsky, and Frank T. Piller with the task of improving the ability of companies to efficiently customize products and services across a diverse set of industries and customer groups. Chin at MIT earned a master of science in media arts and sciences and a master of architecture; and bachelor’s degrees in civil engineering and architecture from the Catholic University of America.

Ryan Chin, Smart Cities Group
 

Jennifer Corriero
Jennifer Corriero

Jennifer Corriero is an innovator and leader, bringing tremendous insight into understanding, reaching and motivating youth. Jennifer's experience includes developing and driving youth programs related to technology, collaboration and entrepreneurship, and has designed and delivered an extensive range of interactive learning experiences with the aim of empowering youth as community leaders.

In 2003, Jennifer was a member of the Official Canadian Government Delegation to the World Summit on the Information Society. She has presented and supported civil society engagement at events including the World Urban Forum, International AIDS Conference, World Summit on Sustainable Development, Youth Employment Summit and Global Knowledge Partnership International Forum.

Jennifer has been a youth engagement strategy consultant for a range of organizations including Microsoft, TD Bank, VanCity Credit Union, Ontario Science Centre and the Canadian Government. She has a BA (Liberal Studies) with a focus on 'Business, Communications, Technology and Culture' and a Masters in Environmental Studies from York University.

Jennifer Corriero, Taking it Global

 

Sasha Dichter
Sasha Dichter


Sasha is the Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund, a global non-profit that invests in enterprises that serve the poor. In this role, he leads up capital raising globally for Acumen Fund and is responsible for creating an engaged, vibrant, and connected community of Acumen Fund Partners, Advisors and supporters around the world. He is a member of Acumen Fund's leadership team. Sasha is also a successful blogger on storytelling, nonprofits and philanthropy at http://sashadichter.wordpress.com, where he made a splash with his Manifesto for Nonprofit CEOs.

Before Acumen Fund, Sasha worked as Global Manager of Corporate Citizenship at GE Money, expanding financial offerings to underserved communities globally; and as a Senior Program Manager at IBM, spearheading the company’s corporate citizenship strategy and launching a leadership program for school administrators. Sasha began his career as a management consultant for Booz & Company in the telecommunications practice, based in New York and working primarily in Latin America and Europe, and he has also worked with the microfinance group of Bank Rakyat Indonesia and with the venture-backed Navic Networks, recently acquired by Microsoft. Sasha holds a BA from Harvard College, a Masters in Public Administration in International Development from Harvard’s Kennedy School and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Sasha Dichter, Acumen Fund

 

Mitchell Joachim
Mitchell Joachim

Mitchell Joachim earned a Ph.D at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MAUD Harvard University, M.Arch. Columbia University, BPS SUNY at Buffalo with Honors. He is a Co-Founder of Terrefuge & Terreform ONE. Currently he is faculty at Columbia University and Parsons. Formerly an architect at Gehry Partners, and Pei Cobb Freed.

He has been awarded the Moshe Safdie Research Fellowship, and the Martin Family Society Fellow for Sustainability. He won the History Channel/ Infiniti Award for the City of the Future, NY and Time Magazine Best Invention of the Year 2007, Compacted Car w/ MIT Smart Cities. His project, Fab Tree Hab, has been exhibited at MoMA and widely published. He was selected by Wired magazine for "The 2008 Smart List: 15 People the Next President Should Listen To". Rolling Stone magazine honored Mitchell in "The 100 People Who Are Changing America".

Mitchell Joachim, Terreform One
 

Alan Kay
Alan Kay

President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., is one of the earliest pioneers of object-oriented programming, personal computing, and graphical user interfaces. His contributions have been recognized with the Charles Stark Draper Prize of the National Academy of Engineering[1] “for the vision, conception, and development of the first practical networked personal computers,” the Alan M. Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery “for pioneering many of the ideas at the root of contemporary object-oriented programming languages, leading the team that developed Smalltalk, and for fundamental contributions to personal computing,” and the Kyoto Prize from the Inamori Foundation “for creation of the concept of modern personal computing and contribution to its realization.” This work was done in the rich context of ARPA and Xerox PARC with many talented colleagues.

At Xerox PARC he invented Smalltalk, the first completely object-oriented programming, authoring and operating system (which included the now ubiquitous overlapping window interface), instigated the bit-map screen, screen painting and animation, participated in desk-top publishing, other desktop media, and the development of the Alto, the first modern networked personal computer. This was part of the larger process at PARC that created an entire genre of personal computing including: the GUI, Ethernet, Laserprinting, modern word processing, client-servers and peer-peer networking.

He has been a Xerox Fellow, Chief Scientist of Atari, Apple Fellow, Disney Fellow, and HP Senior Fellow. He is currently an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at UCLA. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization dedicated to children, learning and advanced systems research.

Alan Kay, Viewpoints Research Institute
 

Jonathan Rose
Jonathan Rose

Jonathan F.P. Rose’s business, not-for-profit and public policy work all focus on creating a more environmentally, socially and economically responsible world. In 1989, Mr. Rose founded Jonathan Rose Companies LLC, a multi-disciplinary real estate development, planning, consulting and investment firm, as a leading green urban solutions provider. The firm currently manages over $1.5 billion of work, much of it in close collaboration with not-for-profits, towns and cities.

A thought leader in the Smart Growth, national infrastructure, green building, and affordable housing movements, Mr. Rose is a frequent speaker and writer. His work has received widespread media attention from CNN to The New York Times and was recently profiled in e², a PBS series on sustainable development. His many published works include the chapter, "Green Urbanism: Developing Restorative Urban Biophelia" featured in Biophilic Design, a book recently honored with a 2008 American Publishers Award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence.

Mr. Rose is a co-founder of the Garrison Institute with his wife, Diana Rose. He graduated from Yale University in 1974 with a B.A. in Psychology, and received a Masters in Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980.

Jonathan Rose, Jonathan Rose Companies

 

Susan Szenasy
Susan Szenasy

Susan S. Szenasy is Editor in Chief of METROPOLIS, the award-winning New York City-based magazine of architecture, culture, and design. Since 1986 she has lead the magazine through years of landmark design journalism, achieving domestic and international recognition. She is internationally recognized as an authority on sustainability and design.

Susan sits on the boards of the Council for Interior Design Accreditation (formerly FIDER), FIT Interior Design, the Center for Architecture Advisory Board, and the Landscape Architecture Foundation. She has been honored with two IIDA Presidential Commendations, is an honorary member of the ASLA, and the 2008 recipient of the ASID Patron’s Prize and Presidential Commendation. Along with METROPOLIS Publisher Horace Havemeyer III, Susan was a 2007 recipient of the Civitas August Heckscher Award for Community Service and Excellence.

Susan holds an MA in Modern European History from Rutgers University, and honorary doctorates from Kendall College of Art and Design, the Art Center College of Design, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She lives in New York’s East Village in a small loft designed by Harry Allen, where she moved in 2001 to reduce her ecological footprint.

Susan Szenasy, Metropolis Magazine

 

Hardin Tibbs
Hardin Tibbs

Hardin Tibbs is a UK-based strategy consultant and futures researcher with extensive experience of scenario-based strategic thinking. His work is focused on helping organizations move forward with confidence in an environment marked by accelerating social and technological change, and rising economic and environmental instability. He has worked with major companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations in the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. This work has spanned a wide range of industries, government areas and institutions, including electricity, aviation, cement, insurance, household products, food, biotechnology, urban infrastructure, natural resources, taxation, transport and defense. In addition, he frequently gives presentations on future-related topics. He is a skilled strategic analyst, process facilitator and presenter, with a background in product development and visual communications. In addition to his strategy work, Hardin has made significant contributions on issues involving technology and environment. Hardin is an Associate Fellow at the Saïd Business School, Oxford University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA) in London, UK.
Web: www.hardintibbs.com Email: htibbs@well.com


Hardin Tibbs, Futures Researcher and Strategy Consultant
 

John Thackara
John Thackara

John Thackara is Director of Doors of Perception. Founded as a conference in Amsterdam in 1993, Doors of Perception now organises festivals and projects around the world in which grassroots innovators work with designers to imagine sustainable futures - and take practical steps to realize them. In addition to event production, John Thackara also helps cities and regions build next-generation institutions. A former London bus driver, and later a book and magazine editor, John was the first Director (1993-1999) of the Netherlands Design Institute. He was programme director in 2007 of Designs of the time (Dott 07) a new biennial in England. In 2008 he was commissioner of City Eco Lab at Cite du Design in St Etienne, the main French design biennial. John is a an Associate of The Young Foundation, UK; senior advisor on sustainability to the UK Design Council; and an advisor on sustainability indicators to Agence France Presse. John's blog (doorsofperception.com) and monthly newsletter are widely read in 60 countries. His most recent book was In The Bubble: Designing In A Complex World (MIT Press).

John Thackara, Doors of Perception
 

José Zaglul
José Zaglul

José A. Zaglul is the President of EARTH University, an international, private, not-for-profit institution in Costa Rica, dedicated to preparing leaders with ethical values to contribute to the sustainable development of the tropics and to construct a prosperous and just society. Dr. Zaglul has been President of EARTH University since its inception in 1989 and has provided the vision and leadership for this innovative institution and its unique educational environment that encourages the development of responsible leadership based on values, social commitment, environmental consciousness, academic excellence and an entrepreneurial and enterprising spirit.

Prior to serving as EARTH University’s President, Dr. Zaglul was Head of the Animal Production Department at the Centro Agrícola Tropical de Investigación y Enseñanza (CATIE) in Costa Rica, an international center for tropical research and the oldest postgraduate school of agriculture in Latin America. From 1981 to 1985, Dr. Zaglul was a Food Science professor and later Vice President of Research and Extension of the Instituto Tecnológico de Costa Rica (ITCR).

Born and raised in Costa Rica to parents of Lebanese descent, Dr. Zaglul obtained his B.S. in Agricultural Economics and M.S. in Animal Science from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. He later received a second M.S. in Food Science and Human Nutrition and a PhD in Meat and Muscle Biology from the University of Florida.

José A. Zaglul, Earth University



2009 Jury



Adam Bly
Adam Bly

Adam Bly is the Founder and CEO of Seed Media Group and the Editor-in-Chief of Seed.

At the age of 16, Adam became the youngest researcher at the National Research Council of Canada, where he spent three years working with a team studying cell adhesion and cancer. While at NRC, Adam identified a cultural shift in the making: science is transforming business, politics, the arts and current affairs unlike ever before; today, science affects every single person on the planet and science literacy is essential to modern society. Adam set out to launch a new type of magazine that captured the ideas, issues and icons shaping this global science culture. With the receipt of the 2006 Independent Press Award for Best Science and Technology Coverage, it was noted that “the best comparison for Seed is the early years of Rolling Stone, when music was less a subject than a lens for viewing culture.” Under Adam’s leadership, the magazine received two National Magazine Award nominations in 2007, for Best Design and for General Excellence, the magazine industry’s highest honor. Seed is now the flagship division of Seed Media Group, a science media and technology company Adam founded in 2005 to extend the magazine’s mission to other platforms and markets.

Adam is the recipient of numerous international prizes. In 2007, he was selected as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. He is a recipient of the Golden Jubilee Medal from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and his achievements have been highlighted by former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, “for showing people the scope and power of science not just as an object of study but as a key to understanding the world around us.”

Adam has spoken around the world on the relationship between science and society in the 21st century, most notably at the World Economic Forum (Davos), STS Forum (Kyoto), DLD (Munich), OECD-MOST Conference (Beijing), ideaCity (Toronto), the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), and the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and at universities including MIT, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, McGill Business School, and Peking University. He sits on the Executive Committee of the American Committee for the Weizmann Institute of Science (ACWIS) and the Advisory Board of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Communications Initiative. He lives in New York.

Adam Bly
 

Bill Browning
Bill Browning

Early in his career, Bill helped build Buckminster Fuller’s last experimental structure, based on advanced geometry systems. In 1991, he founded Green Development Services at Rocky Mountain Institute, an entrepreneurial, non-profit “think and do tank” whose work advances energy-efficient and environmentally-responsive design. His 300+ consulting projects at RMI included new towns, resorts, building renovations, and high-profile demonstration projects including Wal-Mart’s Eco-mart, the Greening of the White House, and the Sydney 2000 Olympic Village. He also worked on energy efficiency improvements for a number of U.S. Department of Defense facilities, including the Pentagon, the Navy Yard, the Air Force Academy, and the Pacific Air Force Headquarters. In 1999 Green Development Services was awarded the President’s Council for Sustainable Development/Renew America Prize. Bill remains a Senior Fellow at RMI.

Beginning in 2004, Bill was the Director of Design and Environment for Haymount, a New Urbanist community in Virginia. In this capacity he led the development’s site planning, authored a set of design guidelines, and guided the strategic development of innovative infrastructure systems for energy and resource management. In 2005 he left Haymount to join Jeffrey Bannon in co-founding Browning+Bannon LLC, an independent real estate and consulting firm focused on environmentally responsive development.

Bill was a founding member of the U.S. Green Building Council’s Board of Directors, and still serves on the USGBC’s Governance Board. Over the years Bill has served in a Board or advisory role to numerous other organizations, including: the Nature Conservancy, Greening America, the American Institute of Architects, the Colorado Alliance for Environmental Education, RealEnergy, the Roaring Fork Conservancy, and the American Society for Testing and Materials. Currently, he is a member of the Real Estate Council for The Trust for Public Land, the Interface “Green Dream Team,” the Department of Defense’s Defense Science Board, and is an editorial advisor for Environmental Building News, Environmental Design & Construction Magazine, and Green @ Work.

In addition to consulting, Bill writes and lectures widely on sustainable design and building practices. He is a co-author of Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate; A Primer on Sustainable Building; and “Greening the Building and the Bottom Line.” He has published articles in Architectural Record, Progressive Architecture, Urban Land, and AIA’s Environmental Resource Guide. His work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Popular Science, among others, and he has been interviewed by NPR, CNN, and PBS.

Bill received a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design from the University of Colorado, specializing in energy-conscious architecture and resource management. He holds a Masters of Science in Real Estate Development from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded the MIT Center for Real Estate's 1991 Public-Sector Fellowship, and, in 1995, the Charles H. Spaulding Award. In 1998 Bill was named one of five people “Making a Difference” by Buildings magazine. In 2001 he was selected as an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, and in 2004 he was honored with the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership Award. Bill is based in Washington, D.C.

Bill Browning
 

Jamais Cascio
Jamais Cascio

Jamais Cascio writes about the intersection of emerging technologies, environmental dilemmas, and cultural transformation, specializing in the design and creation of plausible scenarios of the future. His work focuses on the importance of long-term, systemic thinking, emphasizing the power of openness, transparency and flexibility as catalysts for building a more resilient society.

Cascio’s work appears in publications as diverse as Metropolis, Technology Review, and ForeignPolicy.com. He was featured in National Geographic Television’s SIX DEGREES, its 2008 documentary on the effects of global warming. Cascio has spoken about future possibilities around the world, at venues including South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, Texas, FuturShow3000 in Bologna, Italy, the 2007 Singularity Summit in San Francisco, and the TED 2006 conference, “The Future We Will Create,” in Monterey, California.

Recent projects of note include:
  • In late 2008, he served as scenario design lead for the “massively multiplayer forecasting game,” Superstruct, for the Institute for the Future, creating the world of 2019 inhabited by the game’s thousands of players.
  • In 2008, he was invited to be a kick-off blogger for the Science Fiction Channel’s future-focused website, How You Can Save the World, joining luminaries such as Richard Branson, physicist Michio Kaku, and astronaut Rusty Schweikart.
  • In 2007, he served as lead author on the Metaverse Roadmap Overview, a cross-industry examination of the next decade’s evolution of online technologies.
  • In 2007, his work on calculating the carbon footprint of cheeseburgers went viral, appearing in dozens of newspapers and magazines, multiple radio programs, hundreds of websites, and even as part of a museum exhibit. Increasingly, the cheeseburger has become an icon of the surprising carbon impact of everyday life.

Cascio has worked in the field of scenario development for over a decade, and is currently a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future. After several years as technology specialist at scenario planning pioneer Global Business Network, he went on to craft a wide array of scenarios on topics including energy (for an industry think tank), nuclear proliferation (for a political research non-profit), and sustainable development (for a multi-client project). Cascio serves as the Director of Impacts Analysis for the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, and is a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.

In 2003, he co-founded WorldChanging.com, the award-winning website dedicated to finding and calling attention to models, tools and ideas for building a “bright green” future. In his time at WorldChanging, Cascio wrote the plurality of the site’s content, covering topics including urban design, climate science, renewable energy, open source models, emerging technologies, social networks, “leapfrog” global development, and much more. In March, 2006, he started Open the Future as his online home.

Cascio has also applied his scenario development skills in the entertainment industry, advising multiple television and film projects, and designing several well-received science fiction game settings, including Transhuman Space: Broken Dreams (speculating on the future of the developing world) and Transhuman Space: Toxic Memes (examining future popular culture and political movements).

Cascio lives outside of San Francisco, California, with his wife, two cats, four Macs, and the inevitable hybrid cars.

Jamais Cascio

 

Edie Farwell
Edie Farwell

Edie Farwell is the Program Director of the Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program of the Sustainability Institute.

The Donella Meadows Leadership Fellows Program was launched in 2002 to honor and build on the life example of Dr. Donella Meadows. Donella’s life and work expressed a dedication to scientific rigor, a deeply grounded optimism, and the ability to communicate clearly and compassionately. Her systems approach enabled her to see the root causes of seemingly intractable problems - poverty, war, environmental degradation - and her deep affection for people and the Earth gave her a unique power to reach others. Our communities, our state, our country and our world need more people with this combination of skills. Supporting such people and enhancing their effectiveness, reach, and mutual connectivity is the mission of the Fellows Program.

The Fellowship aims to accelerate the shift to global sustainability by increasing the impact of well-positioned sustainability leaders. Fellows learn to address social, economic and environmental issues at their root causes while benefiting from a national and international network of sustainability champions from business, government, non-governmental organizations, tribes, military and philanthropy. Fellows are selected for their ability to grapple effectively with multi-stakeholders and diverse issues, and for an approach to sustainability that displays analytic clarity, systemic change and attention to spirit, values, and meaning. Systems thinking, reflective conversation and the discipline of vision are the suite of tools Edie and her team use to leverage Fellows’ individual and collective ability to design and implement the systems needed to bring forth a life-sustaining society.

As the number of alumni of the Fellows Program grow, Edie is launching a social networking project to significantly increase the impact the Fellows make to global sustainability by joint projects across sectors, their expanded interactions with each other, each other’s networks and with Sustainability Institute partners, colleagues and networks.

The Sustainability Institute (SI), founded in 1996 by the late Donella (Dana) Meadows, is committed to helping society move toward sustainability through its systems analysis, multi-stakeholder convenings, writing, teaching and mentoring. Applying the principles of organizational learning and system dynamics, SI works with individuals as well as public and private entities to identify key leverage points, shift mindsets, restructure systems, and help build the capacity necessary to manage, learn from, and adapt to complex environmental, social, and economic systems. Addressing climate change from a systems perspective to shift the climate conversation in the US, and internationally, from “wait-and-see” to “why we must act now to have an impact in the future,” is a central part of all of SI’s work.

Edie has a M.A. in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the California Institute of Integral Studies; and a B.A. in anthropology and environmental studies from Dartmouth College. She lives with her two sons and husband at Cobb Hill Cohousing - an ecovillage that is an experiment in sustainable living - in Hartland, Vermont.


Edie Farwell
 

Helena Norberg-Hodge
Helena Norberg-Hodge

Helena Norberg-Hodge is the founder and director of the International Society for Ecology and Culture, a non-profit organisation concerned with the protection of both biological and cultural diversity, and education for action: moving beyond single issues to look at the more fundamental influences that shape our lives. ISEC runs programs on four continents aimed at strengthening ecological diversity and community, with a particular emphasis on local food and farming.

Helena is a co-founder of the International Forum on Globalization, an alliance of sixty leading activists, scholars, economists, researchers and writers formed to stimulate new thinking, joint activity and public education in response to economic globalisation.

She is also involved with the Global Ecovillage Network and directs the Ladakh Project, renowned for its groundbreaking work in sustainable development on the Tibetan plateau. She is a recipient of the Right Livelihood Award or Alternative Nobel Prize.

Helena is a leading analyst of the impact of the global economy on cultures around the world. A linguist by training, she was educated in Sweden, Germany, England and the United States, and speaks seven languages. She has lectured and taught extensively around the world from the Smithsonian Institution to Harvard and Oxford universities.

She is the author of numerous works, including the inspirational classic, Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, which together with an award-winning film of the same title has been translated into more than 30 languages. Her latest book is Bringing the Food Economy Home: Local Alternatives to Global Agribusiness.

Helena Norberg-Hodge
 

John + Nancy Jack Todd
John and Nancy Jack Todd

Dr. John Todd, winner of the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, is one of the pioneers in the emerging field of ecological design and engineering. He has degrees in agriculture (McGill University), parasitology & tropical medicine (McGill University) and a doctorate in fisheries and ethology from the University of Michigan. He has received two honorary doctorates in science and engineering respectively.

Dr. Todd is a Research Professor in the School of Natural Resources and a Distinguished Lecturer at the University of Vermont. Also, he is a Fellow of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at UVM.

He is the Founder and President of Ocean Arks International, a non-profit research and education organization established in 1981, and the Founder and a Principal in Todd Ecological Design, an international ecological design and engineering firm based in Woods Hole on Cape Cod.

John Todd teaches ecological design and oversees an ecological design studio at UVM. The ecological design course is taught in the fall and the ecological design studio during the spring semester. The course, as well as the design studio, explores the theory and practice of employing ecological knowledge to address urgent human and environmental problems.

Nancy Jack Todd is Vice President of Ocean Arks International and editor of its journal Annals of Earth; co-founder with John Todd of the New Alchemy Institute, which has been at the forefront of work in appropriate-scale technology; author and co-author of many works, including Bio-shelters, Ocean Arks and City Farming. Not only is Nancy Todd well acquainted with the technologies that would lead to a sustainable society in the new millennium, but she is versed in the cultural thinking that underlies and encourages the change in lifestyle necessary to apply those technologies. Trained as a dancer, she is also a perceptive writer and editor. She contributed all the introductory essays to People, Land, and Community: Collected E. F. Schumacher Society Lectures (Yale University Press). Her latest book is A Safe and Sustainable World: The Promise of Ecological Design.

She and John Todd have received the Bioneers Award, the Charles and Ann Morrow Lindbergh Award the Daimler/Chrysler award for design, the United Nations (FUNEP) Award, and the Swiss Threshold Award for contributions to human knowledge.

John Todd
Nancy Jack Todd
 

Greg Watson
Greg Watson

From 1995 to 1999 Greg Watson served as Executive Director of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative. He has been with: Second Nature as its Director of Educational Programs; The Nature Conservancy’s Eastern Regional Office as its Director; and Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture as Commissioner.

Prior to that, Greg was the Executive Director of the New Alchemy Institute. In 1983, he was appointed Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology within the Massachusetts Executive Office of Economic Affairs, a post he held until 1989. From 1983 through 1986 he also served as Deputy Director of the Massachusetts Centers of Excellence Corporation. He became the first Director of the Massachusetts Office of Science and Technology in 1986.

As Vice President for Sustainable Development & Renewable Energy at the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, he is taking the lead role on the Offshore Wind Collaborative working with the U.S. Department of Energy and GE.

Greg serves on the board of directors of Ocean Arks International and the Henry A. Wallace Institute for Alternative Agriculture. He attended Tufts University where he majored in Civil Engineering. He also developed a self-directed program in Environmental Design Science at Campus-Free College in Boston.

Greg Watson

2008 Jury




Janine Benyus
Janine Benyus

Janine Benyus is a natural sciences writer, innovation consultant, and author of six books, including her latest — Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Since the book’s 1997 release, Janine has evolved the practice of biomimicry, consulting with sustainable business, academic, and government leaders, serving on the Eco-Dream Team at Interface, Inc., and conducting seminars about what we can learn from the genius that surrounds us. Her favorite role is biologist-at-the-design-table, introducing innovators to organisms whose well-adapted designs have been tested over 3.8 billion years.

In 1998, Janine co-founded an education and innovation practice called Biomimicry Guild. Through workshops, research reports, biological consulting, and field excursions, the Guild helps innovators learn from and emulate natural models. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies that create conditions conducive to life.

Janine is currently creating the Biomimicry Design Portal — a public database of biological literature organized by design function. She is also developing a ‘biology - taught - functionally’ course for engineers and designers, the only biology most will encounter in their university education. To help further Biomimicry education and research, she recently founded the non-profit Biomimicry Institute. These projects are intended to create a flow structure so that nature’s ideas can move freely into human systems design.

An educator at heart, Janine believes that the more people learn from nature’s mentors, the more they’ll want to protect them. This is why she writes, speaks, and revels in describing the wild teachers in our midst.

Janine Benyus
 

Sir Nicholas Grimshaw
Sir Nicholas Grimshaw

Sir Nicholas Grimshaw graduated with Honours from the Architectural Association in 1965 and imediately started his own practice. His buildings of the 60s and 70s gained recognition for their innovative approach to construction and detailing.

Nicholas Grimshaw and Partners was formed in 1980, over time cementing a reputation for rational building that draws on rigorous engineering combined with the fundamental principles of architecture and a profound understanding of the materials. Sir Nicholas Grimshaw has lectured in 21 countries worldside including eight cities in the United States. He is a registered architect in England, France, Germany and Spain. Following examination in 2002 he was also registered to practice architecture in the State of New York.

Sir Nicholas Grimshaw was elected a Royal Academician in 1994 and President of the Royal Acadmey in 2004. He is also an Honorary fellow of the AIA. He was knighted in 2002 and continues to actively lead his practice as Chairman of the Board.

Sir Nicholas Grimshaw
 

Hazel Henderson
Hazel Henderson

Dr. Hazel Henderson is a world renowned futurist, evolutionary economist, a worldwide syndicated columnist, consultant on sustainable development, and author of Beyond Globalization, and seven other books. Her editorials appear in 27 languages and more than 400 newspapers. Her articles have appeared in over 250 journals. Her books are translated into German, Spanish, Japanese, Dutch, Swedish, Korean, Portuguese, and Chinese.

She sits on several editorial boards, including Futures Research Quarterly, The State of the Future Report, and E/The Environmental Magazine (USA), Resurgence, Foresight and Futures (UK). The first version of her Country Futures Indicators (CFI©), an alternative to the Gross National Product (GNP), is a co-venture with Calvert Group, Inc.: the Calvert-Henderson Quality-of-Life Indicators (Desk Reference Manual, 2000), updated regularly at Calvert-Henderson.

In addition, she has been Regent's Lecturer at the University of California (Santa Barbara), held the Horace Albright Chair in Conservation at the University of California (Berkeley), and advised the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment and the National Science Foundation from 1974 to 1980. She is an Honorary Member of the Club of Rome. She shared the 1996 Global Citizen Award with Nobelist A. Perez Esquivel of Argentina. And, in 2007, she was elected a Fellow to the Britain’s Royal Society, founded in 1754.

Hazel Henderson
 

Danny Hillis
Danny Hillis

W. Daniel (Danny) Hillis is Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Applied Minds, Inc., a research and development company creating a range of new products and services in software, entertainment, electronics, biotechnology and mechanical design.

Previously, Hillis was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow. He developed new technologies and business strategies for Disney's theme parks, television, motion pictures, Internet and consumer products businesses. He also designed new theme park rides, a full sized walking robot dinosaur and various micro mechanical devices. Danny Hillis is an inventor, scientist, author, and engineer. He pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He holds over 40 U.S. patents, covering parallel computers, disk arrays, forgery prevention methods, and various electronic and mechanical devices. Danny Hillis is also the designer of a 10,000-year mechanical clock.

Hillis is co-chairman of The Long Now Foundation, a member of the Science Board of the Santa Fe Institute, the SETI Institute's Technical Advisory Committee, the Advisory Board of Yale's Institute for Biospheric Studies, the National Academy of Engineering, and the board of the Hertz Foundation. Dr. Hillis is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Spirit of American Creativity Award for his inventions, the Hopper Award for his contributions to computer science and the Ramanujan Award for his work in applied mathematics. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow in the International Leadership Forum.

Danny Hillis
 

Hunter Lovins
Hunter Lovins

L. Hunter Lovins is President and founder of the Natural Capitalism Solutions. NCS educates senior decision-makers in business, government and civil society to restore and enhance the natural and human capital while increasing prosperity and quality of life. In partnership with leading thinkers and implementers, NCS creates innovative, practical tools and strategies to enable companies, communities and countries to become more sustainable.

Trained as a sociologist and lawyer (JD), Hunter co-founded the California Conservation Project (Tree People), and Rocky Mountain Institute, which she led for 20 years. Lovins has consulted for scores of industries and governments worldwide. She has consulted with large and small companies including the International Finance Corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, Interface, Clif Bar and Wal-Mart. Governmental clients include the Pentagon, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy and other agencies, numerous cities, and the governments of Jamaica, Australia, and the U.S. She also serves an advisor to the Energy Minister of the Government of Afghanistan.

Recipient of such honors as the Right Livelihood Award, Lindbergh Award and Leadership in Business, she was named Time Magazine 2000 Hero of the Planet. She has co-authored nine books and hundreds of papers, including the 1999 book, Natural Capitalism and 2006 Climate Protection Manual for Cities. She has served on the boards of governments, non and for profit companies.

Hunter Lovins
 

William McDonough
William McDonough

William McDonough is a world-renowned architect and designer and winner of three U.S. presidential awards: the Presidential Award for Sustainable Development (1996), the National Design Award (2004); and the Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award (2003). He is founder and principal of two design firms: William McDonough + Partners, Architecture and Community Design, which has created numerous landmarks of the sustainability movement since 1981, and McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, which employs a comprehensive Cradle to Cradle design protocol to chemical benchmarking, supply-chain integration, energy and materials assessment, clean-production qualification, and sustainability issue management and optimization.

Time magazine recognized him as a “Hero for the Planet” in 1999, stating that “his utopianism is grounded in a unified philosophy that - in demonstrable and practical ways - is changing the design of the world.”

William McDonough
 


Vandana Shiva
Vandana Shiva

“Shiva has devoted her life to fighting for the rights of the ordinary people of India her fierce intellect and her disarmingly friendly, accessible manner have made her a valuable advocate for people all over the developing world.” - Ms. Magazine

“A leading thinker who has eloquently blended her views on the environment, agriculture, spirituality, and women's rights into a powerful philosophy.” - Utne Reader

“One of the world's most prominent radical scientists.” - The Guardian

Born in India in 1952, Vandana Shiva is a world-renowned environmental leader and thinker. Director of the Research Foundation on Science, Technology, and Ecology, she is the author of many books, including Water Wars: Pollution, Profits, and Privatization (South End Press, 2001), Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge (South End Press, 1997), Monocultures of the Mind (Zed, 1993), The Violence of the Green Revolution (Zed, 1992), and Staying Alive (St. Martin's Press, 1989).

Shiva is a leader in the International Forum on Globalization, along with Ralph Nader and Jeremy Rifkin. She addressed the World Trade Organization summit in Seattle, 1999, as well as the recent World Economic Forum in Melbourne , 2000. In 1993, Shiva won the Alternative Nobel Peace Prize (the Right Livelihood Award). The founder of Navdanya (“nine seeds”), a movement promoting diversity and use of native seeds, she also set up the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in her mother’s cowshed in 1997. Its studies have validated the ecological value of traditional farming and been instrumental in fighting destructive development projects in India .

Before becoming an activist, Shiva was one of India’s leading physicists. She holds a master’s degree in the philosophy of science and a Ph.D. in particle physics.

Vandana Shiva