Who We Are
The System Shift Lab is a consultancy working to provide people and organisations the capacity to lead and succeed through the current global phase-shift, by building what we call ‘public networked empathic intelligence’ to understand and respond to the Crisis of Civilization through transformative social, economic, political, cultural, cognitive and technological adaptations.
The Lab is developing its analytical and practical methodologies by learning from the work of a global network of natural and social scientists, technologists, engineers, government workers, business leaders, entrepreneurs, civil society activists and non-profit leaders.
The Lab works to understand the intersections across our most pressing global challenges, including pandemics, climate change, energy, economics, finance, food, politics, society, culture, conflict, war, terrorism, ideology, ethics, philosophy, spirituality and beyond; and to build our capacities to respond adaptively to this spectrum of converging crises.
Founder and PRINCIPAL
The System Shift Lab has been conceived by Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, based on his award-winning work over 20 years as an academic, systems theorist, investigative journalist, communications consultant and organisational change strategist, as a vehicle to offer world-class consultancy services on systems change to non-profits, governments, companies, communities, civil society and beyond. The Lab offers both pro-bono and fee-based services.
As an investigative journalist, Nafeez has broken numerous exclusive viral stories which have reached hundreds of millions of people worldwide; as an academic he has pioneered the development of holistic systems frameworks to understand the intersection of civilizational crises; and as a communications and change strategist he has worked with and advised a range of intergovernmental organisations, national governments, nonprofits and businesses.
Nafeez is an active journalist writing on global system transformation. He previously reported on the interconnections of global environment, energy and economic crises for The Guardian via his Guardian ‘Earth insight’ blog. His reporting can also be found in VICE, The Times, The Independent, The Atlantic, Quartz, Foreign Policy, New York Observer, New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, and numerous other places. Most recently, he leads on special investigations and global trends at the crowdfunded newspaper Byline Times.
He has previously taught international relations, globalization, and history at the University of Sussex and Brunel University. From 2014-2017 he was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Global Sustainability Institute in Anglia Ruskin University’s Faculty of Science & Technology. Currently he is a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, and a Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts.
He is the author of eight books including A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save it (Pluto, 2010), the first peer-reviewed study integrating the study of climate, energy, food, economic and political crises. He wrote and co-produced a feature documentary film based on the book, The Crisis of Civilization, which won several film festival awards and received three quarters of a million views online.
His latest book is a scientific monograph on the risks of state-failure due to the converging impacts of multiple climate, energy, food and water crises, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017).
He has advised and his work been used by numerous official agencies including the 9/11 Commission, the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Prevent, the State Department, the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence’s Development Concepts & Doctrines Centre, the EU’s European Strategy & Policy Analysis System, among many others.
As a senior strategic communications consultant, he has led on projects for the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (the world’s second largest intergovernmental organisation), Europe’s largest solar energy company Lightsource, Hamdi Ulukaya (the billionaire founder of Chobani and the Tent Partnership for Refugees), the Amal Foundation, Friends of the Earth UK, among many others.
Nafeez has twice been listed in the Evening Standard’s list of the top 1,000 most influential Londoners, and has been awarded the Routledge-GCPS Essay Prize, the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, and Premio Napoli, Italy’s most prestigious literary award created by decree of the President of the Republic.
Core Advisory Network
The System Shift Lab’s Core Advisory Network consists of leading experts whom we are able to draw on to seek advice on development of research, design, communications, dialogue, collaboration and social innovation initiatives. Members of the Core Advisory Network are not responsible for the Lab’s work.
Governance Network
Ahmed Bashir: Ahmed is a career senior UK civil servant who has worked across the UK government’s various trade and finance ministries and agencies. He is currently Director of UK Pavilion, Beijing Expo, at the Department for International Trade, and has previously held senior positions across Central Asia and Africa, including a stint as British Deputy High Commissioner in Nigeria. He is joining the System Shift Lab’s Governing Council in his personal capacity as the Lab’s Political Engagement Lead to advise on how our work can reach political decision-makers around the world.
Alexander James Phillips: Alexander James Phillips is co-founder of HelpfulEngineering.org, a global network of 5000+ registered and 16,000+ volunteer engineers and technologists covering a wide range of countries, skills, backgrounds, working to help develop innovative solutions to the COVID-19 crisis. He also co-founded the OpenCovidPledge.org to encourage companies to put defeating SARS-CoV-2 before IP and profits. Alexander is a software engineer by profession, and has worked as team lead and project manager at various companies. He graduated in biochemistry from Oxford University in 2008, and biotechnology & chemical engineering from Cambridge University in 2012. He was previously a VP of Engineering at the Global Stress Index. He is supporting the Lab to explore opportunities to match research with practical innovation in technology and beyond to help people here and now.
Allan Stromfeldt Christensen: Allan Stromfeldt Christensen is a former film-maker turned farmer, who writes about the collapse of industrial civilization and renewal of culture at his blog, FromFilmerstoFarmers.com. He is the System Shift Lab’s Front-End Web Developer, working on building its advanced online presence using the Ghost.org open source publishing platform.
Michelle Holliday: Michelle Holliday is a consultant, facilitator, writer and presenter with over 20 years of experience in organizational strategy. Her work centres around “thrivability” — a set of perspectives, intentions and practices based on a view of organizations and communities as dynamic living systems. To that end, she brings people together and helps them discover ways they can feel more alive, connect more meaningfully with each other, and serve life more powerfully and effectively through their work. Michelle spent the first part of her career in brand strategy, working internationally for Coca-Cola and H.J. Heinz. The second part of her career focused on employee engagement, consulting for a range of organizations in Washington, DC. Now, she combines both disciplines, accompanying a delightful community of pioneering clients. With a Master’s in International Marketing and a Bachelor’s in Russian Studies, Michelle has lived in 19 cities around the world, including Moscow, London, Paris, a small town in Scotland, and now Montreal. She is the author of The Age of Thrivability: Vital Perspectives and Practices for a Better World, which distills her insights on living systems theory and the practice of stewarding change.
Vicente Lopez-Ibor Mayor: Vicente Lopez-Ibor Mayor is chairman of Ampere Energy, a Spanish distributed clean energy, storage and data analytics company. He is also the co-founder and former Chairman of Lightsource, Europe’s largest solar power company. Mayor was is a former Commissioner of Spain’s National Energy Commission and National Electric System Commission, and a former Special Advisor of the European Energy Commissioner. He is a founding partner of Spanish energy law firm, Estudio Juridico Internacional Lopez-Ibor Mayor & Asociados (EJI), and has written numerous scholarly papers about energy security, law, and policy. He is the author of Conversations about Energy (Civitas-Thomson Reuters, 2012) and Enhanced Cooperation and Energy (Institute for European Studies of CEU San Pablo University, 2009), among others. Mayor was previously the General Manager of Institutional Relations for Spain's major construction and Infrastructure firm, FCC Group. He has a PhD in Law from Madrid University with the highest qualifications "Cum Laude". In 2004, he attended the IESE Business School, University of Navarra in Barcelona, Spain and in 2007 participated in the IME program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, Boston.
Scientific Network
Jeremy Lent: Jeremy Lent is an author whose writings investigate the patterns of thought that have led our civilization to its current crisis of sustainability. He is founder of the nonprofit Liology Institute, dedicated to fostering an integrated worldview, both scientifically rigorous and intrinsically meaningful, that could enable humanity to thrive sustainably on the earth. Born in London, England, Lent received a BA in English Literature from Cambridge University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He pursued a career in business, eventually founding an internet startup and taking it public. Beginning around 2005, Lent began an inquiry into the various constructions of meaning formed by cultures around the world and throughout history. His award-winning novel, Requiem of the Human Soul, was published in 2009. His most recent work, The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, traces the deep historical foundations of our modern worldview. Lent is currently working on his next book provisionally entitled The Web of Meaning: An Integration of Modern Science with Traditional Wisdom, which combines findings in cognitive science, systems theory, and traditional Chinese and Buddhist thought, offering a framework that integrates both science and meaning in a coherent whole. He holds regular community workshops to explore these topics through contemplative and embodied practices in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Nathan Hagens: Nate Hagens currently teaches a systems synthesis Honors seminar at the University of Minnesota ‘Reality 101 – A Survey of the Human Predicament’. He sits on the Boards of the Post Carbon Institute, Bottleneck Foundation, Institute for Integrated Economic Research, and the Institute for the Study of Energy and the Future. Previously, he was lead editor of The Oil Drum, one of the most popular and respected websites for analysis and discussion of global energy supplies and the future implications of the upcoming energy transition. Nate has appeared on PBS, BBC, ABC and NPR, and has lectured around the world. He holds a Masters Degree in Finance with Honors from the University of Chicago and a PhD in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. Previously, Nate was President of Sanctuary Asset Management and a Vice President at the investment firms Salomon Brothers and Lehman Brothers. Nate is advising the Lab on its overall strategy.
Simon Michaux: Simon is Associate Professor at the Geological Survey of Finland (GTK), working in geometallurgy and mineral processing in the Circular Economy Solution (KTR) unit. He works with the GTK pilot scale plant run by MINTEC at Outokumpu, and interacts with EU government and industry partners on Circular Economy. Previously he was a Senior Scientist at GTK, and a Senior Research Officer at the University of Liege working on minerals, mining and industrial recycling.
Julia Steinberger: Julia K. Steinberger is Professor of Ecological Economics at the University of Leeds. She studies the relationships between the use of resources and performance of societies. She is an author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 6th Assessment Report, contributing to the report's discussion of climate change mitigation pathways. Her research considers the relationships between the use of resources (energy, materials and emission of greenhouse gases) and performance of societies (wellbeing and economic output). She is interested in identifying new development pathways toward a low carbon society. Julia is the Principal Investigator on the Leverhulme Trust Project Living Well Within Limits. The project investigates what the biophysical requirements are for human well-being, and the influence of social provisioning on the levels of resource associated with this. The project also looks to understand how the world's limited resources could be used to preserve human wellbeing. To achieve this, Steinberger believes it is necessary to define what a "good" life is, understand what the requirements are for wellbeing and the context surrounding international inequality.
Tim Jackson: Tim Jackson is Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), and Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey in the UK. CUSP builds on Tim’s vision over three decades to explore the moral, economic and social dimensions of prosperity on a finite planet. Tim has served in an advisory capacity for numerous Government departments, Intergovernmental organisations, non-governmental organisations, private sector companies, and delivery agencies. Between 2004 and 2011, Tim was Economics Commissioner on the UK Sustainable Development Commission, where his work culminated in the publication of his controversial book Prosperity without Growth.
Since 2010, Tim has been engaged in an ambitious collaborative project to build a new ecological macroeconomics. He and Prof Peter Victor from York University, Canada are developing the conceptual basis for an economy in which stability no longer depends on relentless consumption growth. In 2016, Tim was awarded the Hillary Laureate in recognition of his international leadership on sustainability.
Joe Brewer: Joe Brewer is Founder and Executive Director of the Center for Applied Cultural Evolution. He has three bachelors degrees in physics, mathematics, and interdisciplinary studies and a masters in atmospheric sciences. He is a complexity researcher, innovation strategist, experience designer, and serial social entrepreneur who brings a wealth of expertise to the adoption of sustainable solutions at the cultural scale. Among his notable achievements are the creation of an undergraduate degree program in Earth Systems, Environment and Society at the University of Illinois and design of new collaboration protocols for strategic communications among European NGO’s with WWF-UK and Oxfam, Great Britain.
He was an active member of the Center for Complex Systems Research from 2001 to 2005, where he studied pattern formation in self-organizing systems. He was a research fellow at the Rockridge Institute in 2007-08 analyzing political discourse in the United States.
He contracted with the International Centre for Earth Simulation in Geneva in 2010-11 to help build a globally-focused high performance computing facility dedicated to holistic simulations of the dynamic Earth. His experiences as a social entrepreneur and cross-disciplinary scholar weave together a combination of skills dedicated to open collaboration, interactive design, and empowered civic action for catalyzing change toward greater resilience in our turbulent world.
Robert Drury King: Robert Drury King is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sierra Nevada College and a research fellow with the Centre Leo Apostel at the Free University of Brussels. He has been a visiting fellow at Duke University's Center for the History of Political Economy and a visiting scholar at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen.
Robert has published widely in the fields of continental philosophy, systems theory, and political economy. He has studied in the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University; the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Città di Castello, Italy; within the Unseld Lecture Series at the University of Tübingen, Germany; as a visiting fellow of the World Congress Summer School in Glasgow, Scotland with the Association for Social Economics; as a visiting scholar under the National Endowment for the Humanities' 2012 Summer Institute in Experimental Philosophy at the University of Arizona and in the National Humanities Center's Summer Institutes in Literary Studies at Research Triangle Park.
The American Philosophical Society awarded Robert a Franklin Research Grant to study the Norbert Wiener Papers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; he was also selected as an inaugural member of the London Graduate School’s Summer Academy in Critical Humanities and was awarded a grant from the John F. Kennedy School for North American Studies.
Robert is the book review editor for Constructivist Foundations and a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Philosophy: A Cross-Disciplinary Inquiry.
His recent research program uses systems-theoretical frames of reference to analyze the dynamics of the capital system in its structural crisis. He uses concepts from thermodynamics, information theory, and dissipative systems to look at social systems, including assaying the future behavior of the capital system and its adaptive quality, to ask questions about democracy and its limits, urban agricultural movements as low-input forms of resistance to capital's high-input dynamics, the structural-causal dynamics of the system in relation to phenomena like violence, climate change, and financialization of the economy.
Wolfgang Knorr: Wolfgang Knorr is Senior Research Scientist in Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science at Lund University. He has more than 25 years of experience as a climate scientist, publishing on a broad range of sub-fields.
He received his doctorate from the University of Hamburg and the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology, one of the world's leading climate modelling centres, and went on to lead a research group of more than ten PhD students and postdocs with the then newly founded Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry.
After that, he was recruited by University of Bristol and the UK's Natural Environment Research Council, as Deputy Leader of a major climate science and Earth system modelling research programme called QUEST (Quantifying and Understanding the Earth System). Wolfgang has served as Detached National Expert for the European Commission at its Joint Research Center in Italy, as Mission Consultant for the European Space Agency, as reviewer for numerous funding bodies, and has been editor for over six years at the American Physical Union's flagship journal Geophysical Research Letters, handling more than a hundred research articles per year.
He has worked and published extensively in broad range of climate and climate impacts research, including the global carbon cycle, climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, plant physiology, soil science, land surface-atmosphere feedbacks, and forestry for climate mitigation. As a Senior Researcher Scientist at Lund University, Sweden, he works on fire ecology under demographic and climatic changes, atmospheric chemistry and air pollution, as well as measuring CO2 fluxes from terrestrial vegetation and human activities.
Albert Bates: Albert has been founding director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and of the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm community since 1994. He is Chief Permaculture Officer at Qi, a cool design services company focusing on climate stabilization.
He is the author of 18 books on history, ecology and the future, including Burn: Using Fire to Cool the Earth (2019); Transforming Plastics (2019); The Paris Agreement (2015); and The Biochar Solution (2010). He holds degrees in political science, law and permaculture and certifications in emergency medicine, horsemastership and forest management. He serves as visiting professor for Gaia University, Nanjing Agricultural University, and Gaia Education. As past president of Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), he is part of GEN Consultants, designing drawdown ecovillages, ecodistricts and economies.
Albert’s books Shutdown: Nuclear Power on Trial (1979) and Climate in Crisis (1990) provided early insight into two of the greatest dangers now confronting the world. In 1980 he shared the first Right Livelihood Award for his work with Plenty International in preserving indigenous cultures. He was designer of concentrating photovoltaic arrays and solar-hybrid automobiles displayed at the 1982 World’s Fair.
Charles Hall: Charles Hall is a systems ecologist and Professor Emeritus of the College of Environmental Science and Forestry at the State University of New York. Hall was born near Boston, and received a B.A. in biology from Colgate University, and an M.A. from Penn State University. He trained as systems ecologist under Howard Odum at the University of North Carolina, where he received a PhD. Since then he has had a diverse career at Brookhaven Laboratory, The Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, Cornell University, University of Montana and, for the last 20 years, at the State University of New York.
Hall’s research interests are in the field of systems ecology with strong interests in biophysical economics, and the relation of energy to society. Central to his work is an understanding that the survival of all living creatures is limited by the concept of energy return on investment (EROEI): that any living thing or living societies can survive only so long as they are capable of getting more net energy from any activity than they expend during the performance of that activity.
He is the author of hundreds of scientific papers and dozens of books, including his more recent works: America’s Most Sustainable Cities and Regions: Surviving the 21st Century Megatrends (with John W. Day); Energy Return on Investment: A unifying principle for biology, Economics and sustainability; and Energy and the Wealth of Nations: An introduction to BioPhysical Economics (with Kent A. Klitgaard).
Joan Diamond: Joan Diamond is the Executive Director of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and Biosphere, a Stanford University initiative addressing the gap between knowledge of global problems and societies’ failure to act. As a visiting scholar at the Center for the Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, she oversees the Institute of Foresight Intelligence. She is Deputy Director of the Nautilus Institute for Security and Sustainability. She is also Executive Director of the Crans Foresight Analysis Consensus.
Ugo Bardi: Ugo Bardi is Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Florence, Italy. He is a member of the Club of Rome. He is the author of a number of books and articles on the subject of mineral resources and their depletion, among which the 33rd report to the Club of Rome titled Extracted (2014) and The Limits to Growth Revisited (2011). He is also chief editor of Biophysical Economics and Resource Quality, a Springer journal. His latest book is Before the Collapse: A Guide to the Other Side of Growth (Springer, 2019)
Elke Pirgmaier: Elke is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Sustainability Research Institute at the University of Leeds, studying the links between capitalist dynamics and global environmental challenges, from a political economy and ecological economics perspective. Elke’s work unveils the political implications of different economic theories and methodologies to explain barriers to sustainability transitions with a view to supporting radical systemic change towards social and environmental justice.
Elke’s PhD research aimed to strengthen theoretical and methodological links between heterodox economics and ecological economics to increase understanding of the reality of contemporary economic systems and how future sustainable societies might look. Elke has an MSc in Business from WU Vienna University of Economics and Business. She is currently a research fellow in the Living Well Within Limits project and the iCASP Green and Blue Infrastructure Business Cases project. She is also a member of the European Society for Ecological Economics.
Elena Hofferberth: Elena Hofferberth is a PhD student working on macroeconomic theory and policy that helps understand and address key challenges of society today. Her research analyses systemic drivers of climate change and ecological crisis, inequality and instability as well as the interconnection of these phenomena. On that basis, she scrutinises and develops ideas for a social-ecological transformation of the economy and investigate into post-growth and degrowth proposals. She is particularly interested in just ways of reducing carbon emissions and resource extraction, alternative models of ownership, and monetary and financial policy. She is a member of the Economics and Policy for Sustainability Research Group, the international Post-Growth Economics Network (PEN), and the Scientific Working Group on Sustainable Money (WANG).
Safa Motesharrei: Safa Motesharrei is an Applied Mathematician and Systems Scientist (Physicist) who has worked on a wide range of challenging interdisciplinary problems. He has two bachelor's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Physics, two master's degrees in Physics and Mathematics, and two PhD degrees in Applied Mathematics / Public Policy and Physics from UMD. He designs mathematical models to propose and assess holistic decisions and policies that could prevent catastrophic outcomes in interconnected environmental, economic, social, and health systems. He develops novel methods based on Data Science, Dynamical Systems, and Data Assimilation to analyze large, diverse datasets of these complex systems.
Safa has published his papers in a broad range of prestigious journals, including Science, Nature Communications, Ecological Economics, National Science Review, Journal of Climate, Scientific Reports, and PLOS ONE, and several of his papers are among the most cited and most downloaded papers in their respective fields.
Safa's research has been covered by The Guardian, Reuters, Discover Magazine, NPR, BBC, LA Times, The Independent, New Scientist, IFL Science, and dozens of other newspapers. He is an avid science communicator who has delivered dozens of invited lectures at major international meetings, universities, and research institutes, including Stanford, University of California, Berkeley, University of Virginia (UVA), University of Washington, Seattle (UW), Johns Hopkins University, UMD, Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), U Rochester, World Bank, US DOE, and France's CNRS.
Stuart B Hill: Professor Stuart B. Hill is Foundation Chair of Social Ecology at the University of Western Sydney where he has taught units Qualitative Research Methodology, Social Ecology Research, Transformative Learning, Leadership and Change, and Sustainability, Leadership and Change. After retiring in 2009, he is now an Emeritus Professor in the WSU School of Education.
His PhD was one of the first whole ecosystem studies that examined community and energy relationships (1969); and it was the earliest such study conducted by a single researcher. In 1977, in Canada, he produced a report for the New Brunswick Government on Energy and Agriculture that detailed many of the resource, environment and climate issues that are at last being recognized today. Since then he has produced many more cutting edge reports, and has been an advisor to several ministers.
Prior to 1996 he was at McGill University, in Montreal, where he was responsible for the zoology degree, and where in 1974 he established Ecological Agriculture Projects, Canada’s leading resource centre for sustainable agriculture, and the first such centre in the world within a university (www.eap.mcgill.ca). Hill has published over 350 papers and reports. His latest books are Ecological Pioneers: A Social History of Australian Ecological Thought and Action (with Dr Martin Mulligan; Cambridge UP, 2001), Learning for Sustainable Living: Psychology of Ecological Transformation (with Dr Werner Sattmann-Frese; Lulu, 2008) and Social Ecology: Applying Ecological Understanding to our Lives and our Planet (with Dr David Wright and Dr Catherine Camden-Pratt; Hawthorn, 2011).
Stuart has worked in agricultural and development projects in the West Indies, French West Africa, Indonesia, The Philippines, China, the Seychelles, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. His work in the Seychelles to make a whole coralline island completely self-sufficient in food and energy is particularly significant.
Roberto De Vogli: Roberto De Vogli is an associate professor in Social Determinants of Global Health at the Department of Public Health Sciences, University of California Davis (UCD). He is also an Honorary Senior Lecturer at the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, and is a former member of the Globalization and Health Knowledge Network of the World Health Organization Commission on Social Determinants of Health. He previously worked as an associate professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
He has consulted for various UN agencies, the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and international organizations in Guatemala, Italy, Mexico, Russia, Tanzania, and Vietnam. Roberto is the author of more than 70 articles, scientific reports, letters, and book chapters in the field of globalization and social determinants of global health. Some of his work has appeared on mainstream media outlets, including the BBC, NBC, The Los Angeles Times, Reuters, and Associated Press. His first book, entitled Progress or Collapse: The Crises of Market Greed, published by Routledge, is a wake-up call on the converging crises of neo-liberal globalization and global economic development.
John Boik: John Boik is the founder of the Principled Societies Project and an Associate Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Governance Innovation. He received a BS in civil engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder; a Master’s Degree in acupuncture and Oriental medicine from Oregon College of Oriental Medicine, Portland, Oregon; and a PhD in Biomedical sciences from the University of Texas, Health Sciences Center, Houston. He completed postdoctoral work at Stanford University in the Department of Statistics. John is the author of Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being and of other books and scientific papers. Interests and experience include agent-based modeling and simulation of new designs for economic systems, and machine learning and artificial intelligence, including Bayesian deep learning and statistical relational learning. He has also authored two highly acclaimed books on the subject of natural compounds and cancer therapy. The first was Cancer and Natural Medicine (1996). The second was Natural Compounds in Cancer Therapy (2001). Both were praised by medical, oncology, and health journals.
Blaine D. Pope: Blaine D. Pope is a professor of business strategy in the Management Department, Nazarian College of Business and Economics, at California State University, Northridge. He previously taught ‘The Political-Economy of Energy Resources,’ in Redlands Department of Sociology & Anthropology), during which students researched and reported on real-world events, focusing on natural resource usage. Blaine was previously a Language Instructor for the Naval Special Warfare Command, and a Faculty Adviser in Goddard College’s Independent B.A. program, as well as its Environmental Sustainability program. In 2008, he worked at the USC Center for Sustainable Cities / Geography Department (focusing on the environment).
Prior to that, Blaine worked at both UC Santa Barbara Global Studies Program, and, at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. At Columbia he taught environmental science and policy. He also worked at the New York City Department of Health, in the position of Special Consultant in staff training and development. Blaine has worked in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East, in emergency relief, health, natural resources management, and community development.
Blaine holds a BA from UC Berkeley, master's degrees in public admin (MPA) and international affairs (MIA) from Columbia University; and has a third master's degree and Ph.D. from Fielding Graduate University, both in human and organizational systems (organization development).
Jennifer Hinton: Jennifer Hinton is a researcher at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, where she is a PhD candidate focusing on the effects of different business structures on global sustainability challenges such as pollution, resource use, and inequality. Jennifer’s work explores the relationships between core aspects of common business structures (including ownership, legal purpose, and profit-orientation) and global sustainability challenges. Her PhD work is part of an EU-funded project called ‘AdaptEconII: Adapting to a new economic reality’, which aims to build a sustainable post-growth economic model, using system dynamics methods.
Jennifer holds a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs and an MSc degree in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science. Prior to starting her PhD, she was a co-director of the Post Growth Institute, a global network of researchers and activists seeking pathways to social-ecological prosperity beyond the growth-based economic system. In her work with the Post Growth Institute, she co-authored the book, How on Earth: Flourishing in a Not-for-Profit World.
Originally from Colorado in the USA, Jennifer lived in Greece from 2009 – 2016, during the economic crisis, working with both local initiatives and global networks to help lay the foundation for a new economic paradigm. In all of her work, she seeks to bridge activism, research, and business in order to co-create a more sustainable future for humanity. Jennifer also holds an associate position at the Post Growth Institute.
Íñigo Capellan Perez: Inigo Capellan Perez is an Industrial Engineer in the Group for Energy, Economy and System Dynamics from the University of Valladolid. He holds a MSc. in “Electrical Energy and Sustainable Development” (ENSAM Lille, 2008) and a PhD in Economics with the dissertation “Development and Application of Environmental Assessment Modelling Towards Sustainability” (University of the Basque Country, 2016). He is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher playing a key role in the EU-funded MEDEAS integrated assessment model of energy-economy-environment systems, one of the most comprehensive system dynamics models available to date. His research focuses on the transition to renewable energies in the context of the depletion of fossil fuels, climate mitigation and the technical and social transformations towards sustainability. He has contributed to several books and has published in international journals such as Energy & Environmental Science, Energy, Energy for Sustainable Development, and Sustainability Science.
Business Leaders Network
The Business Leaders Network represents an emerging corpus of far-sighted conscious business leaders working actively at the forefront of systems change.
Jeremy Leggett: Jeremy Leggett is founder and board director of Solarcentury, an international solar solutions company (1998-present), as well as founder and chair of SolarAid, a charity funded with 5 percent of Solarcentury’s annual profits that builds solar lighting markets in Africa. From 2010 to 2017, he chaired Carbon Tracker, a climate-and-finance think tank analysing climate risk in the capital markets. He is the author of five books, the most recent of which is The Winning of The Carbon War. His other books are The Carbon War (2000), an eye-witness account of the climate negotiations in the 1990s; Half Gone (2005), a holistic critique of the oil industry; The Solar Century (2009), a vision of the solar revolution; and The Energy of Nations (2013). He has lectured on short courses in business and society at the Universities of Cambridge (UK) and St Gallen (Switzerland). Previously he was an Associate Fellow at the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University (1997 – 2015).
Jeremy has a D.Phil in earth science from Oxford University, and previously taught at the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College, where he researched earth history with funding from BP and Shell.
Jordan Hall: Jordan Hall is an entrepreneur and angel investor with a focus on the internet and digital media space. He received his law degree from Harvard, but went on to co-founded DivX, Inc. (Formerly, DivXNetworks, Inc.), the digital media giant, in 2000, serving as its Chief Executive Officer and Executive Chairman through 2007.
Previously, he served as Vice President of MP3.com, where he was responsible for developing and implementing MP3.com, business and content development model. Jordan was on the Board of Trustees for the Santa Fe Institute and Aspen Institute. More recently he is the co-founder and executive chairman of Neurohacker Collective, a group of scientists, technologists, academics, and creatives developing advanced supplements to optimize wellbeing and peak performance.
Florijn de Graaf: Florijn De Graaf is the Energy Systems Engineer of Spectral - a spin-off enterprise of Metabolic (an action agency for sustainable development, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands). He is involved in the design of highly integrated, renewable heat & power smart-grids for various upcoming and existing area developments - mostly in and around Amsterdam.
Florijn and his company are working hard to develop the next generation of smart energy infrastructure. These state-of-the-art energy systems will help to improve the sustainability, resilience and efficiency of the built environment. His dream is to create a modern self-sufficient neighbourhood, the ‘Smarthood’, in which all resource flows (heat, power, water, biomass) are circularly connected. Florijn de Graaf holds a double MSc degree in sustainable energy engineering from Chalmers and University of Iceland and a BA degree in philosophy of science from University of Groningen. His research on self-sufficient renewable microgrids gained worldwide attention and was featured by the World Economic Forum.
Richard D. Bartlett: Richard Barlett is co-founder of Loomio, a digital tool for deliberation and decision-making in groups of 3-300 people. In 2016, he co-founded The Hum, which can be described as a management consultancy for organisations without managers. He is also a Director and longstanding member of Enspiral - a network of people supporting each other to grow up and to get paid for doing meaningful work. Richard’s first book (still a work-in-progress) is called Patterns for Decentralised Organising, sharing solutions to the most common failure points of collaborative groups. He is also a contributing author for Better Work Together, a book written by Enspiral members. His recent project is called Microsolidarity, which aims to answer "how do we start more Enspirals?"