Conference program > Keynote speakers

Prof. Dr. Janet Hering

Prof. Dr. Janet Hering is the Director of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science & Technology (Eawag), Professor of Environmental Biogeochemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETHZ) and Professor of Environmental Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). Research at Eawag focuses broadly on water and the water environment, encompassing the continuum from relatively unperturbed aquatic ecosystems to fully engineered water and wastewater management systems.

Prof. Dr. Hering's own research interests include the biogeochemical cycling of trace elements in natural waters, water treatment technologies for the removal of inorganic contaminants from drinking water, and knowledge exchange at the interface of science with policy and practice. Her research includes both laboratory and field experimental studies.

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Prof. Dr. Benjamin Sovacool

Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool is Professor of Energy Policy at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the School of Business, Management, and Economics, part of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom.  There he serves as Director of the Sussex Energy Group and Director of the Center on Innovation and Energy Demand. He is also Director of the Center for Energy Technologies and Professor of Business and Social Sciences in the Department of Business Development and Technology at Aarhus University in Denmark. 

Professor Sovacool works as a researcher and consultant on issues pertaining to energy policy, energy security, climate change mitigation, and climate change adaptation.  More specifically, his research focuses on renewable energy and energy efficiency, the politics of large-scale energy infrastructure, designing public policy to improve energy security and access to electricity, and building adaptive capacity to the consequences of climate change.

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Prof. Dr. Alexandra-Maria Klein

 1999 she graduated in biology and completed her PhD 2003 in agroecology and entomology with a thesis on coffee pollination in Indonesia, both at the University of Göttingen. After working as a postdoc mainly to assess the effects of land- use changes for biodiversity in Ecuador, she moved to the US to work on almond pollination financed by the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at UC Berkeley. After her return to Germany she was shortly leading the Agroecology group at the Department of Crop Science in Göttingen and started her first full Professorship at the University of Lüneburg, Germany in 2010 and moved to the University of Freiburg in 2013 to lead the Chair of Nature Conservation and Landscape Ecology.