ETH PhD Academy on Sustainability and Technology 2012

Volker Hoffmann is an associate professor for sustainability and technology at the Department of Management, Technology, and Economics of ETH Zurich.

He received a diploma in chemical engineering from ETH Zurich in 1997 and a diploma in business administration from the University of Hagen, Germany, in 1999. In 1996/97 and 1999/2000 he worked as a visiting scholar and scientist at MIT where he investigated uncertainty propagation in large scale process models for the chemical industry (group of Gregory J. McRae). In 2001, he obtained his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich with a thesis on multi-objective decision making under uncertainty in chemical process design (group of Konrad Hungerbühler). Before joining the faculty of ETH Zurich in 2004, he was a project manager at McKinsey & Company where he worked in the chemical and electricity industry. He focused on strategy development for European utility companies, especially in the light of upcoming greenhouse gas regulations. During his career, Volker Hoffmann received several scholarships and awards including a German National Academic Foundation Scholarship (1994-97), an Ernest-Solvay-Scholarship (1996/97), and an Exchange Fellow Scholarship of the Alliance for Global Sustainability (1999/2000).

Volker Hoffmann's research at ETH Zurich centers on corporate strategies with respect to climate change, with a focus on climate policy and innovation. Recent research results are being published in journals such as the Journal of Management Studies, Global Environmental Change, Climate Policy, Energy Policy, the Journal of Industrial Ecology, the European Management Journal, Business Strategy & the Environment, Policy Sciences, Environmental Science & Policy, and Ecological Economics.

Margaret Taylor is a Project Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and is affiliated with several units at the University of California, Berkeley, where she served from 2002-11 as an Assistant Professor with a primary appointment in the Goldman School of Public Policy (GSPP). Margaret has a broad interdisciplinary education and professional experience that bridges engineering, the social sciences, and the environmental sciences; her degrees are from Carnegie Mellon University and Columbia University. Margaret also has legal and Capitol Hill experience in the areas of international trade, energy, and the environment.

Margaret's research, which has won awards from the Academy of Management and the International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, explores questions at the nexus of innovation and energy/environmental policy. She is particularly passionate about three cross-cutting research topics: (1) how the innovation process occurs in relation to policy efforts to address difficult public problems, in order to inform these efforts; (2) how to manage the risks of emerging technologies with significant potential public benefits; and (3) how to advance the resilience of large technical systems, given the pressures associated with rapid environmental and technological change. The problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to climate-stabilizing levels at affordable cost unifies much of her research.