Chris Kennedy is a Professor of Industrial Ecology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He has worked for over 30 years on the world’s toughest environment and sustainability challenges, from climate change, waste and pollution to declining biodiversity. Chris has been a consultant to several national governments and international institutions, including a secondment to the OECD in Paris. He was previously a professor at the University of Toronto, and a visiting professor at Oxford University and ETH Zürich. Chris is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering, and a former President of the International Society for Industrial Ecology.

Dr. Kennedy is the author of three books:

• Advanced Introduction to Industrial Ecology (2025)
• Malthus Enigma: Technology, Science, and Policy for a Fragile Earth (2025)
• The Evolution of Great World Cities: Urban Wealth and Economic Growth (2011)

Distinguished Professor Bai joined ANU in 2011, as a professor of Urban Environment and Human Ecology at the Fenner School of Environment and Society. Prio to ANU, she was a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO, visiting professor at Yale University, and senior researcher at environmental research institutes in Japan. She is a Visiting Professor at The University of Tokyo.

Professor Bai's research focuses on several frontiers of urban sustainability science and policy, including drivers and consequence of urbanization, structure, function, processes, and evolution of urban socio-ecological systems, urban metabolism, urban sustainability experiments and transition, cities and climate change, and urban environmental policy and governance, and cross scale translations between planetary level boundaries and targets into cities.

Professor Bai authored/co-authored over 200 publications, including near 30 in Nature, Science and Nature Research journals. She is serving as Coordinating Lead Author for the IPCC Climate Change and Cities Special Report, and in the past served as a Lead Author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Global Energy Assessment, IPBES Global Assessment and IPCC AR6. She delivered invited lectures/seminars at top academic institutions as well as keynotes at many international conferences and science/policy forums. She supervised award-winning PhD and Honours students.

Professor Bai is a member of Earth Commission, where she co-leads its Working Group on cross scale translation that aims to connect cities and businesses to planetary and earth system boundaries. She was an inaugural member of the Science Committee of Future Earth where she served as inaugural co-chair of the Urban Knowledge-Action Network. She served as the Vice Chair of the Science Committee of the International Human Dimensional Program for Global Environmental Change (IHDP); Science Steering Committee of IHDP Industrial Transformation Core Project; and Steering Committee of US National Academies Sustainable Cities Initiative. She served on the European Research Council assessment panels for Consolidator and Advanced grants, and was a member of Global LafargeHolcim Award Jury for 2018.

She is a Fellow of Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 2017, and was named one of the World's 100 Most Influential People in Climate Change Policy in 2019 and 2021. She is the 2018 Laureate of the Volvo Environment Prize, and the 2021 Global Economy Prize. She is an ARC Laureate Fellow since 2023

Prof Linda Godfrey is a Principal Scientist at the CSIR and Extraordinary Professor at North-West University, South Africa, and holds a PhD in Engineering. With over 25-years of sector experience, she manages Circular Innovation South Africa on behalf of the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation. She has provided strategic input to a number of local, regional and international waste and circular economy initiatives for the United Nations, European Union, World Bank, South African Government, business and academia. She lectures internationally on solid waste management, and on the circular economy in the context of developing countries. She has published extensively in the field.

Anu Ramaswami is an interdisciplinary environmental engineer and professor at and environmental engineering, and the High Meadows Environmental Institute. She has pioneered sustainable urban systems science and knowledge co-production for developing low-carbon, healthy, and equitable cities. Her work explores how eight key sectors – that provide water, energy, food, buildings, mobility, connectivity, waste management and green/public spaces – shape human and environmental wellbeing, from local to global scales. Ramaswami’s work integrates environmental science and engineering, industrial ecology, public health and public affairs, with a human-centered and systems focus. She is the author of more than 100 peer-reviewed articles, published in leading journals such as Science, Nature Climate Change, Nature Sustainability, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Environmental Science & Technology, and Environmental Research Letters. She is the inaugural director of the M.S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University, the lead principal investigator and director of the National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported Sustainable Healthy Cities Network, and serves on the United Nations Environment Programme’s International Resource Panel. In 2022, she received the American Academy of Environmental Engineers & Scientists Science Award and the Steven K. Dentel Association of Environmental Engineering & Science Professors Award for Global Outreach.

Dr. Heinz Schandl, PhD, is a senior science leader at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Canberra, where he directs the Circular Economy Initiative and coordinates research efforts in this area. Additionally, he is an adjunct professor at Nagoya University’s Graduate School of Environmental Studies in Japan, a member of the UN Environment Program International Resource Panel, and a past president of the ISIE. His research focuses on social theory, industrial metabolism, and sustainability policy to advance resource efficiency, waste minimization, and circular economy principles.