A Circular Built Environment in the Digital Age

Catherine De Wolf is an Assistant Professor of Circular Engineering for Architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology of Zurich (ETH Zurich), where she conducts research on digital innovation towards a circular built environment. She has a dual background in civil engineering and architecture and completed her PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where she initiated the Structural Engineers 2050 Commitment. She is on the steering committee of the ETH Centre for Augmented Computational Design in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (Design++) and a faculty member at the ETH AI Center, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa), the Circular Future Cities group of the Future Cities Lab, and the National Centre of Competence in Research on Digital Fabrication (DFAB). She has worked in academia (e.g., University of Cambridge, University of Technology Delft, Nanjing University), in industry (e.g., Arup, Elioth, Ney& Partners), and in governmental institutions (e.g., Joint Research Centre of the European Commission).



Sultan Çetin is a PhD candidate at the Delft University of Technology. She received bachelor’s degrees in architecture and civil engineering in Turkey and a master’s degree from Eindhoven Technology of University. Sultan worked as an architect on international projects in Russia, Azerbaijan, and the Netherlands for several years. Since 2019, she has been conducting doctoral research on digitalisation for a circular building industry. She founded the DiCE Lab (Digital Circular Economy Lab) with Catherine De Wolf in 2021. After the disastrous earthquakes in Turkey in 2023, she founded a network platform called RIAR (Research Industry Alliance for Recovery) to connect experts to find recovery solutions.





Nancy Bocken  is a Professor in Sustainable Business and Circular Economy at Maastricht University, Maastricht Sustainability Institute (MSI) and is a leading researcher on topics such as sustainable business models, business experiments for sustainability, circular economy, and sufficiency. She is also a Fellow at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, advisor to TNO (Dutch association for applied scientific research) and a Board member of the Philips Foundation. Before going into academia, she held positions in the logistics, banking, and consulting sectors. She holds a PhD from the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge and is a co-founder of her own circular and sustainable business, HOMIE.