studied mechanical engineering at Technical University of Ilmenau (Germany), with semesters abroad in Russia (ITMO, St. Petersburg) and Brazil (UFSC, Florianopolis). In 2006 he joined Fraunhofer IPK as a research assistant, where he worked on a number of research and industry projects in the area of Virtual Product Creation. He obtained his PhD in engineering from TU Berlin in January 2014, with a distinction for his work on the usage of traceability data in systems engineering. Grischa Beier joined RIFS in September 2014 where he acts as the leader of the research group on "Digitalization and Sustainability Transformations". He explores the social and ecological effects of future digitalised and networked industrial production. In July 2023, he was appointed professor for Sustainability in Digitalisation at the University of Potsdam.

is the Technical Officer (Science for Food Systems) at the UN Food Systems Coordination Hub, leading the work on thought leadership and science-policy interface. She was the inaugural Klaus Töpfer Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies for Sustainability (now RIFS) in Potsdam, Germany, and founder of Women Leaders for Planetary Health. In 2021, she published the book “Breaking the Silos for Planetary Health: A Roadmap for a Resilient Post-Pandemic World”. She is also an advisor to the World Health Organization- South-East Asia Regional Expert Group on Environment Determinants of Health and Climate Change and one of the Scientific Commissioners of The Lancet Pathfinder Commission on decabornization.

is an agronomist specializing in the sustainability of integrated crop-forestry-livestock systems. At the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy (ATB), he manages the Living Lab within the EU-funded Climate Farm Demo project, promoting climate-smart innovations in agriculture in collaboration with the Leibniz “InnoHof”, and supports the coordination of ERA-NET projects such as MilKey, MELS, and DairyMix, which focus on modeling multicriteria sustainability and reducing environmental impacts in livestock farming. Federico’s research focuses on sustainability, nutrient circularity and diversification of farming systems. His work strongly aligns with the One Health approach, which recognizes the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health—an interconnection increasingly shaped by climate change.

is an education and scientific coordinator within the Cabo Verde cooperation group at GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel. Alongside with a team from the local Universidade Técnica do Atlântico (UTA) in Mindelo, he organizes and co-leads the at-sea training called “Floating University” within the Master Research Program „Climate Change and Marine Sciences“ as part of the larger West African Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land-Use (WASCAL) program.
His experiences as a sea-going chemical oceanographer, his research interest in observing the marine carbon and oxygen cycle, his knowledge in science communication from his two-year traineeship (“Volontariat”) as well as his curiosity for the coast and ocean – it is all required to support this cross-cultural, multinational knowledge exchange and academic education programme, training the future generation of early career ocean professionals in West Africa.

is a computer scientist and philosopher in the “Data, Algorithmic Systems, and Ethics” research group at the Weizenbaum Institute and Technische Universität Berlin. In his PhD research, he explores algorithmic fairness from both technical and philosophical perspectives, with a focus on socio-technical evaluations of machine learning systems. He develops auditing methods for models that are not fully accessible, such as AI-driven content moderation systems, which often risk over- or under-moderating speech from marginalized groups.

is a full professor of the University of Potsdam in the Computer Science faculty and she is the head of the data science department of the Leibniz-Institution for Agriculture and Bioeconomy, including the research group Understandable Machine Intelligence (UMI lab). She received her masters degree in Technomathematics from the Technical University of Berlin in 2012. Afterwards she worked as a researcher at Ottobock in Vienna, Austria, on time series data and domain adaptation for controlling prosthetic devices. In 2014 she started her PhD on explainable AI and received the Dr. rer. nat. degree from the Technical University of Berlin in 2017. After one year maternal leave, she continued working at the machine learning chair at TU Berlin as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2020 she started her own research group UMI Lab dealing with explainable artificial intelligence at the Technical University of Berlin. From 2021-2023 she had a secondary employment as Associate Professor at the Arctic University of Norway. Furthermore, she is a member of the Berlin Institute for Foundations of Learning and Data (BIFOLD), and of the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Society.

is graduated in Chemical Engineering from the University of Blumenau - FURB (2017). She holds a master's degree in Chemical Engineering from the same university (2019) and a specialization in Food Safety Management from the SENAC/SP University Center (2019). She worked in the food industry for two years and as a researcher engineer and adjunct professor at the University of Blumenau (FURB), conducting research in the areas of food preservation, refrigeration systems, and technological packaging. Currently, she is a PhD researcher at Humboldt University of Berlin and scientist and PhD representative at the Leibniz Institute for Agricultural Engineering and Bioeconomy e.V. (ATB) in the Department of Process Engineering of Systems. She is also a committee member of the Young Professionals Network of the European Society of Agricultural Engineers.

is a political scientist from Recife, Brazil. He joined the RIFS-Potsdam in 2021 as Research Associate for the Democratic Governance for Ecopolitical Transformations (Ecopol) project, which analyzes the dynamics of sustainability governance. His research interests include US foreign policy, critical security studies, transdisciplinary research, environmental justice, and the intersection of geopolitics and ecopolitics, with the Amazon Basin as case study. He has worked at international organizations and think tanks in Europe and Latin America. He graduated in Social Sciences at the Federal University of Pernambuco, holds an MSc in comparative politics from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a PhD degree in political science from the Freie Universität Berlin.

is scientific director at RIFS, the Research Institute for Sustainability at the GFZ Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences (formerly IASS). He addresses the Anthropocene in an integrative manner, bringing together a wide range of academic expertise in his team and involving societal actors in a transdisciplinary research approach.

His main transformative research topics include air pollution, climate change, climate geoengineering, environment-related governance of vulnerable regions like the Himalayas, the Arctic and the ocean, and the sustainability-oriented interfaces between the sciences and other key knowledge-holder communities such as the arts, religions and indigenous peoples.

He also actively supports whole person development as a component of sustainability, including exploring the common ground between personal transformations and systemic transformations, as well as the mindsets needed to bring these into harmony.

joined the RIFS in 2012 and leads the group "Climate Action in National and International Processes (ClimAct)." ClimAct focuses on participation in and understanding of political forums that aim to drive climate action, with a particular emphasis on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC).

Kathleen holds a Ph.D. in atmospheric chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley and worked at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) prior to joining the RIFS. This perspective - combining scientific expertise with practical experience in the world of policy and administration - shapes her approach to both research and policy-oriented work.

leads the Ocean Governance Research Group at RIFS since September 2022. Trained as a geographer, she has specialized human-environment interactions, sustainable development and (environmental) governance of coastal and marine areas. Her research interest is in understanding how governance processes can be designed and supported in such a way that they foster sustainable approaches and provide responses to the challenges ahead. She employs transdisciplinary and transformative research approaches and focuses particularly on the interface of science, policy/administration, and civil society. Barbara was a research associate at the Chair of Physical Geography and Environmental Research at Saarland University, Germany, from 1997 to 2010 and received her PhD in 2002. From 2010 to 2017, she was a member of the Cluster of Excellence "The Future Ocean" in Kiel and employed as a research associate in the working group Coastal Risks and Sea Level Rise at the Institute of Geography at Kiel University. Here she researched and taught on climate change, sea-level rise impacts, and sustainability and governance of coastal areas. She joined the RIFS (formerly the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, IASS) in 2017.

is a student assistant in the research group "Data, Algorithmic Systems and Ethics" and a core researcher of the “Data Workers’ Inquiry” project at the Weizenbaum Institute. He holds a Double-Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from the University College Maastricht, and is studying philosophy of technology in his master's program at the Technische Universität Berlin. His interests revolve around Philosophy of AI, Marxist Theory and infrastructural studies of sociotechnical systems.

is an anthropologist (PhD), artist, and facilitator. She creates contact zones between species, disciplines, and institutions. Those include minature bars for extinct insects (with Katrin Petroschkat), hacked audio guides for Natural History Museums (with choreographer Laurie Young), nail salons that raise questions about touch between species (Haptic Hortus, 2022), and excursions into millinery and its environmental histories, read through AI-powered species recognition apps ("To be of Service. Speculative millinery's tiny worlds of consequence, 2023). As a facilitator, she loves running barcamps and facilitates transdisciplinary collaborations (which she also teaches at unviversity level, e.g. at TU Munich).

Susanne was Fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS)/Helmholtz Center Potsdam in 2022 and 2023 and is now head of STEAM projects at the Museum für Naturkunde Bayern with BIOTOPIA Lab in Munich. www.susanneschmitt.org

joined the RIFS communications department in June 2014. She studied philosophy at the University of Hamburg (M.A.) and literature at Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D.). She trained as a journalist at the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung and has worked as a program manager at the International Center for Journalism at Freie Universität Berlin and as a freelance journalist for the taz, Deutsche Welle and the magazine of the Leibniz Association.

studied politics and communications. He has worked as a journalist, was deputy press spokesman for the Green Party parliamentary group in the German Bundestag and, most recently, press spokesman for the Berlin Senate Administration for Environment, Transport and Climate Protection. Matthias joined RIFS in in November 2018, where he heads the institute's Press & Communications unit. He is particularly fascinated by the institute's focus on co-creating transformative knowledge for a sustainable future.

is a facilitator, evaluator, trainer, and coach dedicated to driving social change. She cultivates leadership, social entrepreneurship, and systems innovation, working with companies, UN agencies, NGOs, and social movements to foster meaningful transformation.
With over 20 years of experience across Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America, Malika has worked as a facilitator, systems scientist, and sustainability practitioner. Her work focuses on advancing inclusive business models, sustainable production and trade, nature-based solutions, climate adaptation, and the rights of communities and Indigenous peoples.
A prolific writer on systems transformation, Malika has contributed extensively to the field, sharing insights on how to create just and regenerative futures.