Liat is a service designer and expert in social innovation, and she is passionate about creative processes and developing new tools for design thinking and innovative strategies towards sustainability. Liat coordinates and manages local and European projects to improve the urban lifestyle from an environmental and social point of view. She is currently the project manager for the Municipality of Milan of the Pilot action of the H2020 project Centrinno, promoting circular economy. As founder of HousingLab and the Director of the Impact Housing Foundation, she is facilitating and coaching processes of urban housing renewal and exploring how private investments may be used to generate more housing options. Liat holds a PhD in design from Politecnico di Milano and teaches social innovation In IES abroad Milan.

Alejandra Calleros-Islas graduated as an Economist. She has a Master's degree in Sustainability with a specialty in policy design and evaluation from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona. She wrote her PhD on integrated assessment tools at the UPC, where she developed and tested a methodology to evaluate performance of agroecosystems to support the transition towards organic farming in Mexico. She is an expert in the field of sustainability with over 12 years of experience in research and project development and evaluation, both in European and Latin American contexts. She has taught the "Sustainability: Challenges and Responses" course at IES Barcelona since 2018 and the Global Pillars course "Designing the Sustainable City" since the Spring 2022 pilot. Her interests include the Circular Economy, the Nexus -food, energy, water- approach, biomimicry, and socio-agroecosystems. What she likes the most about her professional field is its flexible, transversal, and multidisciplinary nature, so everyone has a part to play. IES course taught: ES352 Sustainability: Challenges and Responses; ES/SO360 Designing the Sustainable City.

Christine Alfsen has been teaching at IES ABROAD NICE campus courses on the Governance of Global Environmental Risks and Cities and Water in the Mediterranean region since 2015 while also teaching at Sciences Po Paris. Christine was born and educated in Paris, graduating from Sciences Po Paris and INALCO (Russian and Romanian languages), and a postgraduate degree in development economics. Christine spent 32 years (1980-2012) working at the United Nations in Bangkok (ESCAP), Phnom Penh, and the United Nations in New York City. Her career focused on natural resources management: Law of the Sea and marine resources management. She was in charge of Cambodia's forestry and mining sector at the United Nations Peace Keeping force 1992-1993. At the United Nations In New York City, she created a sciences policy network between UNESCO and Columbia University (CUBES, URBIS), leveraging partner universities' scientific networks (Columbia U, Cornell, Yale, University of Stockholm) to inform UN policies on urban sustainability. She worked in the UN Secretary General cabinet (2011), contributing to the UN Secretary General’s High -Level Panel on Global Sustainability report: “Resilient People Resilient Planet- Sustainable Development Goals” and in that context, was part of the team crafting with stakeholders around the world, the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) especially SDG 11: Sustainable Cities.