The 2019 Laudise Medal, awarded for outstanding achievements in industrial ecology by a researcher under the age of 36 was awarded to Francesca Verones, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. Francesca studied environmental engineering at the Swiss Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, where she won prizes for outstanding Masters’ and PhD theses. She had a short stint as a PostDoc at the Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
In her nomination, her PhD advisor Stefanie Hellweg describes Francesca as “a brilliant young scholar who is pioneering the assessment of biodiversity effects in Life Cycle Assessment.” Francesca works on closing important gaps with respect to the assessment of impacts in aquatic and marine environments and has addressed major drawbacks in the general approach to ecosystem impact assessment in LCA, such as addressing the species richness of affected habitats. Her organizational skills are formidable. She coordinated the LC-Impact methodology in collaboration with Mark Huijbregts and led a task force of the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative. Further, she held one of the most appreciated talks at the 2018 Gordon Research Conference.
Edgar Hertwich
