Speakers

My name is Kristina and I am an interdisciplinary researcher and teacher enthusiastic about engaging in sustainability transitions and transformations. In my profession as Assistant Professor ‚Just Sustainability Transitions‘, I hope to promote more just and sustainable worlds in my research, teaching and engagement activities. My main research interests are emotions, justice and transformative action. I am interested in, e.g. how emotions interact with justice and power, how emotions empower and disempower, how emotions can both uncover but also hide injustices in our societies. In my research, I use a broad variety of methods, from qualitative research, over design, to more quantitative text analyses and LLM. I am in particular interested in the political being and doing of emotions, that is how emotions interrelate with politics and power. This is why, together with colleagues, I research, e.g. Transition Pain of Farmers, how to design ’Spaces for Letting Go’, the interconnectedness of emotions and power in transformative social innovation initiatives, or emotionality of discourses around farmers protests in the Netherlands.

Tobias Brosch is Full Professor at the University of Geneva, where he holds the chair in Psychology of Sustainable Development. In his research, Tobias is interested in understanding how cognitive, affective, and social processes influence our environmentally relevant choices, and how this knowledge can be used to promote sustainable decisions and behaviors. His research has been published in more than 90 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as PNAS, Nature Energy, Nature Climate Change, and Nature Human Behaviour. He is associate editor for the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and he actively engages with policy makers in the sustainability domain to bring insights from behavioral science into their work and to promote science-policy collaborations. He is lead author for the AR7 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and member of ProClim, the Forum for Climate and Global change of the Swiss Academy of Sciences.

I am a Professor of Social Psychology at the College of Wooster in Ohio. My research examines people’s relationship with the natural environment, how it is socially constructed, and how it is affected by changing environmental conditions. I developed the Environmental Identity Scale and (with co-author Bryan Karazsia) the widely used Climate Change Anxiety Scale. I am a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the International Association of Applied Psychology, and I was a lead author on the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I continue to research the ways in which climate change is affecting people’s lives and well-being, with a particular focus on moral distress and on how climate change is affecting future planning.

 

Dr. Matthew Goldberg is a Research Scientist and the Director of Experimental Research at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University. His research focuses on persuasion, social influence, and strategic communication about climate change, renewable energy, and other urgent environmental, social, and political issues. He has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and scientific reports, and his research is regularly cited in prominent news outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post. In 2022, he was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, and in 2023 he received the Early Career Achievement Award from division 34 of the American Psychological Association for exceptional research contributions. He is also co-founder of XandY—an independent research and strategy firm that helps the world’s most important ideas and innovations build momentum in society.

 

I am an Associate Professor of International Law at the Geneva Graduate Institute, where I have been a faculty member since 2015. I obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics, an LLM from King's College London, and an LLB from Leiden University. My areas of interest and expertise are environmental law, climate change, and food and agriculture. My current research focuses on emotions and international law and I am leading an SNF-funded project on this topic (see: https://emotions-and-international-law.com/). My first monograph titled Narratives of Hunger in International Law: Feeding the World in Times of Climate Change was published with Cambridge University Press in 2019. My second monograph titled Emotions and International Law is forthcoming (2027 expected) with Oxford University Press.

I'm associate professor of psychology at the Department of Psychology and tutorial fellow at Christ Church, University of Oxford. My group investigates relationships between emotion and pro-environmental behaviour, with an emphasis on processes involving positive emotions. Our research makes use of a wide range of empirical approaches, including cross-cultural comparisons, experiments, longitudinal designs, and computational methods. I did my BSc and PhD in psychology at University College London, followed by a postdocs at King’s College London, Birkbeck College, and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. From 2011 to 2025, I was based at the University of Amsterdam. I am associate editor of the journal Emotion Review, president of the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE), and a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP).

Claudia Schneider is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Psychology at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. She received her PhD from Columbia University, and worked at Princeton University, US and the University of Cambridge, UK, prior to UC. Her research focuses on understanding what shapes and motivates (prosocial) behaviour in the context of large-scale global social issues, such as climate change mitigation. One core focus being the role of positive emotions and positivity. She has a special interest in translation to practice, in particular the science-policy interface and has been a member of the Evaluation Task Force of the UK government, a fellow of the Science-Policy pairing scheme with the UK parliament, a consultant with the Centre for Science and Policy at the University of Cambridge, and has worked with various City and Regional Councils in the UK and NZ. Her work has been featured in media outlets including BBC Radio 4 in the UK and Radio NZ, in addition to journal articles and the popular press.

Giuseppe Ugazio is professor in Behavioral Philanthropy and Finance at University of Geneva. In his research he uses interdisciplinary experimental methods to explores the behavioral mechanisms underlying decision-making in philanthropy. Through the lense of behavioral science, he investigates also the interactions of AI and Philanthropy, e.g. developing machine learning approaches to disclose motivations to engage in prosocial endeavors and analyzing the role philanthropies can play in shaping the development and use of AI.