Greg Norris, PhD

Greg Norris founded and directs Sylvatica, an international life cycle assessment institute which consults on LCA to the UN, governments in the US and abroad, a variety of Fortune 500 companies, industrial associations, and smaller companies, and the non-profit sector. Norris manages the LCA-Into-LEED process for the US Green Building Council. He is Senior Fellow with GreenBlue, providing LCA guidance to their Sustainable Packaging Coalition, and through the SPC to Wal-Mart and the US EPA. He works part time with the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas, where he is also Adjunct Professor; in this role he helps the ASC advance the availability of valid and transparent life cycle inventory data. Norris founded Earthster (www.earthster.org), an open source sustainable information platform, and New Earth, a global fund for community-driven sustainable development (www.newearth.info). Norris teaches LCA at Harvard, and is Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is an editor for the International Journal of LCA and the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

Yurika Nishioka, PhD

Yurika Nishioka provides Sylvatica with expert LCI research and expertise in a number of areas with high potential environmental impact. Through a grant from an association of US manufacturers, she is advancing her research on the potential impacts of energy-saving technologies; she is expanding the modeling and results to address the impacts of energy conservation measures on greenhouse gas emissions, taking into account the full life cycle (economy-wide) industrial interactions, using a dynamic economic/emissions modeling framework. Her current research also includes an integrated life-cycle assessment and risk assessment of PVC and alternative building materials and an investigation of phthalate concentrations and sources in homes. She works as a TA at both Harvard and MIT for graduate-level courses. Yurika received her Ph.D. from the Harvard School of Public Health in 2004. Her research focused on applying and combining quantitative models in the following domains: energy consumption in the industrial, commercial, and residential sectors; inter-linkages of industrial sectors using life cycle assessment methods, with process-based models as well as economic input/output models; pollution dispersion modeling, and epidemiological models to estimate health impacts of pollution exposures.

Sébastien Cabot, B.S.

Sebastien is the acting Chief Software Engineer for Earthster. Originally a C and unix programmer, Sebastien began his career as a consultant in the telecom industry. Afterwards, he returned to school, and began to develop experience with a number of web technologies. He holds a degree in computer science from the University of Sherbrooke, a minor in linguistics, a certificate in digital information management, and he is persuing a second Bachelors degree in Mathematics, all from the University of Montreal. Sebastien rides his bike to work everyday, even during the Montreal winters.

Catherine Benoît, M.S.
Doctoral Candidate

Catherine Benoît's expertise lies in CSR and in social impacts assessment of products and development projects. In Sylvatica, she develops and applies methods, tools and database for social life cycle assessment. She acts as the research coordinator for social life cycle assessment (SLCA) within CIRAIG (www.ciraig.org), based at the University of Quebec at Montreal business school (www.esg.uqam.ca). She is the lead editor of the Code of Practice for SLCA that will be published by the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative in 2009 (http://lcinitiative.unep.fr/). She holds a bachelor of science in anthropology from University of Montreal, and a master’s in environmental sciences from University of Quebec at Montreal. She is currently completing a PhD in administrative science in the Montreal joint doctoral program (McGill-UQAM-HEC-Concordia). Catherine’s professional goal is to contribute to make all trade fair. In this perspective she works to facilitate mediation, solution development and capacity building amongst stakeholders in the complex dynamic context of a global economy, locally based. She is especially interested in the questions related to trade and human rights.

Rad Tebbens, PhD

Rad believes that an in-depth understanding of the dynamic processes influencing our environment is critical to achieving a sustainable world. As a visiting scholar at Harvard School of Public Health and MIT Sloan’s System Dynamics Group, Rad came to appreciate the enormous potential for system dynamics modeling to help us better manage public resources locally and globally. One of his papers, which modeled the long term economic implications of a global health policy debate, earned him and his co-author the Jay W Forrester award for best contribution to the field of system dynamics in the past five years. Rad joined the Sylvatica team in 2008. His goal is to help incorporate system dynamics concepts into analytical tools for sustainability, including LCA. Rad holds master and doctoral degrees in applied mathematics from Delft University of Technology.

Current Professional Positions/Affiliations

• Consultant, Sylvatica, Cambridge MA office (since August 2008)
• Research Associate, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA (since 2005)