André Taylor is a NSW-based environmental and social scientist, who is a specialist in environmental leadership. André currently wears three “hats":

First, he a leadership researcher in the last phase of his PhD with the School of Geography & Environmental Science at Monash University. His research has examined particular types of leaders (‘champions’ or ‘change agents’) that are instrumental in the transformative processes of change that lead to widespread adoption of more sustainable practices.

Second, he is also an environment management consultant with 18 years of experience gained through working in five Australian States for consultancies, State government, local government and academia. Coincidentally, his first full-time job after completing his Honours degree at the University of Tasmania was working in waste management for the former Department of Environment & Land Management.

Finally, André is also an Area Governor for Toastmasters International. Toastmasters is the world's largest non-profit communication and leadership organisation, with approximately 200,000 members worldwide.

André's paper is titled ‘Responding to the challenge of climate change: Using the lever of leadership’. His paper and presentation will examine:

• what is 'leadership';
• why leadership is particularly important for tackling 'complex challenges' in the environmental sector, like the many challenges associated with climate change; and
• how we can use knowledge of environmental leadership, relevant leadership theories and models, and methods to build leadership capacity to enhance our ability to overcome challenges like the one being addressed at this conference.

Dr Koegler holds a degree in Materials Sciences and Geochemistry from the Technical Univeristy Aachen in Germany. His PHD is in research on heavy metals in groundwater and soil. Dr Koegler began his career in the international mining industry, where he gained 10 years experience with assignments in Europe, Africa and Nth America.

Dr Koegler began working at the European Commission in 1990 where he was responsible for the management of EU funded research projects on industrial production, mining, recycling, environmental technologies and the implementation of special research funding programs for small and medium enterprises. Since 2002, he has been responsible for Environmental policy and legislation relating to natural resources, products and waste management.

Scientia Professor Veena Sahajwalla, FTSE, FIEAust, is passionate about her research on Sustainable Materials Processing, she leads a research team at The University of New Sound Wales (UNSW) and works with many companies across the globe. She is the Director of Centre for Sustainable Materials Research & Technology (SMaRT@UNSW).

She has received many International and Australian awards - the most recent was the 2008 New South Wales Scientist of the Year Award in the category of Engineering Sciences for her research on recycling waste plastics in steelmaking, a process which she invented. She also received the 2006 AIST Environmental Technology Award for best paper and  presentation and the 2006 AIST Charles Briggs Award for best paper in Electric Steelmaking. In 2005, she received Eureka Prize for Scientific Research.

She was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE) in 2007 and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineers Australia in 2005. 

Veena completed her Masters degree at the University of British Columbia and her PhD at The University of Michigan. She is passionate about science and engineering, and gets a real thrill from talking about inventions.  She is also one of the judges on the ABC TV show, “The New Inventors.”

Professor Sahajwalla has obtained research grants from Australian Research Council, Cooperative Research Centre, AISI/U.S. Department of Energy, and industry.

As director of Community Change, Rob is a community psychologist whose work has used action research strategies to examine the links between what people say they do and what they actually do. Rob has been responsible for numerous projects aimed at understanding community attitudes and behaviour and is a world leading authority on human behaviour in the waste minimisation field.

Both locally and internationally Rob’s work takes a long term perspective on behaviour change programs, most notably in waste/ resource recovery/litter prevention, water and energy conservation, and more recently in the field of climate change adaptation and mitigation.

Rob is strongly committed to a scientist-practitioner model for applying community behaviour change methods to develop sustainable outcomes and most importantly, community wide approaches to change.

Ian Garner is WRAP’s Northern Ireland Manager, based in Belfast.  Ian joined WRAP in 2003 after a 20-year career in the chemical industry and is a Chartered Environmentalist.  He is a biologist-come-chemist by background and has industrial and research experience in the fields of waste and wastewater treatment, contaminated land regeneration and chemical manufacturing and production process development.

Ian is WRAP’s main point of contact for the Northern Ireland Government and Northern Ireland Stakeholders and he also works alongside organisations in the Republic of Ireland in cross-border market development projects.

Alongside WRAP’s UK teams, Ian works with businesses and the public sector in Northern Ireland to implement WRAP’s recycling market development programme delivery in Northern Ireland.