At Oxford, programmes related to business and entrepreneurship are incorporating principles of sustainability development. Professor Mette Morsing, director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, will share her thoughts on the role of businesses in responding to climate change, including her previous work developing the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education. We will also be joined by Evan Thomas, director of the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Mortenson Center is training a new generation of engineers to tackle global sustainability challenges.

About our speakers:

Professor Mette Morsing is the Director of the Smith School. She's also a Fellow by Special Election at St Edmund Hall. Professor Morsing’s area of research expertise is organisation theory and corporate sustainability, with a focus on governance, strategy, communication, identity and cross-sector partnerships. She is appointed to a number of international board/council memberships and honorary fellowships, including RSM Rotterdam School of Management (Holland), Kings College London (UK), Sasin School of Management (Thailand), RRBM Research for Responsible Research for Business and Management (USA), and Boards Impact Forum (Sweden). She has served on numerous boards, committees and councils with regards to sustainable development and her research has won several international recognitions, especially her research with a practice orientation. She is an invited author, researcher and speaker at global academic and business conferences, with expertise spanning responsible management, responsible management education and sustainable development. Morsing has been invited to public speaking engagements in Africa, East Asia, Australia, Eurasia, China, Middle East, North America, Latin America, and Europe.

Professor Evan Thomas is the Director of the Mortenson Center in Global Engineering & Resilience and holds the Mortenson Endowed Chair in Global Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He is a tenured full Professor jointly appointed in the Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering and the Aerospace Engineering Sciences Departments, and an affiliate faculty in Environmental and Occupational Health at the Colorado School of Public Health. Evan is currently a member of the NASA and USAID SERVIR Applied Sciences Team, and a member of the board of the Millennium Water Alliance. Evan has a PhD in Aerospace Engineering Sciences from the University of Colorado Boulder, a Masters in Public Health from the Oregon Health and Science University, a MBA in Global Business from the Fletcher School at Tufts University, and is a registered Professional Environmental Engineer. Evan’s technical background is in water and air testing and treatment applied in a range of contexts, from low-resource settings to operational spacecraft. Evan’s research has been funded by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the World Bank, USAID, the UN Foundation, the CDC, the United Kingdom Department for International Development, the Gates Foundation, and others. Evan led the technical conception and development of a $160M award from the NSF for the Colorado-Wyoming Climate Resilience Engine.