Dr Maria Holgado

Industrial sustainability; Resource efficiency; Industrial symbiosis; Sustainable business models; Centre for Industrial Sustainability; Institute for Manufacturing; Department of Engineering; School of Technology

Dr Maria Holgado is a Research Group Leader at the Centre for Industrial Sustainability in the Institute for Manufacturing, Department of Engineering and a member of the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP). She is also the coordinator of the Sustainability Cohort, a group of researchers and practitioners working on industrial sustainability from different disciplines that emerged from the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Industrial Sustainability.

Maria works in the Energy and Resource Management Systems for Improved Efficiency in the Process Industries (MAESTRI) project, funded by the European Commission through the Horizon 2020 programme. Her contribution regards the integration of Industrial Symbiosis, focusing on material and energy exchanges, into tools and methods to enhance the adoption of resource efficiency improvement strategies in the process industry. Her research work covers business model and supply chain innovations, as well as new industrial models and solutions for more sustainable and better performing production and service networks.

The focus of Maria’s research on mechanisms capable of creating sustainable value and of enabling solutions that are commercially viable and maximising environmental and social benefits can positively impact the lives of the world’s poorest 3 billion people. More specifically, it can influence resource consumption and production patterns in terms of increasing resources and products value and their useful lifetime.

Maria’s motivation to advance towards more sustainable industrial systems underlies her contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals through the participation in Cambridge Global Challenges.