Agenda

Speaker:
Dr. Danail Hristozov, Green Decision srl and Emerge

Abstract:
The European Commission’s (EC) Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework has highlighted the importance of assessing safety and sustainability as early as possible in the innovation process and in a pragmatic way. This has created the need to operationalise the framework with cost-effective methods and tools for simplified sustainability assessment. The development of such approaches is not a straightforward task: it requires integration of diverse technical indicators for lifecycle assessment of environmental, social and economic impacts with the trade-offs of key stakeholders from industry, academia, policy, regulation and the civil society. The task is particularly complicated for the family of emerging advanced (nano)materials due to the complexity of their physicochemical properties and interactions with physiological and environmental systems. These new innovative materials have the potential to effectively support the green transition in a broad range of industrial sectors (e.g., construction, structural and functional materials, active ingredients, food, healthcare, energy, cosmetics and electronics). They offer unprecedented technological benefits, but due to their emerging and complex nature it has been challenging to assess their Environmental, Health and Safety (EHS) and sustainability impacts, and even more so to do this in an integrated manner. The goal of the seminar is to present these challenges in the context the revised 2025 EC SSbD Framework and deliver an approach for integrated health, environmental, social and economic impacts of advanced materials currently being developed in the EU SUNRISE project. This approach uses methods from decision science (such as Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis) that can also incorporate stakeholders’ trade-offs in the SSbD decision making process. The second part of the seminar will focus on providing the participants with basic training in writing EU research proposals on the topic of SSbD of chemicals and advanced materials.

Bio sketch:
Dr. Danail Hristozov is the Head of Research at Greendecision Srl, a spin-off company of University Ca’ Foscari of Venice in Italy. There he performs integrative research across the areas of risk assessment, management and governance of bio and nanomaterials used in medicine and consumer products as part of the large-scale EU H2020 projects GRACIOUS, BIORIMA, REFINE, caLIBRAte, Gov4Nano, NanoInformatix and SAFE-N-MEDTECH. Danail has been a senior research scientist at the Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics of University of Venice, where he acted as the Principal Investigator of the large-scale EU FP7 project SUN. Over the last years Danail contributed to several EU projects, including MARINA, NANOforART, ENPRA, ITS-NANO, GLOCOM, ECONANOSOPRB and EPSEI, also as research staff of the private sector companies Venice Research Consortium and Veneto Nanotech. In his early years as a researcher, Danail was employed at the Chair of Industrial Sustainability of the Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany. Danail has started initiatives to promote his research internationally and transfer knowledge and skills to the new generations of researchers. Specifically, he founded the Working Group on “Training” and co-chaired the Working Group on “Risk” of the European NanoSafety Cluster. He also launched and currently co-chairs the Society for Risk Analysis Roundtable with the NanoSafety Cluster, which aims at advancing science and policy, training and education, information exchange and dissemination in the nanosafety research area with a special focus on risk governance.