​Geopolitical pressures and a shifting international policy landscape are prompting companies to make significant changes to their operations and supply chains, often requiring rapid adaptation. At the same time, environmental challenges, such as extreme weather events and rising temperatures and sea levels, can erode the physical and natural capital that the companies depend on. How can companies ensure that their operational and supply chain changes do not inadvertently increase their environmental risk compared to their current exposure, and vice versa?

​In this webinar, Yale faculty experts will engage in a collaborative conversation with corporate attendees, focusing on the latest strategies and technologies to mitigate risks, enhance resiliency, and spur innovation in a moment of great uncertainty. Ideas generated during this webinar may be further developed through the Catalyst Consortium.

​Yale faculty will delve into how companies should be considering the risks posed by environmental challenges, when modifying supply chains to account for other pressures. They will draw upon expertise in areas including water-related risks, critical minerals, biomaterials, circular economy, operations management, and supply chain innovation.

​Corporate attendees will be invited to contribute their perspectives on the relevance of these challenges to their companies. What problems are they trying to solve? What information do they need to make better decisions?

​The conversation will be highly interactive and include active participation and questions from attendees. Please feel free to submit any questions in advance to [email protected]; this will enable panelists to focus on common pain points related to these issues.

​This webinar is tailored for chief sustainability officers, chief supply chain officers, and senior leaders focused on resilience, supply chains, sustainability, environmental risk management, and related strategic areas, along with Yale faculty engaged in these topics.

​Registrations will be reviewed, and confirmation with the event link will be sent via email.

​Come be part of the conversation!

​Moderator

​Stuart DeCew

​Executive Director, Yale Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY)

​Stuart DeCew is the Executive Director at the Yale Center for Business and the Environment. In this role, Stuart is responsible for overseeing the management, administration, strategy and development of the School of Management and the School of the Environment research, education and outreach programs in business and the environment. Stuart was also recently named the inaugural Director of the Planetary Solutions Impact Accelerator (PSIA), a new initiative designed to accelerate the translation of Yale research into commercially scalable technologies to mitigate climate change and address other planetary challenges.

​Panelists

​Barbara Reck

​Senior Research Scientist, Yale School of the Environment

​Barbara Reck is a Senior Research Scientist at the Yale School of the Environment, serves as Director Material Systems at Bauhaus Earth, Berlin, and is part of the REMADE Institute’s leadership team. She holds a doctorate in environmental engineering from TU Berlin in Germany and, prior to joining Yale, worked as Manager Environmental Affairs at Lufthansa German Airlines. She studies material cycles, their degree of circularity, recycling barriers, and implications for embodied carbon; work that informs environmental and resource policy as well as circular economy assessments. Her systems approach is rooted in detailed material flow studies of metals, plastics, and textiles that led to the development of internationally recognized, harmonized metal recycling indicators, a method to assess metal criticality that was applied to 60+ elements, and scenarios on the future supply and demand of key technology metals. More recently, she studies the supply and carbon implications of substituting carbon-intensive conventional building materials with low-carbon, often bio-based alternatives.

​Jaehong Kim

​Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor of Chemical & Environmental Engineering

​Jaehong Kim is currently the Professor and Department Chair of Chemical and Environmental Engineering in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale University in 2013, he was the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor and the Associate Chair for Undergraduate Programs at the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Chemical and Biological Engineering from Seoul National University in Korea in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and a Ph.D. degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2002. He is interested in diverse aspects of environmental science and engineering, from fundamental photocatalytic and photoluminescent materials chemistry to water quality engineering in the developing world.

​Liangbing Hu

​Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science

​Liangbing Hu is currently the Carol and Douglas Melamed Professor of Electrical Engineering in the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Yale University. Prior to joining Yale University in 2024, he was the Distinguished University Professor and director of the Center for Materials Innovation at the University of Maryland College Park. He received a B.S. degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California, Los Angeles. Hu, whose research focuses on materials innovations, manufacturing, and device integrations with a particular emphasis on emerging technologies to address energy and climate challenges, is interested in diverse aspects of materials science and engineering, from low-dimensional electronic materials and devices to nano-cellulose materials and energy applications. He is also a co-founder of companies such as InventWood and HighT-Tech, which aim to commercialize his innovative research in materials engineering.

​Sang Kim

​Professor of Operations Management and Senior Associate Dean for Centers and Executive Programs

​Sang Kim is a Professor of Operations Management and Senior Associate Dean for Centers and Executive Programs at the Yale School of Management. Professor Kim specializes in supply chain management and service operations, with a particular interest in management of business process failures. He develops analytical models based on operations research and game theory to study practice-driven problems. His recent research interests include managing low-probability/high-impact disruptions in supply chains, sustainable operations, and social responsibility in supply chain management. Using the risk management framework, he has studied problems in application areas such as aftermarkets in the aerospace and defense industry, environmental regulation, and social enterprises in developing economies. Kim’s research has been published in top management journals including Management Science, Operations Research, and Marketing Science. Currently he serves as an associate editor at Management Science and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management. Professor Kim received his Ph.D. degree in Operations and Information Management from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, MS in Scientific Computing & Computational Mathematics from the Stanford University, and BA in Physics from the University of Pennsylvania.