ABSTRACT

Imagine we are in a community where products are made & repaired locally, and we consume food prepared and produced locally by people you know.

Imagine waste management is not a dirty & tedious job but a respectful & high-tech job enabling zero waste city?

Imagine your innovation enabling the sustainable city where you desire to live.

How would this make you feel?

It makes me feel connected, purposeful, and at peace.

Is it even possible? For Singapore? How to make it happen?

Dr Lerwen LIU will share her personal experience on how she has been transformed from a Nanotechnology Advocate to become a Circular Economy & Sustainability Advocate.

She will highlight the importance of design & technology innovation and education in driving the Circular Economy transition. Changing product services from a selling business model creates new business opportunities to accelerate sustainability transformation.

She will share her career journey from a researcher and analyst to an entrepreneur and her role as a consultant for the Asia Development Bank (ADB), Founding Director of STEAM Platform (STEM with a soul), Managing Director of NanoGlobe (specializing in emerging technology and sustainability consultancy), and a co-editor of the 1st Circular Economy Textbook published by Springer Nature, etc.

Come and have a dialogue with Lerwen. Together we figure out how we all contribute to a more sustainable future for ourselves and generations to come.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr. Lerwen Liu specializes in business development and education in emerging technologies, circular economy, and sustainability. She focuses on strategic development, assessment, and support of emerging technologies including nanotechnology and Artificial Intelligence with applications in all sectors. She has 20 years of practice in global business development in strategic partnership & communication and marketing. She has been bridging government, industry, and academics in developing sustainable solutions to address the challenges humanity is facing today. She has worked in both the developed and developing world focusing on youth leadership and entrepreneurship development towards sustainability.

She founded the STEAM Platform in 2018 focusing on youth empowerment with convergent STEM knowledge, strategic communication skills, entrepreneurship for SDGs2030, Circular Economy, and Industry 4.0. She is the convenor of the Circular Economy Leadership & Partnership (CELP) Summit 2021 under the CE Accelerator program which she co-founded at Knowledge Xchange for Innovation Center in Bangkok. She has been an invited expert in nanotechnology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and circular economy by different agencies in the united nations, Asia Development Bank (ADB), Islamic Development Bank, and other government bodies. She has co-founded a number of emerging technology start-ups and mentored hundreds of youth leaders in Asia. She was a founding secretary of the Asia Nano Forum supporting the strategic development of Nanotechnology in 17 countries in the Asia Pacific region.

She has developed and taught innovative modules at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT) on topics of nanotechnology, innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability. She is an author and co-editor of the 1st Textbook “An Introduction to Circular Economy” published by Springer Nature in Dec. 2020 (ISBN: 978-981-15-8509-8, at link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-15-8510-4). She is the editor of “Emerging Nanotechnology Power: Nanotechnology R& D and Business Trends In The Asia Pacific Rim published by World Scientific in 2009. She is a Review Editor in Frontiers in Environmental Science – Environmental Economics and Management.

Lerwen holds a Ph.D. in Physics from UNSW Australia. She is an Australian citizen, currently based in Bangkok and Singapore.