Leadership & Governance
Leadership
Global leader · Board member · International adviser
Global leader · Board member · International adviser
With a long and distinguished career in entrepreneurship and business, I have spent several decades founding companies and advising boards and institutions.
Spanning infrastructure, energy and sustainability, these roles reflect a career built on turning ideas into organisations, and organisations into impact. From directing capital across major real estate portfolios to overseeing the development of technologies that will define how cities heat themselves, the thread is consistent: large-scale decisions, long horizons, and the conviction that science and business are stronger together.
ISSMGE brings together some 21,000 members through national societies in 93 countries. The presidency is principally a question of direction: what the profession should hold itself responsible for, how a global society governs itself, and where geotechnical engineering ought to be heard that it currently is not. I served as Vice President for Europe from 2022 to 2026, and the office carries a seat on the board of the Federation of International Geo-Engineering Societies.
Board work is where technical evidence meets capital, timing and risk. In each of these rooms the question is the same: what does the engineering actually support, and what is still a promise?
A Swiss real estate fund group. Property portfolios face a decarbonisation problem with a long horizon and no inexpensive answer: buildings account for around 30% of Swiss CO₂ emissions, most of the stock predates 1990, and at current renovation rates the work would take the better part of a century. The board questions are about capital, sequence and timing, and about which technologies are genuinely ready to specify at scale.
Medusoil developed bio-cementation, a biological alternative to cement grouting for soil reinforcement, out of research in my laboratory. Chairing its board is the deep-tech scale-up question in concrete form: when a proof of concept becomes a product, what a first commercial deployment can honestly claim, and how a small company survives the distance between a laboratory result and industrial adoption.
Local Energy delivers energy transition solutions for residential and commercial building portfolios — photovoltaic, thermal systems and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. Based in Lausanne, the company works with major Swiss property owners and fund managers to replace fossil fuel systems and bring renewable energy into existing and new buildings.
Assessing engineering research proposals for national funding. The work is judging which lines of enquiry are worth public money, which is a question about where a field is going as much as about the quality of any single proposal.
Hagerbach is a working underground test facility where tunnelling and construction technologies are trialled at full scale before they reach a live project. The council’s role is direction: what should be tested, and what the sector needs to know next.
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