Catherine Benoît

Catherine Benoît is the co-creator and executive director of the Social Hotspots Database project. She is the lead editor of the Guidelines for S-LCA that were published by the UNEP Life Cycle Initiative in May 2009 (http://lcinitiative.unep.fr/). Catherine is a visiting scholar at the University of New Hampshire and a project leader within the Sustainability Consortium. In 2008, she joined Sylvatica (www.sylvatica.com), a Life Cycle Assessment consulting firm, directing Social LCA projects. She is also leading the development of the social sustainability assessment capabilities of Earthster (www.earthster.org). Prior to her current positions, she was the research coordinator for social life cycle assessment (S-LCA) within CIRAIG (www.ciraig.org), based at the University of Quebec at Montreal business school (www.esg.uqam.ca) for 6 years (2004-2009). She holds a bachelor of science in anthropology from the University of Montreal, and a master’s in environmental sciences from the University of Quebec at Montreal. She is currently completing a PhD in Business Administration in the Montreal joint doctoral program (McGill-UQAM-HEC-Concordia). Catherine is also an advisor to sustainable purchasing initiatives, to social responsibility supply chains metrics development initiatives, to the Ecoinvent committee on impact indicators and a project leader within the UNEP-SETAC Life Cycle Initiative.

Greg Norris

Greg Norris is the co-creator of the Social Hotspots Database project and he is leading its economic and system modeling dimension. Greg founded New Earth, a global fund for community-driven sustainable development (www.newearth.info) and Earthster (www.earthster.org), an open source sustainability information platform. He is a Visiting Professor of the Applied Sustainability Center at the University of Arkansas and a member of the planning committee of the Sustainability Consortium. Norris has lead the development of the methods, modeling, and software to implement LCA within the US Green Building Council's LEED rating system. Greg founded and directs Sylvatica, an international life cycle assessment institute (www.sylvatica.com) which consults on LCA to the UN, governments in the US and abroad, a variety of Fortune 500 companies, industrial associations, smaller companies, and the non-profit sector. Greg Norris teaches LCA at Harvard, and is an Adjunct Lecturer at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is an editor for the International Journal of LCA and the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

Deana Aulisio

Deana Aulisio has been a research associate for the Social Hotspots Database project since September 2009. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Hampshire, where she has achieved prior degrees in civil/environmental engineering and has been a research scientist for over 10 years in the areas of environmental remediation and sustainability. A temporary position at the NH Department of Environmental Services in 2008 allowed her to assist in producing the Climate Change Action Plan for the state. In that same year, she offered her time to develop a quantitative Sustainability Evaluation for scoring local businesses in the Green Alliance, a Green Business networking cooperative of over 80 businesses in the Seacoast of New Hampshire, southern Maine, and northern Massachusetts, where she currently sits on the advisory board.

The Social Hotspots Database project also benefits from the work of graduate and undergraduate research assistants based at the University of New Hampshire.