Didac Ferrer Blas

Dr. Didac Ferrer-Balas (Barcelona, 1974) is currently the head of the Innovation and Community Bureau at UPC. He graduated as an industrial & materials engineer since 1997, and obtained a doctorate in materials science in 2001 from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC-Barcelona Tech). Since year 2000, he has occupied various management positions related to sustainability and social innovation at UPC, with a wide number of projects in sustainable education, sustainable management, inclusion and diversity, SDG, social responsibility, or interdisciplinary collaboration like the Nexus24 program on collaborative communities.

He is currently international expert advisor at the Global University Network for Innovation (GUNI), and has been member of the editorial boards of Journal of Cleaner Production and of the journal Sustainability Science. He has been in the scientific committees and chairs of various international conferences (EESD, AGS, EMSU) and taught in the Masters of Sustainability at UPC, in the fields of sustainable organizations, industrial ecology and sustainable technology.

He was co-founder of Tarpuna, a non-profit cooperative for social inclusion created in 2012. He has been involved in projects in social fabrication, social farming, energy poverty, collaborative consumption, and advised the Barcelona City Council for the creation of a public fab-labs network. More recently, he's experiencing with art as a means to influence society and has developed artistic projects related to climate change and artificial intelligence.