BSSC Panel: Why Projects Matter! Creating Better Futures. Isn´t This The Main Purpose of Projects?

Professor Martina Huemann also serves as Professorial Lead of the MBA: Major Infrastructure Delivery, where she also teaches. She is also a Professor at WU Vienna, Austria. Martina has published widely on topics such as project careers, stakeholder engagement, sustainability, and project management. She is recipient of the IPMA Research Award. Martina is Editor-in-Chief of International Journal of Project Management and Founding Editor-in-Chief of Project Leadership and Society. In 2024, her co-edited Handbook of Project Management (Routledge) and the Research Handbook of Sustainable Project Management(Edward Elger) were published.

As Dean Jacqui is committed to sustaining a strong and vibrant education and research culture in the faculty, while being mindful of the importance of equity and inclusion in everything that we do. As an engaged academic specialised in Construction Management, she is interested in how we build, why we build, and how we organise ourselves to create buildings and infrastructure for a wide range of users. She values doing her work in close proximity to the construction industry to help her understand how it functions. Jacqui Glass is a Fellow of CIOB and CABE, and Associate Member of RIBA.

Priti Parikh also leads the Engineering for International Development Research Centre which evidences the impact of infrastructure and links with climate change and sustainability in resource challenged settings. She is a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers and a Council Member. Professor Parikh serves on the board of Engineers Against Poverty and Happold Foundation. Her work has received recognition through UCL's Education and Sustainability Research Award, Top 50 Women in Engineering in 2022 and as one of the top 100 academics for policy making for Apolitical.

Daniel´s research integrated civil engineering and organization theory to better understand how organisations coordinate to build, manage, maintain and deploy large civil infrastructure amidst complexity. He holds a PhD from Stanford University in Management Science & Engineering. Daniel has been named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2022.

He was Academic Director for Executive Education at AMBS, including project leadership programmes such as Managing Projects for BP, and Leading Complex Projects Programmes and Portfolios for BAE Systems. He is author of Managing Construction Projects (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), co-author of Strategic Project Organizing (OUP, 2022), and co-editor of the Research Handbook of Complex Project Organizing (Edward Elgar, 2023). He has also been an advisor on construction innovation policy to the Dutch, French, and UK governments. Project management is Graham's principal research interest, particularly around the organisation of the project process and the role of the owner/investor in large, complex projects. 

He is involved in teaching and research activities at both universities, notably on sustainable finance, climate policy, and project planning and management techniques. Previously, he was Director General at the European Investment Bank, the EU’s long-term financing institution.  While at that institution, Chris led its transformation to the EU “Climate Bank” together with the introduction of policies to align all lending with the goals of the Paris Agreement.  More generally, he was responsible for the technical, economic and ESG assessment of EIB-financed projects, including setting the standards for due diligence.  Chris holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Operations Research and a degree in engineering from Imperial College.