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Dr Isabela Butnar
Senior Research Associate
Bartlett School Env, Energy & Resources
Faculty of the Built Environment
- Joined UCL
- 22nd Feb 2016
Research summary
Isabela is a chemical engineer by
background, specialised in environmental impact assessment by using Life Cycle
Assessment (LCA) and Environmentally Extended Economic Input-Output (EIO)
techniques. She has a wide experience on modelling environmental impacts of
food and biofuel systems, e.g. GHG emissions, water consumption and pollution,
over the complete lifecycle, from the cultivation of crops, their processing,
product manufacturing, transport, consumer use, through to final disposal.
Her PhD work explored the use of
hybrid EIO - LCA techniques for environmental impact assessment. She developed
a hybrid EIO - LCA model to assist the environmental impact assessment of
companies within the wider context of a national economy, with a particular
focus on the Spanish context. She used advanced economic techniques, such as
Structural Path Analysis and Structural Decomposition, to unravel the
contribution of particular sectors to the national environmental impacts, e.g.
GHG emissions, land use, water consumption.
At Unilever, Isabela provided
environmental sustainability expertise to several business units, but she
primarily supported Unilever’s Foods business. She also undertook research on the
development and application of environmental impact assessment methods to
products and services at different scales, e.g. local, regional, and
global.
As part of the UCL ISR modelling team, Isabela contributes to incorporating LULUCF GHG emissions into the TIAM-UCL global energy systems model, enabling a more accurate estimation of climate change consequences of various scenarios of global bioenergy consumption in general, and UK bioenergy consumption in particular.
Teaching summary
Isabela supervised several MSc students and co-supervised a PhD student. She also taught several undergraduate laboratory courses, and trained business audiences on environmental sustainability.
Biography
Isabela joined the UCL ISR as a Senior Researcher in the Bioenergy Value Chains project in February 2016. Her research focuses primarily on the assessment of environmental impacts of bioenergy systems, particularly related to the contribution of land use and land use change to climate change. Before joining the UCL ISR, Isabela worked as an environmental sustainability scientist for Unilever, and as associate researcher and research projects manager at the Rovira i Virgili University (Spain).
Isabela holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Rovira i Virgili (Spain), and a MSc in Interface Process Engineering from the University Babes-Bolyai (Romania).