Copy of Leadership Team
Jacques Chirazi
Certified Biomimicry Professional
Founder and Managing Partner
Jacques Edouard Chirazi, Certified Biomimicry Professional has managed the California City of San Diego’s Clean Technology Program since 2007. His focus is to create economic growth while fostering sustainability. One emerging initiative is to bridge cleantech with biomimicry. He develops and supports a clean technology cluster in San Diego. As a critical thinker, analyzing complex programs and policies, he leverages his strong communication skills while collaborating across a diverse range of private, public and non-profit sector groups. With a passion for learning about the natural world and understanding how nature could transform the corporate environment, his long term vision is to create new business models and financial instruments to accelerate the commercialization of biomimetic solutions. Jacques served six years as Senior Project Manager at Bainbridge Inc., a strategic management consulting firm, which provides consulting services for Fortune 500 companies. He currently teaches sustainability courses and clean technology to business students at the University of California, San Diego and San Diego State University. He holds a Masters of Arts from UCSD Graduate School of International Relations & Pacific Studies in International Environmental Policy and a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing from San Diego State University. Jacques is also a certified Energy Manager (C.E.M.), Renewable Energy Professional (R.E.P.) and LEED-GA.
Jamie Brown
Certified Biomimicry Specialist
Managing Partner
Sustainable Development and Community Credit Architect
Jamie is a sustainable development, community credit and biomimicry specialist in Basel, Switzerland. She specialises in regenerative financial architecture, or the application of biomimicry to financial system design. Biological design can inform financial architecture at all levels from community credit to global finance policy. Jamie unfolds a story of how nature would design a financial system, and is working with the Biomimicry Global Network to put these lessons into practice (link). She manages the secretariat of its Bio-credits Working Group and administers the biomimicry movement's first prototype bioinspired credit facility, the Biomimicry Exchange Network (BXN). Jamie received the US Presidential Scholar’s medallion from Bill Clinton in 1999. She holds an MSc with Distinction in Development Management from the London School of Economics, where she submitted a controversial dissertation on "The Root of All Money". Jamie was Founder and Head of Secretariat for the UNEP Sustainable Energy Finance Alliance, the first convening body in the international system for public finance agencies in the clean energy sector, with a fee-for-service business model. She developed this from BASE, a non-profit UNEP Collaborating Centre in Basel. She authored major policy publications for UNEP, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the German federal government (GIZ) on public finance for sustainable energy with emphasis on developing countries. Jamie's earliest work experiences were with the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Nicaragua on environmental impact mitigation after Hurricane Mitch, and in Colombia on local governance and democracy building; and in economic development for the New Orleans Mayor's Office under Ray Nagin. She has over ten years' experience living in developing countries - primarily Kenya, Honduras and Guatemala. Immediately prior to arriving in Switzerland, she worked in private equity investment for PFI health infrastructure in the UK. Her website is www.consciousevolution.ch
Patrick Baumann
Certified Biomimicry Specialist
Managing Partner
Entrepreneur and Engineer
Patrick is the founder and owner of the mechanical engineering company Baumann Maschinenbau and is a Certified Biomimicry Specialist. Very important for him is to take care about our resources, take responsibility for how we produce goods and make products more efficient. One of his goals is to bring the mechanisms, processes and systems that we find in nature into the design and manufacturing process of everyday products to make them more sustainable. As a mechanical engineer with a masters degree from the ETH Zürich in Switzerland, Patrick has 20 years of experience in industrial designing and project management in textile technology, transportation vehicle and train carriage design, industrial computer tomography and automation of manufacturing processes. As a drummer, he received a degree from the Los Angeles Music Academy.
Darja Dubravcic, PhD
Managing Partner and Chief Biologist
Bioinspired Projects Coordinator - EPFL Liaison
Darja is a passionate biologists whose ambition is to create connections between biology, technology, economy and social sciences. Since 2015, she is coordinating all the biomimetic and bioinspired projects at the EPFL, bioinspired.epfl.ch. This includes creating educational projects and courses for students, valorizing and developing research projects and initiating research-industry connections in the field of bioinspired innovations. Her research focuses on social behaviors in microorganisms, within which she studies the problems of competition within a social group and conflict of individual over group interests. Second axe of her research looks at how nature adapts to ever-changing and unpredictable environments. The similarities between nature and business faced problems have been recognized by a multinational investment banking firm AXA, who financed her research (AXA Research Fund). Darja is passionate about the science of creativity which she puts in practice whatever she works on. She is a certified Bio-TRIZ practitioner, mixing together techniques of creativity and a biomimicry approach. Combining biology, physics and mathematics she obtained a PhD in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Evolutionary Biology (University Paris Descartes, Paris). She also holds a Master's degree in Molecular Biology (University of Zagreb, Croatia) and in Interdisciplinary Approaches to Life Sciences (University Paris Descartes, Paris.
Camille Fong
Environmental Engineer and Biomimicry Associate
Camille graduated with a Master in Environmental Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. She developed her passion for biomimicry during the summer of 2013 while in Berlin, where she was involved in Biomimicry Germany. At the same time, she worked as an intern at Technische Universitat of Berlin in Urban Water Management. She eventually returned to Montréal to pursue her studies at McGill University with a greater interest in this emerging discipline. To share her enthusiasm with the Montréal community, she impromptu organized a conference on biomimicry and engineering at her university in collaboration with Biomimétisme Québec (Biomimicry Québec). Still, she felt the need to learn more about this field. Therefore, she decided to participate to the Biomimicry Student Design Challenge 2013-2014 organized by Biomimicry Institute 3.8 and tied first place with her team Dédale. Her willingness to learn more about biomimicry and the opportunity to enhance her Professional network brought her back to Europe, in Switzerland this time. In the summer of 2014, she became a research intern at Central Environmental Laboratory at EPFL, which ended in her presenting poster on Air Ballast Biomimetic Cargo Ship Design a the Biomimicry Europe - Innovation and Finance Summit 2014 held in Zurich. Camille seeks to find a holistic approach to our modern society problems by integrating biomimicry thinking.
PiusLeuba Dit Galland
Associate Professor, Architect, Sustainable Consultant and Biomimicry Associate
A practicing architect, designer and sustainable consultant, Pius is teaching Environental Design ad TonjJi Unversity, Shnghai, School of Design and Innovation (D&I). For more than an decade he has researched designed and taught in the realm of sustainability human environment. His current focus are urban ecology, biomimicrym sustainable materials, place specific design, sustainable rural development projects and sustainable mobility. projects. Pius is director of the biomimetic desgin lab (BiDL: http://bidl.tongji.edu.cn/) at the D&I and instrumental in the creation of the a Regional Biomimicry Network in China (BCN).
“If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.”