Jury

Kato is a human geographer and urbanist. She works as an action researcher and advisor at DRIFT, the Dutch Research Institute For Transitions. DRIFT was established in 2004 at the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, where it is currently operating as a social enterprise. At DRIFT, Kato develops and shares transformative knowledge to support people, cities, sectors and organisations to engage proactively with sustainability transitions and transition governance. She is specifically interested in how to make transitions land well in the built environment.

A few examples of her current projects are the Connecting Nature project in which she is supporting cities with the implementation and scaling of nature-based solutions through co-production and reflexive monitoring. Kato is also coaching innovative food entrepreneurs in the Voedselfamilie Academie to take the next step towards realizing their transformative business models. Furthermore, she’s part of a consortium designing a governance driven approach for Luxemburg to become carbon neutral by 2050.

Ugo Guarnacci is an applied economist by training, with a PhD on measuring resilience and subjective wellbeing in post-disaster, post-conflict regions.
Ugo has been working for almost 9 years at the European Commission, focusing on EU Research and Innovation strategies and programmes for sustainable, resilient and inclusive cities. First, for the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation, then for the Executive Agency for SMEs (EASME) and currently as Project Adviser at the European Research Executive Agency (EREA). Indeed, Ugo is managing Horizon 2020 projects on smart and sustainable cities, social and cultural innovation, nature-based solutions.
In 2019, during a sabbatical year, Ugo worked as Lead in Diversity and Inclusion 4.0 at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, fostering gender, diversity and inclusion at the global level.

Martin Sandbu is the Financial Times’s European Economics Commentator. He also writes Free Lunch, the FT’s weekly newsletter on the global economic policy debate. He has been writing for the FT since 2009, when he joined the paper as Economics Leader Writer.
Before joining the FT, he worked in academia and policy consulting. He has taught and carried out research at Harvard, Columbia and the Wharton School, and has advised governments and NGOs on natural resources and economic development. He is the author of three books, on business ethics, the euro, and on „the economics of belonging“. He was educated at the universities of Oxford and Harvard.

Sena Segbedzi is the Coordinator of the OECD’s Champion Mayors Initiative for Inclusive Growth a global coalition of mayors prioritizing policies to expand inclusive economic growth in their cities. She manages the activities, strategic and substantive direction of the Initiative and contributes to projects related to equitable development, climate finance and investment, local governance and innovation capacity in cities.
Sena has worked on topics related to equitable urban development for over 8 years. Prior to joining the OECD, Sena was a policy analyst at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy on secondment to the OECD, contributing to advancing inclusive growth through land based finance tools. She also worked at the Ford Foundation where she served as program manager of the foundation’s initiative for the equitable and inclusive recovery of Detroit post-bankruptcy.
She holds a Master of Urban Planning from the New York University’s Wagner School of Public Service (New York, USA) and a Bachelor of Arts in Italian studies from Wellesley College (Massachusetts, USA).