Melissa Sterry

One of the breakthrough-generation of futurists, Melissa Sterry is known as a champion of technology that serves to make the world a better place. Whether giving a keynote speech on the potential of ICT to improve our cities or writing about leading-edge innovations in Bionics, her work is essentially concerned with developing a vision of what successful change may look like and supporting others on a journey towards it.

For more than a decade, Melissa has worked to integrate pioneering sustainability thinking into mainstream business and society. A recipient of several innovation awards, including the Mensa Education and Research Foundation International Award for enhancing intelligence that benefits society, Melissa divides her time in equal parts between research, development, enterprise and communication. Having migrated from designer to design scientist, with a career heavily focused on emergent digital technology and its applications, Melissa has more than two decades experience of working with leading-edge innovation, a dozen of which have been at executive board level with first-to-market start-ups across both B2B and B2C international markets.

Melissa is Director/Head of Technology at Earth 2 Hub™, which gives new science and technology an immersive media platform that supports and drives new content creation and new programmes for change, through which to deliver and build a sustainable future. By presenting new scientific facts and futures as they emerge Earth 2 Hub™ aims to harness The Art of the Possible and cause a positive decision for change to occur on an on-going basis. A visiting fellow, visiting lecturer and guest critic at several leading European built environment research institutes including SOBE, IAAC and AA School, Melissa is published in over 60 international titles and sits on several scientific committees, sustainability awards juries and editorial boards.

Her interests in science, technology and design manifest in her research project the Bionic City®; the world over, Life in all its various shapes and forms, has found novel ways to build resilience to extreme meteorological and geological events. Positing the potential of the city as a complex biomimetic adaptive system, Bionic City® explores these resilience strategies and how we may mimic them using leading-edge science and technology. Its hypothesis challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions in contemporary planning and design and ultimately attempts to answer the question "how would Nature design a city?" Together with a team of artists and filmmakers, Melissa is developing CGI imagery and films to present some of her research findings and proposals. She is researching her hypothesis as an MPhil/PhD candidate at the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architecture Research group, University of Greenwich.