Rachel Armstrong

She creates open innovation platforms for academia and industry to address environmental challenges such as carbon capture & recycling, smart ‘living’ materials and new approaches to sustainable design. She has recently been nominated for a Katerva Award in Urban Design as the designer of the smart chemistry in a team of visionary practitioners for the Hylozoic Ground installation.

Rachel encourages and designs change as well as promoting new transferrable ways of thinking...

Rachel Armstrong innovates and designs sustainable solutions for the built and natural environment using advanced new technologies such as Synthetic Biology – the rational engineering of living systems – and Smart chemistry. She is a fascinating keynote speaker, challenging perceptions, presumptions and established principles around the building blocks of life and society.

She creates open innovation platforms for academia and industry to address environmental challenges such as carbon capture & recycling, smart ‘living’ materials and new approaches to sustainable design. She has recently been nominated for a Katerva Award in Urban Design as the designer of the smart chemistry in a team of visionary practitioners for the Hylozoic Ground installation.

Rachel encourages and designs change as well as promoting new transferrable ways of thinking ‘outside the box’ that enables others to develop innovative environmental solutions. Her approaches are outlined in her forthecoming TED book on Living Architecture.

Dr Rachel Armstrong graduated from the University of Cambridge with First Class Honours. In 2009 she embarked on a PhD in chemistry and architecture to pursue her long standing passion for evolutionary processes and environmental impact.

Rachel has an optimistic view of our relationship with technology, which she considers to be the way that our ideas are embodied and implemented. Core to her practice is the belief that new ways of thinking can drive innovation and generate technology that can help us overcome seemingly impossible problems to create a better future for ourselves.

"The biggest threat to our survival is our resistance to change in an unstable world. Architecture can only truly be sustainable when it is connected to nature, not insulated from it."

Rachel Armstrong's current work involves the development of a new group of materials for architectural practice that have some of the properties of living systems but are not actually ‘alive’. She aims to use a qualitatively different approach to building construction and open up the range of tools and techniques for the built environment in a much broader context.

She was awarded a TED Fellowship and then a Senior TED Fellowship the same year, and has an international platform that enables her to connect with a range of audiences, sharing her broad knowledge and experience.

Rachel is a member of the RESCUE “Collaboration between the natural, social and human sciences in global change research” Working Group, an interdisciplinary body of European experts making recommendations to the EU for strategic investment for interdisciplinary/scientific research of climate change. She was also part of the TARPOL report for the European Commission Research – Food, Agriculture and Fisheries and Biotechnology. TARPOL stands for Targeting environmental Pollutions with engineered microbial systems a la carte research area: Biotechnologies (Synthetic biology for the environment – the use of synthetic biology for the solution of environmental problems.)

Her Nature Opinion was published in 2010. She predicts that synthetic biology could offer innovative sustainable approaches to the built environment.

Speaking Topics

Rachel Armstrong is an innovative and charismatic keynote speaker on innovation, sustainability and technology.

• Science & Technology
• CSR
• Innovation
• Architecture
• Environmental
• Sustainability
• Green

For further information or to book Dr. Rachel Armstrong, please call us on +44 (0)20 7607 7070 or email info@speakerscorner.co.uk