Stefan Pauliuk receives the 2025 BrightCon award for Open Sustainability

October 2025 — Professor Stefan Pauliuk of the University of Freiburg has been awarded the 2025 BrightCon Award for Open Sustainability, a prestigious recognition of his outstanding contributions to open access data, models, and teaching materials in the fields of industrial ecology and socio-metabolic research.

The award, presented at the annual BrightCon Conference on Open Sustainability (BrightCon 2025), honours individuals and initiatives advancing open-source and transparent approaches to sustainability assessment.

Pioneering Open Science in Industrial Ecology

At the Industrial Ecology Freiburg research group, Professor Pauliuk leads pioneering work on the flows of materials and energy in society — the metabolism that underpins cities, industries, and infrastructure. His research combines quantitative systems modelling, life-cycle assessment, and scenario analysis to explore pathways toward sustainable production and consumption within planetary boundaries.

What sets Pauliuk’s contribution apart is his deep commitment to open science. Through initiatives such as the Industrial Ecology Data Commons and the Industrial Ecology Open Online Course (IEooc), he and his team have made cutting-edge data, code, and teaching resources freely available to researchers, students, and practitioners around the world. These efforts have significantly increased transparency, reproducibility, and global collaboration in sustainability research.

“Open data and open models are the backbone of credible sustainability science,” says Pauliuk. “They allow others to build on our work, verify results, and accelerate innovation toward real-world solutions.”

About Brightcon and the Award

Brightcon 2025 — held this year in Grenoble, France, from 12–17 October 2025 — is the leading international gathering dedicated to open-source sustainability tools, methods, and data systems. The event brings together developers, researchers, and practitioners for hackathons, training sessions, and a hybrid conference focused on transparent and collaborative environmental modelling.

The Brightcon Award for Open Sustainability recognises individuals or teams that have made transformative contributions to open-access sustainability science. This year’s award celebrates Pauliuk’s long-standing leadership in building open infrastructures and teaching materials that empower the global industrial ecology community.

A Model for the Future of Sustainability Research

Pauliuk’s work exemplifies how academic openness and scientific rigour can go hand in hand to accelerate sustainability transitions. His group’s research informs circular economy strategies, resource efficiency policies, and low-carbon transitions — while the open-access tools they develop ensure that others can replicate and expand these analyses worldwide.

The Brightcon Award underlines a broader shift in sustainability research: toward transparency, collaboration, and public accessibility as key pillars of impactful science.

Congratulations to Prof. Stefan Pauliuk and the Industrial Ecology Freiburg team on this well-deserved recognition!