The Organizing Committee of Biosystems Engineering conference is delighted to present our first keynote speaker for the BSE 2026 Professor Dr. Franz Faupel.

Franz Faupel is Chairman of the North European Initiative Nanotechnology (NINa SH e.V.) and founding member of the International Alliance of Societies for a Sustainable Future (SFS). Until March 2025, he held the Chair for Multicomponent Materials at Kiel University and published over 400 research papers, inter alia, on metallic glasses, functional nanocomposites, magnetoelectric sensors, photocatalysis, plasma deposition, and memristive devices for bioinspired neuromorphic computing. After a research stay as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights, he completed his habilitation at the University of Göttingen in 1992. For more information, please visit https://www.tf.uni-kiel.de/matwis/matv/en?set_language=en and https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=YnVgzIoAAAAJ&hl=de.

Topic of his keynot speech is: Sustainability crisis and our responsibility as scientific community.

The climate and sustainability crisis is humanity’s greatest challenge, with increasingly frequent droughts, wildfires, floods, and storms signaling breached planetary boundaries and imminent tipping points. Despite clear evidence from scientific research and everyday experiences, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise exponentially due to political, societal, and individual barriers. Given its systemic nature, the sustainability crisis cannot be addressed through technological progress alone but requires a complete paradigm shift. As scientists, we bear a special responsibility to lead the communication of the urgent need for action to both the public and decision-makers. Recently, we founded the International Alliance of Societies for a Sustainable Future (https://sfs-alliance.org). Motivated by the fragility of existing political networks, our vision is to leverage the robust and stable international scientific network to alert the global public about the sustainability crisis and recommend measures for socio-ecological transformation. This alliance spans all disciplines across borders and cultures.