Bin Bin Pearce is a post-doctoral researcher and teacher, part of the Transdisciplinarity Lab at the Dept. of Environmental Systems Science at ETH Zurich. She is currently working with the team to develop a new way of teaching environmental systems science through an integration of problem-based learning and design thinking methods.
BinBin Pearce is a liaison between TDLab and the Singapore-ETH Zurich Centre for Global Sustainability (SEC). She is working with a diverse group of stakeholders in both Switzerland and Singapore to set the research agenda of the third research program of SEC, “Integrating Food, Health, and the Environment”. As a part of these efforts, she organizes workshops and discussions between researchers of the ETH domain, Singaporean agencies, and Singaporean universities.
Her interest is in bridging the distance between academic research and design thinking methodologies in order to help students develop innovative ideas that are sensitive to real-world incentives and constraints. In the past, she has been a part of teams designing the d.light, a solar-powered light for areas with no electricity, developing drainage plans for a tsunami camp in the Andaman Islands, and improving pedestrian mobility in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her background is in environmental engineering and industrial ecology.
She is also currently, together with ETH Sustainability, creating the curriculum and programme for ETH Week, a pilot project aimed at developing critical thinking skills for Bachelor and Master students. The topic of the week is "The Story of Food".
BinBin wrote a doctoral thesis on phosphorus cycling in Singapore (defending in Fall 2014) at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She has a B.S. and M.S. in Environmental Engineering from Stanford University.
