Dr. Fernanda Belizario Silva

Fernanda Belizario Silva graduated with honors in Civil Engineering from the Polytechnic School of the University of Sao Paulo in 2008.

Between 2009 and 2012, Fernanda developed her master studies at the same institution, on process planning for the industrialized construction of social housing, in parallel with her work at a local construction company. She has also worked with the implementation of technological innovations in other Brazilian construction companies until 2014, when she started in a research position at the Institute for Technological Research (IPT).

At IPT, Fernanda worked with technical performance evaluation of innovative construction products and systems for the Brazilian market. Motivated by adding environmental criteria to these assessments, she conducted internal research projects based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). She has coordinated the development of life cycle inventories of Brazilian cementitious products for the ecoinvent database in partnership with the industry, where it became clear that a simplified method was necessary to accelerate life cycle data collection in developing countries like Brazil.

During her doctorate at the University of Sao Paulo, with research stays at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics and ETH Zürich, Fernanda developed a streamlined version of LCA for the construction value chain that considers the most relevant environmental impacts of the construction industry and simplifies primary data collection for developing the life cycle inventories. This method was applied in the development of the Brazilian life cycle data system for construction products (Sidac).

Since September 2023, Fernanda works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of Sustainable Construction at the ETH Zürich.