She holds a Cum Laude PhD in Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela (USC). She is currently working, as postdoctoral researcher, at the Institute of Environmental Sciences at Leiden University and collaborating with the Cross-disciplinary Research in Environmental Technologies (CRETUS) at USC. Her main research topics are related to Sustainability and circularity assessments and the Safe-and-Sustainable by Design (SSbD) framework. Particularly, she has focused on bioeconomy’s sectors and on the role of biorefineries as sustainability drivers. Her work has been supported by funding from the Galician Government and various Horizon-Europe research projects, and several results of her research activities have been published in prestigious international journals.

Visiting activity

The collaboration between USC and the Department of Law and Economics (DSGE) at UnitelmaSapienza is centered on enhancing and exchanging knowledge regarding social sustainability and the social life assessment (S-LCA) methodology. During her research stay, Dr Ana Arias Calvo was introduced to the Social Hotspot Database (SHDB) tool, which represents an important resource for the assessment of social impacts across a range of sectors and countries. The SHDB data is particularly useful for the analysis of social impacts within specific sectors, including food, fashion, and energy. Additionally, she presented her research at a seminar on 8 October entitled “Biorefineries as Drivers for Sustainability .”
To foster collaboration, she contributed to a joint research project proposal entitled “Getting on the right track: Strengthening the social dimension for achieving full sustainability.” This initiative, in partnership also with other universities (e.g Technische Universität Berlin), has the overall aim of developing indicators for a more comprehensive sustainability assessment framework from a social sustainability perspective.