Dr. Daniela Melandri is a senior expert working within the Research and Innovation Urban and Construction landscape. She has over 18 years of extensive experience creating, leading and managing  R&I projects within the EU, UK and international funding programmes. She has collaborated as a senior manager, adviser and evaluator/assessor with several funding agencies in the EU and the UK, and as a policy and strategy advisor for R&I internationally.

In the last six years she has been collaborating with Innovate UK, the UK Innovation funding agency, working as the official EU coordinator (leader) of the SUGI ERANET Call on Sustainable Urbanisation Food -Water-Energy Nexus, which is the first global joint initiative between the JPI Urban Europe, the Belmont Forum and the European Commission (http://jpi-urbaneurope.eu/calls/sugi).

In addition, she has worked with different organisations within the Innovate UK family. For over four years she was the EU Manager in Connected Places Catapult (former Future Cities Catapult) and, prior to that, she spent two years working as the EU Relationship Manager at the KTN.  As official EU coordinator, she has led four important EU projects and over 10 national funded initiatives.  Daniela has a fund raising record of over €50m, which has been raised on R&I awarded projects.

Daniela matches her scientific background with communication and scientific journalism skills and scientific media production expertise, focused on cross media educational projects related to energy and the environment.

She has been working on scientific media education with the most prominent EU TVs and Editors  including RAI, RTBF, TV5 and Rizzoli.  From 2006-2009, she was head of a three years global Research and Media project – named S.o.S.tenibilità – for the Italian national TV RAI, funded by the Italian Ministry for the Environment, creating a series of 14 documentaries on best practice experiences of Sustainable Architecture and Sustainable Urbanization around the world, meeting and collaborating with the most prominent architects in the world (Renzo Piano, Arata Isozaki, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Balkrishna Doshi, Mario Cucinella to name a few).

Daniela is now working part time for Innovate UK as an external consultant for the SUGI Eranet project, and she is part time head of strategy for Eco-Wise, an engineering and architecture company in the UK, NL and TR. Since 2008, she has been the funder and president of the UniverCities Association, which includes over 20 Universities around Europe focused on the Built Environment and Urban Challenges.

Daniela has regular university activity, lecturing between 2006 and 2018 at Brunel University (London), Tor Vergata University (Rome) “Sustainable project management in the Built Environment” and University Politecnica de Valencia, Spain.

She holds a PhD in Engineering – Energy Management a MSc in Industrial Engineering Management and a Master Business Administration degree.

She is a mum of twins, a boy and a girl.