Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lamia Messari-Becker (born 1973, married, two children) has been a university professor for building technology and building physics, at the University of Siegen since 2013. Prof. Messari-Becker is a policy advisor, including a former member of the German Government’s Expert Council on the Environment (2016-20), a member of the Federal Ministry of Building’s Expert Group on Future Construction (since 2017), a member of the Convention of the Federal Foundation for Building Culture, and a member of the renowned Club of Rome (since 2020).

Lamia Messari-Becker: “The energy transition and sustainable building: Heat pumps are one option. Other options would be there if you only wanted them. I have always said: wind and photovoltaics must be joined by other renewable energy sources – biomass, biogas, geothermal energy and waste heat. We need a real heat turnaround.”

Prof. Messari-Becker is an alumna of the U.S. government’s International Visitor Program. For years, she has played a key role in shaping the sustainability debate in the building industry.

Lamia Messari-Becker Lecture Topics:

• Circular economy – efficiency & resource use in construction
• Sustainable building: Saving energy through insulation and clean heating
• Building in the face of climate change
• Smart Cities? Green Cities? How will we live and work in the future?
• Living and working in the future: What will our living spaces of the future look like?
• Sustainable Development Goals SDG’s of the UN: How to achieve?
• Transformation as a process – shaping change positively.
• Climate protection policy from a global perspective.
• Climate protection needs more, not less Ludwig Ehrhard
• E-mobility: Only electric cars are not enough. What happens to trucks and buses?
• Other topics on request

Handelsblatt (Carsten Herz) writes on 14.08.21: “After the flood disaster in Germany, the renowned civil engineer Lamia Messari-Becker has called for a major infrastructure offensive by the federal, state and local governments. “It’s important that policymakers and those shaping the future really understand climate adaptation as an important national task, alongside climate protection,” the professor at the University of Siegen, who long advised the German government on environmental issues, told Handelsblatt.”

The Süddeutsche (Gerhard Matzig) writes on 08.08.21: “After the flood disaster in western Germany, Lamia Messari-Becker became a familiar face in the media landscape. In special broadcasts and talk shows, her expertise on building for the future, which must adapt to climate change, was in demand almost daily. However, the civil engineer and professor of building technology and building physics at the University of Siegen, born in Larache, Morocco, in 1973, has long advocated not only more sustainable and greener building, but above all a fundamentally different building policy.”

After studying civil engineering at the Technical University of Darmstadt (diploma in 2001), Lamia Messari-Becker completed her doctorate at the Department of Civil Engineering in collaboration with the Department of Economics on CO2 reduction in the building sector using CO2 certificates (2006). In 2005, she completed postgraduate studies in management at the TH Karlsruhe. From 2009 to 2013 she worked in a leading position in an internationally operating planning office, where she realized projects in Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Norway, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Switzerland and Turkey, among others, and won numerous competitions. In the period 2006-12 she held teaching positions at the University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt and Giessen. In 2013 she accepted a call to the University of Siegen and turned down a call to the University of Stuttgart.

Messari-Becker is a former expert on environmental issues for the German government. She is a Member of the Club of Rome.

In 2016, Lamia Messari-Becker was appointed by the German government (Merkel III cabinet) as the first civil engineer to the German Council of Environmental Experts (also known as the Environmental Council), where she represented the topics of “civil engineering and sustainable urban development”. There, she occasionally expressed dissenting views. For example, she rejected the Environmental Council’s proposal to give an Intergenerational Justice Council a suspensive veto right against laws in parliament, as this would not be democratically legitimate and would weaken parliament. Instead, she suggested weighing lowering the voting age. Furthermore, on environmental policy issues, she argued in principle for the strengthening of weighing processes in local self-government as well as technology openness in the energy and mobility transition.

Also in 2016, she was appointed by the state government of Thuringia to the advisory board of the International Building Exhibition (IBA) Thuringia, where she contributed the topics of sustainable building until 2019.

In 2020, she was accepted into the Club of Rome. The Club of Rome is an association of experts from various disciplines from more than 30 countries. The non-profit organization is committed to a sustainable future for humanity. Here it works to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG’s), the goals of sustainable development, such as resource conservation, education, affordable energy, clean water, dignified housing, etc.

Her fields of work in teaching, research, practice and policy consulting are sustainable building, sustainable urban development, climate protection concepts for municipalities and companies, energy transition, mobility of the future, resource efficiency and circular economy, neighborhood approaches as well as life cycle oriented planning methods. She looks back on more than 50 construction and consulting projects as well as more than 80 publications related to practice and policy advice.