Dr. Léa Braud
Dr. Léa Braud
Staff of Professorship for Sustainable Food Processing
Additional information
Research area
Prospective Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an emerging approach that evaluates the future environmental sustainability of products and systems, integrating scenario data from Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) with comprehensive background databases such as ecoinvent. This methodology enables the modeling of future supply chains and supports informed decision-making for sustainable product design and policy development. While Python-based tools such premise and futura have advanced the integration of IAMs with LCA databases, traditional LCA software still faces limitations in implementing database-wide changes required for prospective analysis.
Recent prospective LCA studies in the agri-food sector have primarily focused on alternative proteins, such as insects and cultured meat, but have largely limited their scope to foreground scenarios, overlooking the critical influence of future shifts in background supply chains. Only a few pioneering studies have begun to address these background changes, demonstrating their significant impact on environmental outcomes. However, a major gap persists: current prospective LCA frameworks rarely incorporate nutritional or social sustainability dimensions, despite evidence that dietary shifts can have complex effects on overall system sustainability.
To fully capture the sustainability of future food systems, there is a pressing need to expand prospective LCA methodologies to include nutritional and social dimensions alongside environmental and economic factors. Dr. Braud’s research directly addresses this gap, advancing the field toward more holistic and actionable sustainability assessments for novel foods and diets.
Dr. Léa Braud is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Sustainable Food Processing Laboratory at ETH Zurich, within the Institute for Food, Nutrition, and Health. Her research is dedicated to advancing Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) methodologies, with a particular focus on developing tools to evaluate the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of microalgae-based systems.
Prior to joining ETH Zurich, Dr. Braud was a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Sustainable Development, Environmental Science and Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. There, she specialized in developing open-source tools for the prospective sustainability assessment of renewable energy and biorefinery systems. Her work at KTH contributed to the creation of transparent, accessible methodologies for evaluating the future impacts of emerging technologies, supporting informed decision-making in the transition to a sustainable bioeconomy.
Dr. Braud obtained her PhD in Biosystems and Food Engineering from University College Dublin, Ireland, where she was a researcher at both the School of Biosystems & Food Engineering and the BiOrbic Bioeconomy SFI Research Centre. As part of the European SpiralG project (CBE-JU), she advanced environmental LCA methodologies for the algae sector, with a particular focus on assessing the environmental impacts of phycocyanin production from Spirulina within a biorefinery concept. Her doctoral work included industrial collaborations with several companies in the sector.
Earlier, Dr. Braud earned her MSc in Biotechnology from AgroParisTech and L'Institut Agro in France. She completed her MSc thesis at Wageningen University in the Bioprocess Engineering laboratory, where she worked on omega-3 fatty acid accumulation in Nannochloropsis oceanica.