Past Project Members

Peer Sathikh, MDesRCA
Co-Principal Investigator for NTU Tier 1 Grant

Peer Sathikh is an Associate Professor and Academic Associate Chair at the School of Art Design and Media. He obtained a Master of Design (MDesRCA) in Industrial Design from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London and a Master of Design in Product Design from the Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He also has a Bachelor of Engineering (Hons) degree in Mechanical Engineering. He was awarded the Commonwealth Scholarship to study at RCA. While at RCA, Sathikh won the Thorn EMI Award for his project on air travel and won the first International Student Internship Award from Sony to work at the Sony Design Centre in Tokyo.

In 1996 Peer He co-founded Inovasia Design in Singapore. Sathikh has won several awards for work done as design consultant at Inovasia, such as the Good Design Award 2004 from the Chicago Athaenuem, USA and the Singapore Design Award.

Sathikh is the Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the Product Design and Innovation Course at Ngee Ann Polytechnic, Singapore and the member of the Advisory Committee for the Industrial Design Course at Nanyang Polytechnic, Singapore. Past President of the Designers Association Singapore (DAS). He is also a member of the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA), Product Design and Management Association (PDMA), USA and the Design Research Society (DRS), UK. Sathikh has been invited to and has served as a guest lecturer at design and product development conferences in Singapore, Japan and India, where he has given key note addresses and presented papers on the subject of design, design culture and branding. He heads the Above Surface design team.

Sander van der Leeuw, Ph.D
Archeaologist and Complexity Scientist, Sustainability Expert

Sander Van der Leeuw, PhD., was Dean of the School of Sustainability in Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability. He also was a co-director of the Complex Adaptive Systems Initiative at ASU and is a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Additionally, Van der Leeuw is an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. An archaeologist and historian by training, he is recognized in the science and innovation category for his research in human—environmental relations and the scientific study of innovation as a societal process. He is the United Nations 2012 Champion of the Earth in the science and innovation category.