Ursula Eicker

Ursula Eicker is the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Communities and Cities, full Professor in the Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering (BCEE) Department and Founder and Director of the Next-Generation Cities Institute at Concordia University in Montréal. She works on decarbonization strategies for cities using living labs and urban digital twins for scenario modelling, user engagement and operational optimization. Prof. Eicker is a German physicist with a Ph.D. in Solid State Physics from Heriot-Watt University and a Habilitation in Renewable Energy Systems at Berlin Technical University. She has held leadership positions at Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences and its Centre for Sustainable Energy Technologies and led many international research projects in the fields of building energy efficiency and renewable energy supply systems.

Her current research interests focus on zero emission, sustainable and smart cities, integrating renewable energy sources and increasing urban livability. With a team of over 50 graduate students and software developers she is working on multiple living lab and eco-district projects in Canada and builds the urban modelling and data analytics platform Tools4Cities. To engage users, 3D city models can be accessed via web interfaces or immersive gamification tools. In November 2020, Eicker founded Concordia’s Next-Generation Cities Institute, which groups 14 university research centres and 200 researchers from all faculties. The Institute addresses the challenges of urban transformation with a transdisciplinary approach and develops tools and strategies for a sustainable future. Since 2024, Prof. Eicker has been appointed as a member of the Canadian Green Municipal Fund (GMF) council, supporting environmental sustainability and transformative community development across Canada. She is member of several advisory boards such as the Catalonian Energy Research Institute IREC, the Ireland Research Centre for Energy, Climate and Marine research MaREI, the multinational commercial real estate company Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield headquartered in Paris, France and others.

Prof. Eicker has published 8 books, 20 book contributions, over 140 Peer-Reviewed Papers and more than 340 Conference Papers and is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Urban Futures.