Christoph Becker

Christoph Becker is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, directs the Just Sustainability Design Lab, and is one of the University’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Fellows.

Christoph Becker is Full Professor at the Faculty of Information and the School of the Environment at the University of Toronto. He leads the Just Sustainability Design lab (www.justsustainabilitydesign.org). With a background in computer science and informatics, his research today focuses on enacting meaningful change in computing to meet the urgent need for sustainability and social justice (converging in just sustainability) through

(1) critical examination of the politics, values, and cognitive processes of design,
(2) development of methods and tools for just sustainability design,
(3) design projects to bring forth just sustainabilities in urban contexts.

His book Insolvent: How to reorient computing for just sustainability appeared at MIT Press in 2023 and won multiple awards.

Read more about his work: Just Sustainability Design Lab

• Best Paper at CSCW 2025 for “Near Data” and “Far Data” for Urban Sustainability: How Do Community Advocates Envision Data Intermediaries? with PhD students Han Qiao and Siyi Wu, 2025
• Best Reviewer, 11^th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability (ICT4S 2025), 2025
• Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability (MIT Press 2023) is selected a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association, 2024
• Insolvent: How to Reorient Computing for Just Sustainability (MIT Press 2023) is selected a Finalist in Engineering and Technology at the AAP PROSE Awards. 2024. Finalist at PROSE means the book is one of two runners-up in that category. 2024
• Best Paper Award, 6th International Conference on ICT for Sustainability, 2019
• German Academic Exchange Service Scholarship, 2019
• Emerald Literati Network Award for Excellence, OCLC Systems & Services, 2016
• Connaught New Research Award, University of Toronto, 2015-2016
• W. Kaye Lamb Prize, Association of Canadian Archivists