Naiara Casagrande
Researcher
Naiara Casagrande is a researcher in life cycle assessment (LCA) and environmental sustainability at NOVA University Lisbon (FCT NOVA), where she is part of the MARLab. She holds a PhD in Environmental and Sustainability Sciences from FCT NOVA (2024), with research focused on the ecotoxicological impacts of plastic additives in aquatic environments. Her work contributed to the development of a new characterization factor for Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA).
Naiara has a multidisciplinary background in environmental engineering, life cycle thinking, and marine pollution. She holds her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Environmental Engineering from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. During her master’s, she was part of the CICLOG research group, applying LCA to assess the environmental impacts of plastic waste entering the ocean.
She acquired international research experience as a visiting researcher at the Department of Industrial Ecology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), where she collaborated on projects in environmental modeling and LCIA. Her professional and academic experience bridges applied research and methodological development in LCA. In the private sector, she interned at Kimberly-Clark’s tissue paper mill in Brazil, developing projects to reduce environmental impacts in operations.
Since 2014, Naiara has also been involved in environmental education and science communication, participating in outreach initiatives and serving as a researcher with the Veleiro ECO project, which combines sailing expeditions with environmental monitoring. Her current research focuses on improving LCIA methods to better account for emerging pollutants such as microplastics and plastic additives, with an emphasis on aligning life cycle tools with policy-making and marine conservation.